Yakṣas

Yaksas is the sixth in the series of the Collected Works of A. K. Coomaraswamy in the IGNCA's publication programme. Yaksas was originally published by the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in two parts (1928 and 1931). Subsequently, Ananda Coomaraswamy rethought his topic and collected a great deal of iconographic and literary material that permitted him to reconstitute a pre-Vedic cosmology with which the Yaksas, a whole series of pre-and non-Vedic divinities, were intimately associated. In part 1, Coomaraswamy examined the origin of Yaksas in the context of Vedic, Brahmanical and Upanisadic literature, as also theories held by writers such as Fergusson and Dr. Vogel. He attempted to bring together, from literary and archaeological sources, material sufficient to present a clear picture of an even more important phase of non- and pre-Aryan preoccupation with the concept of the Yaksas and Yaksis. Coomaraswamy's thorough revisions of the early chapters of part 1 are incorporated in this edition.