Meditative practice lies at the heart of the Buddhist tradition. This introductory anthology gives a representative sample of the various kinds of meditations described in the earliest body of Buddhist scripture, the Pali canon. It provides a broad introduction to their traditional context and practice and supplies explanation, context and doctrinal background to the subject of meditation. The main themes of the book are the diversity and flexibility of the way that the Buddha teaches meditation from the evidence of the canon. Covering fundamental features of Buddhist practice such as posture, lay meditation, and meditative technique it provides comments both from the principal early commentators on Buddhist practice, Upatissa and Buddhaghosa, and from reputable modern meditation teachers in a number of Theravadin traditions. This is the first book on Pali Buddhism which introduces the reader to the wide range of the canon. It demonstrates that the Buddha's meditative tradition still offers a path of practice as mysterious, awe-inspiring yet as freshly accessible as it was centuries ago, and will be of interest to students and scholars of Buddhism as well as Buddhist practitioners.

Many philosophical approaches today seek to overcome the division between mind and body. If such projects succeed, then thinking is not restricted to the disembodied mind, but is in some sense done through the body. From a post-Cartesian perspective, then, ritual activities that discipline the body are not just thoughtless motions, but crucial parts of the way people think. Thinking Through Rituals explores religious ritual acts and their connection to meaning and truth, belief, memory, inquiry, worldview and ethics. Drawing on philosophers such as Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, and sources from cognitive science, pragmatism and feminist theory, it provides philosophical resources for understanding religious ritual practices like the Christian Eucharistic ceremony, Hatha Yoga, sacred meditation or liturgical speech. Its essays consider a wide variety of rituals in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism - including political protest rituals and gay commitment ceremonies, traditional Vedic and Yogic rites, Christian and Buddhist meditation and the Jewish Shabbat. They challenge the traditional disjunction between thought and action, showing how philosophy can help to illuminate the relationship between doing and meaning which ritual practices imply.

Reframing Pilgrimage argues that sacred travel is just one of the twenty-first century's many forms of cultural mobility. The contributors consider the meanings of pilgrimage in Christian, Mormon, Hindu, Islamic and Sufi traditions, as well as in secular contexts, and they create a new theory of pilgrimage as a form of voluntary displacement. This voluntary displacement helps to constitute cultural meaning in a world constantly 'en route'. Pilgrimage, which works both on global economic and individual levels, is recognised as a highly creative and politically charged force intimately bound up in economic and cultural systems

Reframing Pilgrimage argues that sacred travel is just one of the twenty-first century's many forms of cultural mobility. The contributors consider the meanings of pilgrimage in Christian, Mormon, Hindu, Islamic and Sufi traditions, as well as in secular contexts, and they create a new theory of pilgrimage as a form of voluntary displacement. This voluntary displacement helps to constitute cultural meaning in a world constantly 'en route'. Pilgrimage, which works both on global economic and individual levels, is recognised as a highly creative and politically charged force intimately bound up in economic and cultural systems

Many philosophical approaches today seek to overcome the division between mind and body. If such projects succeed, then thinking is not restricted to the disembodied mind, but is in some sense done through the body. From a post-Cartesian perspective, then, ritual activities that discipline the body are not just thoughtless motions, but crucial parts of the way people think. Thinking Through Rituals explores religious ritual acts and their connection to meaning and truth, belief, memory, inquiry, worldview and ethics. Drawing on philosophers such as Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, and sources from cognitive science, pragmatism and feminist theory, it provides philosophical resources for understanding religious ritual practices like the Christian Eucharistic ceremony, Hatha Yoga, sacred meditation or liturgical speech. Its essays consider a wide variety of rituals in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism - including political protest rituals and gay commitment ceremonies, traditional Vedic and Yogic rites, Christian and Buddhist meditation and the Jewish Shabbat. They challenge the traditional disjunction between thought and action, showing how philosophy can help to illuminate the relationship between doing and meaning which ritual practices imply.

Rituals may be one of the most obvious aspects of social and religious life, but it is certainly not the most accessible. As a subject of systematic historical and comparative study ritual has proved to be a particularly complicated phenomenon to analyse, because of the variety of activities that may be considered ritual and the multiplicity of perspectives from which they may legitimately be interpreted.

In this book Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual and its study, presenting comprehensive overviews of the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our interest in ritual. Instead of approaching ritual as a clear-cut and timeless object of scrutiny, Bell focuses on how a variety of definitions and constructed understandings of ritual have emerged and changed. She organizes the issues and data within three distinct frameworks: the first addreses theories of ritual; the second explores the range of activities understood as ritual; and the third analyses the contexts and conditions in which ritual activitiis take place. Throughout, Bell develops the position that ritual activity appears to us today as a complex social medium, a cultural construction of playing a wide variety of roles and communication a rich density of meanings.

