Whether chanted as devotional prayers, intoned against the dangers of the wilds, or invoked to heal the sick and bring ease to the dead, incantations were pervasive features of Buddhist practice in late medieval China (600--1000 C.E.). Material incantations, in forms such as spell-inscribed amulets and stone pillars, were also central to the spiritual lives of both monks and laypeople. In centering its analysis on the Chinese material culture of these deeply embodied forms of Buddhist ritual, "The Body Incantatory "reveals histories of practice -- and l "ogics "of practice -- that have until now remained hidden.

Paul Copp examines inscribed stones, urns, and other objects unearthed from anonymous tombs; spells carved into pillars near mountain temples; and manuscripts and prints from both tombs and the Dunhuang cache. Focusing on two major Buddhist spells, or dharani, and their embodiment of the incantatory logics of adornment and unction, he makes breakthrough claims about the significance of Buddhist incantation practice not only in medieval China but also in Central Asia and India. His work vividly captures the diversity of Buddhist practice among medieval monks, ritual healers, and other individuals lost to history, offering a corrective to accounts that have overemphasized elite, canonical materials.

Discover the joys of 'Umrah when a brother and sister travel with their parents to the city of Mecca and perform this sacred ritual for the very first time. Colourful illustrations. Includes a poster and paper dolls for children to enact performing Umrah.

This book describes and explains the meaning of essential articles of faith and basic forms of worship in Islam.

Ancient Jewish sacrifice has long been misunderstood. Some find in sacrifice the key to the mysterious and violent origins of human culture. Others see these cultic rituals as merely the fossilized vestiges of primitive superstition. Some believe that ancient Jewish sacrifice was doomed from the start, destined to be replaced by the Christian eucharist. Others think that the temple was fated to be superseded by the synagogue. In Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple Jonathan Klawans demonstrates that these supersessionist ideologies have prevented scholars from recognizing the Jerusalem temple as a powerful source of meaning and symbolism to the ancient Jews who worshiped there. Klawans exposes and counters such ideologies by reviewing the theoretical literature on sacrifice and taking a fresh look at a broad range of evidence concerning ancient Jewish attitudes toward the temple and its sacrificial cult. The first step toward reaching a more balanced view is to integrate the study of sacrifice with the study of purity-a ritual structure that has commonly been understood as symbolic by scholars and laypeople alike. The second step is to rehabilitate sacrificial metaphors, with the understanding that these metaphors are windows into the ways sacrifice was understood by ancient Jews. By taking these steps-and by removing contemporary religious and cultural biases-Klawans allows us to better understand what sacrifice meant to the early communities who practiced it. Armed with this new understanding, Klawans reevaluates the ideas about the temple articulated in a wide array of ancient sources, including Josephus, Philo, Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament, and Rabbinic literature. Klawans mines these sources with an eye toward illuminating the symbolic meanings of sacrifice for ancient Jews. Along the way, he reconsiders the ostensible rejection of the cult by the biblical prophets, the Qumran sect, and Jesus. While these figures may have seen the temple in their time as tainted or even defiled, Klawans argues, they too-like practically all ancient Jews-believed in the cult, accepted its symbolic significance, and hoped for its ultimate efficacy.

In this landmark book, first published in English in 1958, renowned scholar of religion Mircea Eliade lays the groundwork for a Western understanding of Yoga. Drawing on years of study and experience in India, Eliade provides a comprehensive survey of Yoga in theory and practice from its earliest antecedents in the Vedas through the twentieth century.

A new introduction by David Gordon White provides invaluable insight into Eliade's life and work, highlighting the key moments in Eliade's academic and spiritual education, as well as the personal experiences that shaped his worldview. "Yoga" is not only one of Eliade's most important books, it is also his most personal--the only one to analyze a religious tradition that he had truly lived.

Tariq Ramadan has emerged as one of the foremost voices of reformist Islam in the West. In one of his previous books, 'Western Muslims and the Future of Islam'he urged his fellow Muslims to participate fully in the civil life of the Western societies in which they live, and addressed many of the issues that stand in the way of such participation. In this new book he tackles head-on the thorniest of these issues - namely, the rulings of Islamic jurists that make Islam seem incompatible with modern, scientifically and technologically advanced, democratic societies. He argues that it is crucial to find theoretical and practical solutions that will enable Western Muslims to remain faithful to Islamic ethics while fully living within their societies and their time. He notes that Muslim scholars often refer to the notion of ijtihad (critical and renewed reading of the foundational texts) as the only way for Muslims to take up these modern challenges. But, Ramadan argues, in practice such readings have effectively reached the limits of their ability to serve the faithful in the West as well as the East. In this book he sets forward a radical new concept of ijtihad, which puts context - including the knowledge derived from the hard and human sciences, cultures and their geographic and historical contingencies - on an equal footing with the scriptures as a source of Islamic law. This global and comprehensive approach, he says, seems to be the only way to go beyond the current limits and face up to the crisis in contemporary Islamic thought: Muslims need a contemporary global and applied ethics. After setting out this proposal, Ramadan applies his new methodology to several practical case studies involving controversial issues in five areas: medical ethics, education, economics, marriage and divorce, culture and creativity. His radical proposal and the conclusions to which it leads him are bound to provoke discussion and controversy. Muslims and non-Muslims alike will have to contend with Ramadan's new idea of the very basis of Islam in the modern world.

