The Brahma Kumaris are a new spiritual tradition. The movement has more than 450,000 adherents world-wide. As with all spiritual traditions, the Brahma Kumaris are different, bewildering and fascinating in their newness and in their complexity.
In 1936, in Hyderabad in Sind, a sixty year old millionaire diamond merchant named Lekhraj Khubchand began to have visions. These led him to start meetings in his own home which were attended mainly by women. This was the beginning of the Brahma Kumaris. The Brahma Kumaris moved later to Mount Abu in Rajasthan in India and this remains their headquarters. Through phenomenology the author attempts to ‘get inside’ the Brahma Kumari tradition and to see that tradition from the inside. Phenomenology involves putting one’s own world-view aside in order to understand the world-view of others. Applying ‘epoche’, to avoid bias, and ‘empathy’, to engage sympathetically, the objective of this study is to understand, as far as is possible for an outsider, this new tradition from within.
Frank Whaling is emeritus professor of the study of religion, University of Edinburgh. He has taught and researched in many countries including India, the USA and South Africa.
About the Series
Titles in Understanding Faith are intended as first readers for students of comparative religion and as basic source books of essential information about the major world faiths in the 21st century for those who seek to understand this aspect of influence on our lives today.
Other titles in the Series
Understanding the Baha’i Faith — Wendi Momen
Understanding Buddhism — Perry Schmidt-Leukel
Understanding Hinduism — Frank Whaling
Understanding Sikhism — W. Owen Cole
ISBN: 978–1–903765–51–7
