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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Aspects of religions (non-Christian) > Worship > General
A new English translation of the most influential legal text in
medieval India. A Treatise on Dharma, written in the fourth or
fifth century, is the finest example of the genre of
dharmasastra-texts on religious, civil, and criminal law and the
duties of rulers-that informed Indian life for a thousand years. It
illuminates major cultural innovations, such as the prominence of
documents in commercial and legal proceedings, the use of ordeals
in resolving disputes, and the growing importance of yoga in
spiritual practices. Composed by an anonymous author during the
reign of the imperial Guptas, the Treatise is ascribed to the
Upanishadic philosopher Yajnavalkya, whose instruction of a group
of sages serves as the frame narrative for the work. It became the
most influential legal text in medieval India, and a
twelfth-century interpretation came to be considered "the law of
the land" under British rule. This translation of A Treatise on
Dharma, based on a new critical edition and presented alongside the
Sanskrit original in the Devanagari script, opens the classical age
of ancient Indian law to modern readers.
"Connecting to Our Ancestral Past" is a pragmatic, spiritual
journey that introduces a variety of specific rituals and
conversations in connection with Constellations work, an
experiential process that explores one's history and powerful
events of the past in order to understand and resolve problems of
the present. Constellations facilitator and author Francesca Mason
Boring presents this therapeutic method in the context of cultures
like the Shoshone, of which she is a member, that have seen the
world through a prism of interrelationships for millennia. In
Constellations work there is an organic quality that requires a
discipline of non-judgment, one that is embraced in traditional
native circles, where the whole truth of a person's life, roots,
and trans-generational trauma or challenge is understood and
included.
Mason Boring provides a transformational walk through the
universal indigenous field-- that place of healing and knowledge
used by Native healers and teachers for centuries--by describing
stories and rituals designed to help people with their particular
struggles. These rituals, such as "Facing the Good Men"--designed
to help women who have suffered abuse in relationships with
men--reject Western notions of over-the-counter medication.
Instead, they stress a comfortable environment whereby the
"client," with the help of a facilitator, interacts with people
chosen to represent concepts, things, and other people. In Western
culture the word "medicine" is thought of as a concrete object, but
Mason Boring explains that indigenous cultures favor a process of
healing as opposed to an itemized substance. She re-opens doors
that have been closed due to the exclusion of indigenous technology
in the development of many Western healing traditions and
introduces new concepts to the lexicon of Western psychology.
A range of voices from around the world--leaders in the fields of
systems constellations, theoretical physics, and tribal
traditions--contribute to this exploration of aboriginal
perspectives that will benefit facilitators of Constellations work,
therapists, and human beings who are trying to walk with open eyes
and hearts.
Different forms of religious worship and ritual are present
throughout the development of human beings, from early stone-age
ritual, nature religion and ancestor worship, to faiths from which
Christianity and the Eucharist emerge. In this book, Bastiaan Baan
traces the origins and metamorphosis of human religion in
historical, theological and humanistic terms, examining its
significance for human life on earth and in the spiritual world.
In this book, Dana Robinson examines the role that food played in
the Christianization of daily life in the fourth century CE. Early
Christians used the food culture of the Hellenized Mediterranean
world to create and debate compelling models of Christian virtue,
and to project Christian ideology onto common domestic practices.
Combining theoretical approaches from cognitive linguistics and
space/place theory, Robinson shows how metaphors for piety, such as
health, fruit, and sacrifice, relied on food-related domains of
common knowledge (medicine, agriculture, votive ritual), which in
turn generated sophisticated and accessible models of lay
discipline and moral formation. She also demonstrates that
Christian places and landscapes of piety were socially constructed
through meals and food production networks that extended far beyond
the Eucharist. Food culture, thus, provided a network of
metaphorical concepts and spatial practices that allowed the lay
faithful to participate in important debates over Christian living
and community formation.
This book offers a fresh perspective on religious culture in the
medieval Middle East. It investigates how Muslims thought about and
practised at sacred spaces and in sacred times through two detailed
case studies: the shrines in honour of the head of al-Husayn (the
martyred grandson of the Prophet); and the (arguably) holy month of
Rajab. Author Daniella Talmon-Heller explores the diverse
expressions of the veneration of the shrine and the month from the
formative period of Islam until the late Mamluk period. She pays
particular attention to changing political and sectarian
affiliations and to the development of new genres of religious
literature. And she juxtaposes the sanctification of space and time
in individual and communal Sunni, Ithna'ashari and Isma'ili piety.
The northern Chinese mountain range of Mount Wutai has been a
preeminent site of international pilgrimage for over a millennium.
