The Religion of India
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism is a book on the sociology of religion written by Max Weber, a German economist and sociologist of the early twentieth century. The original edition was in German under the title Hinduismus und Buddhismus and published in 1916. An English translation was made in 1958 and several editions have been released since then.
It was his third major work on the sociology of religion, after The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1915). In this work he deals with the structure of Indian society, with the orthodox doctrines of Hinduism and the heterodox doctrines of Buddhism, with the changes wrought by popular religiosity and their influence on the secular ethic of Indian society.
The Hindu social system
The Indian social system was influenced by the concept of varna. It directly linked religious belief and the segregation of society into status groups. Weber goes on to describe the Varna system (the Brahmins – priests, the Kshatriyas – warriors, the Vaishyas – merchants, the Shudras – laborers and the Untouchable).
Weber pays special attention to Brahmins and considers why they occupied the highest place in Indian society for many centuries. With regards to the concept of dharma he concludes that the Indian ethical pluralism is very different both from the universal ethic of Confucianism and Christianity.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1916, 1958, 1905 and 1915.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Religion of India” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.