We've ranked the best hinduism books using expert recommendations, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.
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I read The Bhagavad Gita, which is something I wasn’t ready for before, but glad to finally understand. [source]
The “Tao Te King” by Lao Tzu probably resonated with me the strongest, but others like the “Art of War” by Sun Tzu, “Bhagavad Gita” or Zen Buddhist scriptures were also real eye-openers, even for a non-religious person like myself. [source]
The human world occurs in language so best get good at it! [source]
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Recommended by Caterina Fake.
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Founder/Apple
One book in particular stayed with Jobs his entire life, and Isaacson noted that it was the only book Jobs had downloaded on his iPad 2: “Autobiography of a Yogi,” “the guide to meditation and spirituality that he had first read as a teenager,” Isaacson writes, “then re-read in India and had read once a year ever since.” [source]
CEO/Salesforce
If you haven't read it, and if you want to understand Steve Jobs, it's a goood idea to dip into this book. [source]
One of the more impactful books for me when I was living down in the jungle and experiencing more of the deeper reflections through the medicine space. [source]
4Founder/Apple
In late 1972, Jobs had just started at Reed College, an elite liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon. He started doing lots of LSD and reading lots of books about spirituality. [source]
Changed countless lives. [source]
Travis Brewer said this is one of his most-recommended books. [source]
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Recommended by David Allen.
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Recommended by William Dalrymple.It’s one of the world’s great myths, an epic poem. It’s eight times the length of the Bible, one of the great works of literature of mankind. I came to it via the Peter Brook film, and read the script subsequently, and it is every bit as good as it’s made out to be. A very rare thing. It has a sort of Shakespearian ambiguity; you feel as much for the baddies as for the goodies. No one is pure. The bad guys aren’t entirely bad, the good guys aren’t entirely good. It’s brilliantly done, and the most gripping story ever told. [source]
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Former USA President
According to the president’s Facebook page and a 2008 interview with the New York Times, this title is among his most influential forever favorites. [source]
CEO/Apple
I have two books going right now: One is the Bobby Kennedy book “Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon,” by Larry Tye that just came out. The other is quite an old book. It’s a Gandhi book “Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth” that I got interested in because we went to the Gandhi museum when we were in India recently. I tend to like nonfiction and particularly reading about people and how they lived and how they fought, and what motivated them and their philosophy and so forth. [source]
A profound read. [source]
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CEO & Co-Founder/AngelList
So good that it may as well be non-fiction. [source]
Love this book. [source]
He says, 'Love is stronger than hate. Soft is stronger than hard. Water is stronger than stone.' [source]
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12This collection of the timeless teachings of one of the greatest sages of India, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, is a testament to the uniqueness of the seer's life and work and is regarded by many as a "modern spiritual classic".
I Am That preserves Maharaj's dialogues with the followers who came from around the world seeking his guidance in destroying false identities. The sage's sole concern was with human suffering and the ending of suffering. It was his mission to guide the individual to an understanding of his true nature and the timelessness of being. He taught that mind must recognize and penetrate its own state of being, "being this or that, here or that, then or now," but just timeless being.
Recommended by Bill Liao.The human world occurs in language so best get good at it! [source]
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I love this book because for one thing it’s just a great story, well-told. A lot of books about Indian sages are written in such a way that they just send you to sleep . . . But Ishwerood is a great writer, and he’s smart. He explains lots of things about Hindu tradition and thought throughout. It’s actually a very informative read on that level. [source]
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Recommended by Kevin Lamping and Kyle Russell.Not a business book, but *The Book* is one that I can say shines out among the other stars. It's hard to pick a book that's had the most impact on me, because they always have some effect. But there was something so calming, so reassuring about *The Book* that really helped me in a time of lots of self-doubt. I know this is supposed to focus on less "spiritual" books, and I'm not a religious guy, but I really enjoyed the notions put forth by *The Book*. Watts, the author, has some really profound thinking, and his writing guides you through Eastern thought for Western thinkers. I highly recommend this book for anyone searching for answers to the unknown. [source]
Book 20 Lesson: Distinction is not separation. To understand something, you must also understand its relationships with other parts of the environment or context around it. https://t.co/DB453aY565 [source]
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Founder/The Chopra Foundation
In the book The Untethered Soul, Michael A. Singer takes you step-by-step through the process of Gyana, the yoga of the Intellect, to the Source. Moreover, he does it with elegant simplicity. Read this book carefully, and you will get more than a glimpse of eternity. [source]
Founder/StockPickr
Michael moved to an empty patch of forest, set up his trailer, and started to meditate in the early 70s. He surrendered to whatever happened in his life. Well...what ended up happening is that he created a multi-billion dollar company. His book is about the spiritual beauty of surrender. And how that can go hand in hand with financial success. I was so astonished by the book that I contacted him and flew down to Florida and stayed several days in his “compound” and interviewed him about his success. I re-read the book at least once every few months. [source]
Investor & Author
East is East and West is West, but Michael A. Singer bridges these two great traditions in a radiant treatise on how to succeed in life from our spiritual quest to our everyday tribulations. Freud said that life was composed of love and work. With great eloquence, wit, and compelling logic, Singer’s brilliant book completes this thought by showing them to be two poles of the same selfless devotion. [source]
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In Paths to God, Ram Dass brings the heart of that system to light for a Western audience and translates the Gita's principles into the manual for living the yoga of contemporary life.
While being a guide to the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, Paths to God is also a template for expanding our definition of ourselves and allowing us to appreciate a new level of meaning in our lives.
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Recommended by Nicholas Whyte.It’s one of my guilty pleasures. I can’t claim that Lord of Light is as great a work of literature as the other four, but I enjoy it hugely. The story is essentially about one of them who decides that this isn’t good enough and attempts to reinvent himself as the Buddha, and therefore attempts to cause a religious revolution on this planet. [source]
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43The only hope for the Suryavanshis is an ancient legend: When evil reaches epic proportions, when all seems lost, when it appears that your enemies have triumphed, a hero will emerge.
Is the rough-hewn Tibetan immigrant Shiva, really that hero? And does he want to be that hero at all? Drawn suddenly to his destiny, by duty as well as by love, will Shiva lead the Suryavanshi vengeance and destroy evil?
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55This book was recommended by Antonio when asked for titles he would recommend to young people interested in his career path. [source]
This is a very thin book but a mind-blowing one. In many ways it was part of my motivation to write my book. Alan Watts was a philosophical populariser. He called himself a “spiritual entertainer”, and went around the world giving lectures and writing popular books about Eastern philosophies such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism. This book is about non-dualism – the theory that in some sense, everything is one. It’s the principle encapsulated in the symbols of yin and yang. These days it is often seen as cheesy and New Age. But there’s vastly more to it than that. [source]
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