Home to more than one hundred temples, the entire range is
considered a Buddhist paradise on earth, and has received visitors
ranging from emperors to monastic and lay devotees. Mount Wutai
explores how Qing Buddhist rulers and clerics from Inner Asia,
including Manchus, Tibetans, and Mongols, reimagined the mountain
as their own during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Wen-Shing Chou examines a wealth of original source materials in
multiple languages and media--many never before published or
translated-such as temple replicas, pilgrimage guides, hagiographic
representations, and panoramic maps. She shows how literary,
artistic, and architectural depictions of the mountain permanently
transformed the site's religious landscape and redefined Inner
Asia's relations with China. Chou addresses the pivotal but
previously unacknowledged history of artistic and intellectual
exchange between the varying religious, linguistic, and cultural
traditions of the region. The reimagining of Mount Wutai was a
fluid endeavor that proved central to the cosmopolitanism of the
Qing Empire, and the mountain range became a unique site of shared
diplomacy, trade, and religious devotion between different
constituents, as well as a spiritual bridge between China and
Tibet. A compelling exploration of the changing meaning and
significance of one of the world's great religious sites, Mount
Wutai offers an important new framework for understanding Buddhist
sacred geography.
Sufism is a growing and global phenomenon, far from the declining
relic it was once thought to be. This book brings together the work
of fourteen leading experts to explore systematically the key
themes of Sufism's new global presence, from Yemen to Senegal via
Chicago and Sweden. The contributors look at the global spread and
stance of such major actors as the Ba 'Alawiyya, the 'Afropolitan'
Tijaniyya, and the Gu len Movement. They map global Sufi culture,
from Rumi to rap, and ask how global Sufism accommodates different
and contradictory gender practices. They examine the contested and
shifting relationship between the Islamic and the universal: is
Sufism the timeless and universal essence of all religions, the key
to tolerance and co-existence between Muslims and non-Muslims? Or
is it the purely Islamic heart of traditional and authentic
practice and belief? Finally, the book turns to politics. States
and political actors in the West and in the Muslim world are using
the mantle and language of Sufism to promote their objectives,
while Sufis are building alliances with them against common
enemies. This raises the difficult question of whether Sufis are
defending Islam against extremism, supporting despotism against
democracy, or perhaps doing both.
'Ethics' was not developed as a separate branch of philosophy in
Buddhist traditions until the modern period, though Buddhist
philosophers have always been concerned with the moral significance
of thoughts, emotions, intentions, actions, virtues, and precepts.
Their most penetrating forms of moral reflection have been
developed within disciplines of practice aimed at achieving freedom
and peace. This Element first offers a brief overview of Buddhist
thought and modern scholarly approaches to its diverse forms of
moral reflection. It then explores two of the most prominent
philosophers from the main strands of the Indian Buddhist tradition
- Buddhaghosa and Santideva - in a comparative fashion.
Hinduism comprises perhaps the major cluster of religio-cultural
traditions of India, and it can play a valuable role in helping us
understand the nature of religion and human responses to life.
Hindu image-worship lies at the core of what counts for Hinduism -
up-front and subject to much curiosity and misunderstanding, yet it
is a defining feature of this phenomenon. This book focuses on
Hindu images and their worship with special reference to
Vaisnavism, a major strand of Hinduism. Concentrating largely, but
not exclusively, on Sanskritic source material, the author shows in
the course of the book that Hindu image-worship may be understood
via three levels of interpretation: the metaphysical/theological,
the narratival or mythic, and the performative or ritual. Analysing
the chief philosophical paradigm underlying Hindu image-worship and
its implications, the book exemplifies its widespread application
and tackles, among other topics such as the origins of
image-worship in Hinduism, the transition from Vedic to image
worship, a distinguishing feature of Hindu images: their multiple
heads and limbs. Finally, with a view to laying the grounds for a
more positive dialogic relationship between Hinduism and the
"Abrahamic" faiths, which tend to condemn Hindu image-worship as
"idolatry", the author examines the theological explanation and
justification for embodiment of the Deity in Hinduism and discusses
how Hinduism might justify itself against such a charge. Rich in
Indological detail, and with an impressive grasp of the
philosophical and theological issues underlying Hindu material
culture, and image-worship, this book will be of interest to
academics and others studying theology, Indian philosophy and
Hinduism.
Ritual manuals are among the most common and most personal forms of
Buddhist literature. Since at least the late fifth century,
individual practitioners-including monks, nuns, teachers,
disciples, and laypeople-have kept texts describing how to perform
the daily rites. These manuals represent an intimate counterpart to
the canonical sutras and the tantras, speaking to the lived
experience of Buddhist practice. Conjuring the Buddha offers a
history of early tantric Buddhist ritual through the lens of the
Tibetan manuscripts discovered near Dunhuang on the ancient Silk
Road. Jacob P. Dalton argues that the spread of ritual manuals
offered Buddhists an extracanonical literary form through which to
engage with their tradition in new and locally specific ways. He
suggests that ritual manuals were the literary precursors to the
tantras, crucial to the emergence of esoteric Buddhism. Examining a
series of ninth- and tenth-century tantric manuals from Dunhuang,
Dalton uncovers lost moments in the development of rituals such as
consecration, possession, sexual yoga, the Great Perfection, and
the subtle body practices of the winds and channels. He also traces
the use of poetic language in ritual manuals, showing how at
pivotal moments, metaphor, simile, rhythm, and rhyme were deployed
to evoke carefully sculpted affective experiences. Offering an
unprecedented glimpse into the personal practice of early tantric
Buddhists, Conjuring the Buddha provides new insight into the
origins and development of the tantric tradition.
