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It seems slightly odd to be reviewing a four-year-old text at this stage. There is apparently now a fifth edition 2018 (2018 ISBN 978 0 19 087549 7) although this does not seem to be readily traceable through the website of Oxford University Press who have anyway sent us an old copy of the fourth edition for review instead. The fifth edition appears to be about thirty pages longer than this one, so I presume that it has been revised, but I don’t suppose that knowledge of oriental religions has changed very much in the last four years. It should be noted that new editions have appeared at roughly four to five year intervals, so potential purchasers should expect a new version round about 2022.
As far as I can see we have not reviewed any of the previous editions of this work in Reference Reviews before, though we have reviewed a number of other reference sources with the same or similar titles. Our reviewers have, on various occasions, recommended The World’s Religions (Smart, 1998) (RR 200/276); The World’s Religions (Clarke and Beyer, 2009) (RR 2009/209); The New Lion Handbook (Partridge, 2005) (RR 2006/129) and the Web service World Religions Online (Facts on File n.d.) (RR 2012/007). We have also looked at reference sources on all of the individual religious movements represented here. I myself have reviewed...