This volume investigates the historic and ethnographic accounts of the ongoing religious contestations over the status of the Mahabodhi Temple complex in Bodhgaya (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002) and its surrounding landscape to critically analyse the working and construction of sacredness. It endeavours to make a ground-up assessment of ways in which human participants in the past and present respond to and interact with the Mahabodhi Temple and its surroundings. The volume argues that sacredness goes beyond scriptural texts and archaeological remains. The Mahabodhi Temple is complex and its surround ing landscape is a 'living' heritage, which has been produced socially and constitutes differential densities of human involvement, attachment, and experience. Its significance lies mainly in the active interaction between religious architecture within its dynamic ritual settings. This endless con testation of sacredness and its meaning should not be seen as the 'death' of the Mahabodhi Temple; on the contrary, it illustrates the vitality of the ongoing debate on the meaning, understanding, and use of the sacred in the Indian context. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Magic is a universal phenomenon. Everywhere we look people perform ritual actions in which desirable qualities are transferred by means of physical contact and objects or persons are manipulated by things of their likeness. In this book Sorensen embraces a cognitive perspective in order to investigate this long-established but controversial topic. Following a critique of the traditional approaches to magic, and basing his claims on classical ethnographic cases, the author explains magic's universality by examining a number of recurrent cognitive processes underlying its different manifestations. He focuses on how power is infused into the ritual practice; how representations of contagion and similarity can be used to connect otherwise distinct objects in order to manipulate one by the other; and how the performance of ritual prompts representations of magical actions as effective. Bringing these features together, the author proposes a cognitive theory of how people can represent magical rituals as purposeful actions and how ritual actions are integrated into more complex representations of events. This explanation, in turn, yields new insights into the constitutive role of magic in the formation of institutionalised religious ritual.

It has often been thought that participation in fertility rituals was women's most important religious activity in classical Greece. Matthew Dillon's wide-ranging study makes it clear that women engaged in numerous other rites and cults, and that their role in Greek religion was actually more important than that of men. Women invoked the gods' help in becoming pregnant, venerated the god of wine, worshipped new and exotic deities, used magic for both erotic and pain-relieving purposes, and far more besides.
Clear and comprehensive, this volume challenges many stereotypes of Greek women and offers unexpected insights into their experience of religion. With more than fifty illustrations, and translated extracts from contemporary texts, this is an essential resource for the study of women and religion in classical Greece.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203621328

This volume assembles fourteen highly influential articles written by Michael H. Jameson over a period of nearly fifty years, edited and updated by the author himself. They represent both the scope and the signature style of Jameson's engagement with the subject of ancient Greek religion. The collection complements the original publications in two ways: firstly, it makes the articles more accessible; and secondly, the volume offers readers a unique opportunity to observe that over almost five decades of scholarship Jameson developed a distinctive method, a signature style, a particular perspective, a way of looking that could perhaps be fittingly called a 'Jamesonian approach' to the study of Greek religion. This approach, recognizable in each article individually, becomes unmistakable through the concentration of papers collected here. The particulars of the Jamesonian approach are insightfully discussed in the five introductory essays written for this volume by leading world authorities on polis religion.

Scholars of classical history and literature have for more than a century accepted `initiation' as a tool for understanding a variety of obscure rituals and myths, ranging from the ancient Greek wedding and adolescent haircutting rituals to initiatory motifs or structures in Greek myth, comedy and tragedy.
In this books an international group of experts including Gloria Ferrari, Fritz Graf and Bruce Lincoln, critique many of these past studies, and challenge strongly the tradition of privileging the concept of initiation as a tool for studying social performances and literary texts, in which changes in status or group membership occur in unusual ways. These new modes of research mark an important turning point in the modern study of the religion and myths of ancient Greece and Rome, making this a valuable collection across a number of classical subjects.

Demonstrates that Buddhists appropriated the practice, vocabulary, and ideology of sacrifice from Vedic religion, and discusses the relationship of this sacrificial discourse to ideas of karma in the Pali canon and in early Buddhism.

