This article argues that Balagangadhara has reinforced for the secular study of religion the awareness that the origins of the discipline are indelibly Western, and provided an invaluable service in reminding scholars they should be wary in assuming that the having of a religion or a world-view is a cultural universal. But, in contrast to Balagangadhara, the author claims this is not the consequence of imposing on other traditions the Western Christian understanding of the nature of religion in general, but of a very modern post-Enlightenment Western understanding of religion.
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