This anthology explores the dynamics of shared religious sites
in Turkey, the Balkans, Palestine/Israel, Cyprus, and Algeria,
indicating where local and national stakeholders maneuver between
competition and cooperation, coexistence and conflict. Contributors
probe the notion of coexistence and the logic that underlies
centuries of "sharing," exploring when and why sharing gets
interrupted -- or not -- by conflict, and the policy
consequences.
These essays map the choreographies of shared sacred spaces
within the framework of state-society relations, juxtaposing a
site's political and religious features and exploring whether
sharing or contestation is primarily religious or politically
motivated. While religion and politics are intertwined phenomena,
the contributors to this volume understand the category of
"religion" and the "political" as devices meant to distinguish
between the theological and confessional aspects of religion and
the political goals of groups. Their comparative approach better
represents the transition in some cases of sites into places of
hatred and violence while in other instances they remain
noncontroversial. The essays clearly delineate the religious and
political factors that contribute to the context and causality of
conflict at these sites and draw on history and anthropology to
shed light on the often rapid switch from relative tolerance to
distress to peace and calm.
The study of pilgrimage often centres itself around miracles and
spontaneous populist activities. While some of these activities and
stories may play an important role in the emergence of potential
pilgrimage sites and in helping create wider interest in them, this
book demonstrates that the dynamics of the marketplace, including
marketing and promotional activities by priests and secular
interest groups, create the very consumerist markets through which
pilgrimages become established and successful - and through which
the 'sacred' as a category can be sustained. By drawing on examples
from several contexts, including Japan, India, China, Vietnam,
Europe, and the Muslim world, author Ian Reader evaluates how
pilgrimages may be invented, shaped, and promoted by various
interest groups. In so doing he draws attention to the competitive
nature of the pilgrimage market, revealing that there are
rivalries, borrowed ideas, and alliances with commercial and civil
agencies to promote pilgrimages. The importance of consumerism is
demonstrated, both in terms of consumer goods/souvenirs and
pilgrimage site selection, rather than the usual depictions of
consumerism as tawdry disjunctions on the 'sacred.' As such this
book reorients studies of pilgrimage by highlighting not just the
pilgrims who so often dominate the literature, but also the various
other interest groups and agencies without whom pilgrimage as a
phenomenon would not exist.
This book argues that religion can and must be reconciled with science. Combining adaptive and cognitive approaches, it is a comprehensive analysis of religion's evolutionary significance, and its inextricable interdependence with language. It is also a detailed study of religion's main component, ritual, which constructs the conceptions that we take to be religious and therefore central in the making of humanity's adaptation. The text amounts to a manual for effective ritual, illustrated by examples drawn from a range of disciplines.
"It's a nice piece of pageantry. . . . Rationally it's lunatic, but
in practice, everyone enjoys it, I think."-HRH Prince Philip, Duke
of Edinburgh Founded by Edward III in 1348, the Most Noble Order of
the Garter is the highest chivalric honor among the gifts of the
Queen of England and an institution that looks proudly back to its
medieval origins. But what does the annual Garter procession of
modern princes and politicians decked out in velvets and silks have
to do with fourteenth-century institutions? And did the Order, in
any event, actually originate in the wardrobe malfunction of the
traditional story, when Edward held up his mistress's dropped
garter for all to see and declared it to be a mark of honor rather
than shame? Or is this tale of the Order's beginning nothing more
than a vulgar myth? With steady erudition and not infrequent
irreverence, Stephanie Trigg ranges from medieval romance to
Victorian caricature, from imperial politics to medievalism in
contemporary culture, to write a strikingly original cultural
history of the Order of the Garter. She explores the Order's
attempts to reform and modernize itself, even as it holds onto an
ambivalent relationship to its medieval past. She revisits those
moments in British history when the Garter has taken on new or
increased importance and explores a long tradition of amusement and
embarrassment over its formal processions and elaborate costumes.
Revisiting the myth of the dropped garter itself, she asks what it
can tell us about our desire to seek the hidden sexual history
behind so venerable an institution. Grounded in archival detail and
combining historical method with reception and cultural studies,
Shame and Honor untangles 650 years of fact, fiction, ritual, and
reinvention.
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