Modern scholars have seen women's most important religious activity in classical Greece as their participation in fertility rituals. Matthew Dillon's wide-ranging new study makes it clear that women engaged in numerous rites and cults besides such festivals, and that their role in Greek religion was actually more important than that of men.
Women invoked the gods for help in becoming pregnant, venerated the god of wine, worshipped exotic gods new to the Greek pantheon, used magic and potions for both erotic and pain-relieving purposes - and far more besides. While traditional scholarship has seen such involvement in religion as 'escapist', Dillon's skilful presentation of the evidence proves that this denigrates women's religiosity, and the real importance which they attached to their mediation with the divine.

The annual festivals that are central to the south Indian religious tradition are among the largest religious gatherings found anywhere in the world. Most are located at Hindu temples, but some are at Buddhist, Christian, or Islamic centers, and many involve people or symbols from more than one religious tradition. To an outside observer, the many activities of a festival may seem somewhat chaotic, but the participants see the activities as the ritual focus of a distinct religious experience, and frequently testify that it is in the activity of a festival that they find their most profound sense of religious meaning. In spite of their obvious importance in the lives of participants, these festivals have received scant scholarly attention. In this book, Paul Younger offers a fieldwork-based study of fourteen different religious festivals, shedding light on not only their religious, but also their social and political meanings.

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This major work highlights the importance of Sufi ritual and locates it within the broader domain of the Islamic world. It reveals the world of Sufi ritual with particular reference to two major Sufi orders, examining their ritual and practices, and surveying their organisation and hierarchy, initiation ceremonies, and aspects of their liturgy such as dhikr (litany) and sama (mystical concert). Comparisons are made with the five pillars of Islam (arkan).

This revised introduction to Jewish beliefs and practices demonstrates that Judaism is a living religion which retains the vitality apparent in the Biblical corpus, but which has gone on to develop institutions, modes of behaviour and patterns of thought which together constitute the singularity of Jewish expression.;The study offers, for the non-Jew and the uninformed Jew, an insight into the great legal, mystical, theological, ethical and ritual traditions which have preserved the identity of the exiled and often outcast Jew, and enabled him to carry the message of the Hebrew Bible into the modern world. Alan Unterman is the author of "The Wisdom of the Jewish Mystics" and "Dictionary of Jewish Lore and Legend".

Take your child on a colorful adventure to share the many ways Jewish people celebrate Shabbat around the world. Shabbat Shalom Beginning in an old Jerusalem market Friday morning, shopping for foods to make Shabbat meals specialSetting a beautiful Sabbath table in Australia Friday afternoonLighting Shabbat candles with a family in TurkeySinging zemirot with relatives in RussiaMaking hamotzi as a congregation in the United StatesParading the Torah scrolls at Shabbat morning services in a synagogue in GermanyRelaxing in the peace of Shabbat day in CanadaEnjoying a special Sabbath afternoon meal in Morocco

From Israel to Thailand, from Ethiopia to Argentina, you and your children are invited to share the diverse Sabbath traditions that come alive in Jewish homes and synagogues around the world each week and to celebrate life with Jewish people everywhere."

This is an accessible and up-to-date account of the Jews during the millennium following Alexander the Great's conquest of the East. Unusually, it acknowledges the problems involved in constructing a narrative from fragmentary yet complex evidence and is, implicitly, an exploration of how this might be accomplished. Moreover, unlike most other introductions to the subject, it concentrates primarily on the people rather than issues of theology and adopts a resolutely unsentimental approach to the subject. Professor Schwartz particularly demonstrates the importance of studying Jewish history, texts and artefacts to the broader community of ancient historians because of what they can contribute to wider themes such as Roman imperialism. The book serves as an excellent introduction for students and scholars of Jewish history and of ancient history.

Magic is a universal phenomenon. Everywhere we look people perform ritual actions in which desirable qualities are transferred by means of physical contact and objects or persons are manipulated by things of their likeness. In this book Sorensen embraces a cognitive perspective in order to investigate this long-established but controversial topic. Following a critique of the traditional approaches to magic, and basing his claims on classical ethnographic cases, the author explains magic's universality by examining a number of recurrent cognitive processes underlying its different manifestations. He focuses on how power is infused into the ritual practice; how representations of contagion and similarity can be used to connect otherwise distinct objects in order to manipulate one by the other; and how the performance of ritual prompts representations of magical actions as effective. Bringing these features together, the author proposes a cognitive theory of how people can represent magical rituals as purposeful actions and how ritual actions are integrated into more complex representations of events. This explanation, in turn, yields new insights into the constitutive role of magic in the formation of institutionalised religious ritual.