Each year, about two million pilgrims from over 100 countries converge on the Islamic holy city of Mecca for the hajj. While the hajj is first and foremost a religious festival, it is also very much a political event. No government can resist the temptation to manipulate the hajj for political and economic gain. Every large Muslim state has developed a comprehensive hajj policy and a powerful bureaucracy to enforce it. The Muslim world's leading multinational organization, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has established the first international regime explicitly devoted to pilgrimage. Yet, Robert Bianchi argues, no secular or religious authority - national or international - can really control the hajj. State-sponsored pilgrimage management consistently backfires, giving government opponents valuable ammunition and allowing them to manipulate the symbols and controversies of the hajj to their own ends. Bianchi has been researching the hajj for over ten years and draws on interviews with and data from hajj directors in five Muslim countries (Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey, Indonesia, and Nigeria), statistics from Saudi Arabian hajj authorities, as well as his personal experience as a pilgrim. The result is the most complete picture of the hajj available anywhere, and a wide-ranging work on Islam, politics, and power.

Yantra Yoga, the Buddhist parallel to the Hathayoga of the Hindu tradition, is a system of practice entailing bodily movements, breathing exercises, and visualizations. Originally transmitted by the mahasiddhas of India and Oddiyana, its practice is nowadays found in all schools of Tibetan Buddhism in relation to the Anuttaratantras, more generally known under the Tibetan term "trulkhor," whose Sanskrit equivalent is "yantra." The Union of the Sun and Moon Yantra (Phrul 'khor nyi zla kha sbyor), orally transmitted in Tibet in the eighth century by the great master Padmasambhava to the Tibetan translator and Dzogchen master Vairochana, can be considered the most ancient of all the systems of Yantra, and its peculiarity is that it contains also numerous positions which are also found in the classic Yoga tradition.
Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, one of the great living masters of Dzogchen and Tantra, started transmitting this profound Yoga in the seventies and at that time wrote this commentary, which is based on the oral explanations of some Tibetan yogins and siddhas of the twentieth century. All Western practitioners will benefit from the extraordinary instructions contained in this volume.

The book of Genesis tells us that God made a covenant with Abraham, promising him a glorious posterity on the condition that he and all his male descendents must be circumcised. For thousands of years thereafter, the distinctive practice of circumcision served to set the Jews apart from their neighbors. The apostle Paul rejected it as a worthless practice, emblematic of Judaism's fixation on physical matters. Christian theologians followed his lead, arguing that whereas Christians sought spiritual fulfillment, Jews remained mired in such pointless concerns as diet and circumcision. As time went on, Europeans developed folklore about malicious Jews who performed sacrificial murders of Christian children and delighted in genital mutilation. But Jews held unwaveringly to the belief that being a Jewish male meant being physically circumcised and to this day even most non-observant Jews continue to follow this practice. In this book, Leonard B. Glick offers a history of Jewish and Christian beliefs about circumcision from its ancient origins to the current controversy. By the turn of the century, more and more physicians in America and England--but not, interestingly, in continental Europe--were performing the procedure routinely. Glick shows that Jewish American physicians were and continue to be especially vocal and influential champions of the practice which, he notes, serves to erase the visible difference between Jewish and gentile males. Informed medical opinion is now unanimous that circumcision confers no benefit and the practice has declined. In Jewish circles it is virtually taboo to question circumcision, but Glick does not flinch from asking whether this procedure should continue to be the defining feature of modern Jewish identity.

Spiritual Kneading Through The Jewish Months is an evocative collection of challah recipes, Jewish spiritual insights, and Torah study as it relates to each Jewish month, called Rosh Chodesh.

Dahlia Abraham-Klein, pulls from Jewish texts a book that enhances women's spiritual growth via the tradition of challah baking while meditating upon the Jewish theme of the month. The book gives an extensive history of Rosh Chodesh and why it's traditionally been a woman's holiday. The book covers all twelve months of the Jewish year, with specific Torah text for each month as well as a specific challah that relates the Torah theme to that month. In essence Spiritual Kneading is palatable Torah.