A study of the death and mourning practices of the founders of Judaism - the Rabbis of late antiquity. The text examines the earliest canonical texts - the Misnah, the Tosefta, the Midrashim and the Talmud of the Land of Israel. It outlines the rituals described in these texts, from preparation for death to reburial of bones and the end of mourning. David Kraemer explores the relationships between the texts and interprets the rituals to uncover the beliefs which informed their foundation. He discusses the material evidence preserved in the largest Jewish burial complex in antiquity - the catacombs at Beth Shearim. Finally, the author offers an interpretation of the Rabbis' interpretations of death rituals - those recorded in the Babylonian Talmud.

The author writes: "The focus of this book is on Judaism as it expresses itself in the Jewish holidays. Through these days Judaism is most visible and most easily accessible. But this is meant to be more than a book about the holidays; rather, it is a book about the Jewish way through life and history. To celebrate the holidays is to relive by reliving the Jewish way. Over the centuries Jewish thought and values have been crystallized in religious behavior. Judaism's underlying structures of meaning the understanding of the world, the direction of history, the values of life have come to their classic expression in the holidays. This book seeks to uncover those patterns. "All halachic behaviors are dramatic/mimetic gestures articulating a central metaphor of living. Grasping the metaphor adds depth to action and joy to life. Entering into the holidays with this understanding widens the range of emotion and brings a whole new set of roles and personae into even the most conventional life. Living the Jewish way calls for a highly developed capacity for fantasy and playacting. If you will, one must be a bit of a ham to be a kosher Jew. I hope that by pointing out the roles we are summoned to play, this book will help release the creative imagination for religious living present in every person. "This is not to suggest that practice of the Jewish faith is all play, all fun and games. There have been times when this religion has brought painful memories, moral problematic conflicts with others, oppressive minutiae, and obligations so great I felt guilty no matter what I accomplished. Yet on balance the overwhelming effect has been to fill my life with a sense of Divine Presence and human continuity, bondedness, joy, textured living experiences full of love that make everything worthwhile. No wonder that over the course of history millions of Jews were willing to die, if necessary, for this faith. Through this book, I hope to show others why it is worth living for this faith. "This book is written for different types of readers: nonobservant Jews who seek new experiences to deepen their Jewish identity; observant Jews who wish to avoid the pitfall of practicing the details while missing the overarching goal; those lacking Jewish education who search for more information; learned Jews who search for new insights; and non-Jews who wish to understand the underlying visions of Judaism and who may find that it resonates in their own religious living."

There are many books devoted to explicating Jewish laws and customs relating to death and mourning and a wealth of studies addressing the significance of death practices around the world. However, never before has there been a study of the death and mourning practices of the founders of Judaism - the Rabbis of late antiquity. The Meanings of Death in Rabinic Judaism fills that gap.
The author examines the earliest canonical texts - the Misnah, the Tosefta, the Midrashim and the Talmud of the Land of Israel. he outlines the rituals described in these texts, from preparation for death to reburial of bones and the end of mourning. David Kraemer explores the relationships between the texts and interprets the rituals to uncover the beliefs which informed their foundation. He discusses the material evidence preserved in the largest Jewish burial complex in antiquity - the catacombs at Beth Shearim. Finally, the author offers an interpretation of the Rabbis interpretations of death rituals - those recorded in the Babylonian Talmud.
The Meanings of Death in Rabbinic Judaism provides a comprehensive and illuminating introduction to the formation, practice and significance of death rituals in Rabbinic Judaism.

European Paganism provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of ancient pagan religions throughout the European continent.
Before there where Christians, the peoples of Europe were pagans. Were they bloodthirsty savages hanging human offerings from trees? Were they happy ecologists, valuing the unpolluted rivers and mountains? In European Paganism Ken Dowden outlines and analyses the diverse aspects of pagan ritual and culture from human sacrifice to pilgrimage lunar festivals and tree worship. It includes:
* a 'timelines' chart to aid with chronology
* many quotations from ancient and modern sources translated from the original language where necessary, to make them accessible
* a comprehensive bibliography and guide to further reading.


eBook available with sample pages: EB:0203011775

In Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity, Jon Davies charts the significance of death to the emerging religious cults in the pre-Christian and early Christian world. He analyses the varied burial rituals and examines the different notions of the afterlife. Among the areas covered are:
* Osiris and Isis: the life theology of Ancient Egypt
* burying the Jewish dead
* Roman religion and Roman funerals
* Early Christian burial
* the nature of martyrdom.
Jon Davies also draws on the sociological theory of Max Weber to present a comprehensive introduction to and overview of death, burial and the afterlife in the first Christian centuries which offers insights into the relationship between social change and attitudes to death and dying.