Each Jewish month includes a meditation guided through the kneading of the challah dough. The kneading is an action meditation, best understood as the performance of commandments and rituals. The inner essence of the dough elucidates divines in the challah and becomes a springboard to reach God. This conversation in turn is kneaded into the dough and becomes part of the spiritual wisdom transmitted to your loved ones. When commandments are seen in this light, particularly baking challah, the challah takes on a greater spiritual significance. Each chapter then goes on to give sources, ideas, and questions to be discussed by the group while the challah dough is rising. The purpose of baking challah in this particular way is to develop ones own personal spiritual growth within the context of a Rosh Chodesh group.

In his probing study of the role of death rites in the making of Islamic society, Leor Halevi imaginatively plays prescriptive texts against material culture and advances new ways of interpreting highly contested sources. His original research reveals that religious scholars of the early Islamic period produced codes of funerary law not only to define the handling of a Muslim corpse but also to transform everyday urban practices. Relying on oral traditions, these scholars established new social patterns in the cities of Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the eastern Mediterranean. They distinguished Islamic rites from Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian rites and changed the way men and women interacted publicly and privately.

In each chapter Halevi explores a different layer of human interaction, following the movement of the corpse from the deathbed to the grave. In the process he analyzes the real and imaginary relationships between husbands and wives, prayer leaders and mourners, and even dreamers and the dead. He describes how Muslims wailed for the deceased, prepared corpses for burial, marched in funerary processions, and prayed for the dead, highlighting the specific economic and political factors involved in these rituals as well as key religious and sexual divisions.

Offering a unique perspective on the making of Islamic social and religious ideals during this early period, Halevi forges a fascinating link between the development of funerary rites and the efforts of an emerging religion to carve out its own, distinct identity. "Muhammad's Grave" is a groundbreaking history of the rise of Islam and the roots of contemporary Muslim attitudes toward the body and society.

In South India there is a society where priests and lay people claim supernatural powers. Where a sophisticated medical system underlies a quest for physical longevity and psychic immortality and where arcane and sexual rituals take place that are far removed from the Brahmanic tradition of the rest of India. That society is the Tamil Siddhas. Here expert Kamil Zvelebil offers a vivid picture of these people: religious beliefs, magical rites, alchemical practices, complex system of medicine, and inspired tradition of poetry. Topics covered include: On Siddhas medicine; The ideological basis of Siddhas quest of immortality; Basic tenets of Siddhas medicine; Diseases and their cure; Yoga in Siddhas tradition; Daily regime; Siddhas alchemy; Rejuvenation, longevity, and 'immortality'; Doctrines and traditions of the Siddhas; Tantrik Siddhas and Siddhas attitudes to sex; Siddhas poetry and other texts.

This book examines the ways in which two distinct biblical conceptions of impurity - 'ritual' and 'moral' - were interpreted in the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature, and the New Testament. In examining the evolution of ancient Jewish attitudes towards sin and defilement, Klawans sheds light on a fascinating but previously neglected topic.

Buddhism is a religion indigenous to the Indian subcontinent that encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, who is commonly known as the Buddha, meaning "the awakened one." He is recognized by Buddhists as an awakened or enlightened teacher who shared his insights to help sentient beings end their suffering through the elimination of ignorance by way of understanding and the seeing of dependent origination and the elimination of craving, and thus the attainment of the cessation of all suffering, known as the sublime state of nirvana.

Interest in Jewish mysticism is, in our generation, widespread and growing. From Hebrew schools to Hollywood, people of all backgrounds and levels of knowledge are pursuing the subject. Books, magazines, journals, and classes are rapidly growing in number. One result of this burst of interest and popularization of Jewish mysticism is the problem of misinformation. The need for reliable source material has become crucial. This four-volume work by Professor Joseph Dan is a monumental event in the publishing history of English-language reference books on the subject of Jewish mystical thought and practice. Professor Dan's credentials are of the highest order. The recipient of the Israel Prize (considered to be Israel's highest honor), Joseph Dan is the Gershom Scholem Professor of Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and continues to be a visiting professor at some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world.

The routines explained here are easy to learn, enjoyable to practice, and produce satisfying results. Learn why meditation is so beneficial and how its regular correct practice can enhance your life. Whether you are presently interested in marginal self-improvement or more accelerated spiritual growth, meditation can be helpful to your purposes. Experience the consciousness-clearing influences of these time-tested meditation techniques which have been proven effective for thousands of years; open your mind and your being to all the good life can and will provide for you.

Die Herausforderung religionsgeschichtlicher Forschung besteht darin, die Erschliessung von Quellen in ihren Kontexten und ihre theoriegeleitete Erklarung mit einer historisch-kritischen Reflexion der Wissensproduktion selbst zu verknupfen. Die Reihe Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten (RGVV) will dieser Komplementaritat von historischer Kontextualisierung, theoretischer Verdichtung und disziplinarer Positionierung Rechnung tragen. Studien zu kulturspezifischen Sachzusammenhangen stehen neben vergleichenden Arbeiten, in Form von Monographien oder thematisch fokussierten Sammelbanden.