|
Books > Religion & Spirituality > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Hinduism
"A god transforms into a nymph and enchants another god.A king
becomes pregnant.A prince discovers on his wedding night that he is
not a man."Another king has children who call him both father and
mother. A hero turns into a eunuch and wears female apparel. A
princess has to turn into a man before she can avenge her
humiliation. Widows of a king make love to conceive his child.
Friends of the same sex end up marrying each other after one of
them metamorphoses into a woman. These are some of the tales from
Hindu lore that this unique book examines. The Man Who Was a Woman
and Other Queer Tales from Hindu Lore is a compilation of
traditional Hindu stories with a common thread: sexual
transformation and gender metamorphosis. In addition to the
thought-provoking stories in The Man Who Was a Woman and Other
Queer Tales from Hindu Lore, you'll also find: an examination of
the universality of queer narratives with examples from Greek lore
and Irish folklore a comparison of the Hindu paradigm to the
biblical paradigm a look at how Hindu society and Hindu scripture
responds to queer sexuality a discussion of the Hijras, popularly
believed to be the "third gender" in India--their probable origin,
and how they fit into Hindu societyWith the telling of each of
these tales, you will also learn how the author came upon each of
them and how they relate to the context of dominant Hindu attitudes
toward sex, gender, pleasure, fertility, and celibacy.
With its promise of personal improvement, physical well-being and
spiritual enrichment, yoga is enjoying a resurgence in popularity
at the turn of the third millennium. To unravel the mystery of the
discipline, its philosophies and relevance in contemporary life,
the original text of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali must be explored.
This book offers the first accessible translation and commentary on
Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. An introductory section examines the
multidimensional aspects of yoga as philosophy, psychology,
science, and religion, as well as exploring popular versions of
yoga in the West. The core of the book offers a new translation of
the entire text of the Yoga Sutras, in a language that is clear and
comprehensible to students. Commentaries are presented to highlight
the meaning of various statements (sutras) and key themes are
outlined via sectional summaries. A full glossary of key words and
names is also provided. Concluding chapters look at yoga in
contemporary life, revealing the popularity of yoga in the 21st
century through Star Wars, and exploring yoga's connection to
health and science, contrasting yoga's holistic view of healing
with that of the limited view of present day medical science.
Sample physical, breathing and meditation exercises are provided.
An Introduction to Yoga Philosophy offers a comprehensive
introduction to the Yoga Sutras text of Patanjali to all students
and interested readers of Indian philosophy and religion, world
religions, east-west psychology, and mysticism.
An ancient classic that can become a companion for your own
spiritual journey.
Millions of people turn daily to India's most beloved holy book,
the Bhagavad Gita ("Song of the Lord"), to instruct their spiritual
practice. A Hindu classic, it has universal appeal for people of
all faith traditions who turn to its inspirational support in the
struggles of life, its consolation in times of grief, and its
deeply moving promise of God's love and guidance.
Composed in Sanskrit verse thousands of years ago, this timeless
text tells the story of a distraught warrior on the verge of battle
and the compassionate counsel he receives from Krishna God in human
form. In just seven hundred lines, the Gita presents concise
teachings on such topics as the immortality of the soul, meditation
and yoga, worship and sacrifice, the ideal of selfless action, and
the oneness of all life in the Divine.Now you can read and
understand the Gita with no previous knowledge of Hinduism
required.
This SkyLight Illuminations edition offers insightful yet
unobtrusive commentary that explains references and philosophical
terms; shares the inspiring interpretations of famous spiritual
teachers; and addresses questions such as the inner meaning of
India's caste system and why this sublime discourse on inner peace
is set against the background of a violent civil war."
Beyond Compare is a remarkable work that offers a commentary on
spiritual learning for the twenty-first century rooted in two
classic texts from the Hindu and Christian traditions: the Essence
of the Three Auspicious Mysteries by r Ved nta De ika and Treatise
on the Love of God by St. Francis de Sales. In his commentary,
Clooney achieves multiple goals-the book is a contribution to
Christian spiritual theology, highlighting for today the beautiful
insights into love by St. Francis de Sales (1567-1623), Doctor of
the Church. At the same time it points out how even in our world of
many religious paths, we can recover and deepen the ancient
tradition of loving surrender into God's hands by opening ourselves
to the wisdom of India and one of Hindu India's most famous
traditions of loving God, explained to us by the south Indian Hindu
theologian r Ved nta De ika (1268-1369). Clooney goes further,
offering a comparative study of these classic works in which he
self-consciously writes about the process of reading the two works
and the impact this approach has on the reader. The good advice
found through this deep engagement with these texts offers a deeper
insight into how we can most fruitfully and spiritually think about
religious pluralism in the 21st century, remaining open in heart
and mind while loyal still to our own tradition. Not merely a book
about loving surrender to God, Beyond Compare offers us the
opportunity to advance along that path ourselves, learning from the
wisdom of St. Francis de Sales and r Ved nta De ika, meditating on
their two paths together, deepening our own love and willingness to
surrender in love to God.
Modern Hinduism in Text and Context brings together textual and
contextual approaches to provide a holistic understanding of modern
Hinduism. It examines new sources - including regional Saiva texts,
Odissi dance and biographies of Nationalists - and discusses topics
such as yoga, dance, visual art and festivals in tandem with
questions of spirituality and ritual. The book addresses themes and
issues yet to receive in-depth attention in the study of Hinduism.
It shows that Hinduism endures not only in texts, but also in the
context of festivals and devotion, and that contemporary practice,
devotional literature, creative traditions and ethics inform the
intricacies of a religion in context. Lavanya Vemsani draws on
social scientific methodologies as well as history, ethnography and
textual analysis, demonstrating that they are all part of the
toolkit for understanding the larger framework of religion in the
context of emerging nationhood, transnational and transcultural
interactions.
This volume examines several theoretical concerns of embodiment in
the context of Asian religious practice. Looking at both subtle and
spatial bodies, it explores how both types of embodiment are
engaged as sites for transformation, transaction and transgression.
Collectively bridging ancient and modern conceptualizations of
embodiment in religious practice, the book offers a complex mapping
of how body is defined. It revisits more traditional, mystical
religious systems, including Hindu Tantra and Yoga, Tibetan
Buddhism, Bon, Chinese Daoism and Persian Sufism and distinctively
juxtaposes these inquiries alongside analyses of racial, gendered,
and colonized bodies. Such a multifaceted subject requires a
diverse approach, and so perspectives from phenomenology and
neuroscience as well as critical race theory and feminist theology
are utilised to create more precise analytical tools for the
scholarly engagement of embodied religious epistemologies. This a
nuanced and interdisciplinary exploration of the myriad issues
around bodies within religion. As such it will be a key resource
for any scholar of Religious Studies, Asian Studies, Anthropology,
Sociology, Philosophy, and Gender Studies.
Contemporary debates on "mansplaining" foreground the authority
enjoyed by male speech, and highlight the way it projects listening
as the responsibility of the dominated, and speech as the privilege
of the dominant. What mansplaining denies systematically is the
right of women to speak and be heard as much as men. This book
excavates numerous instances of the authority of female speech from
Indian goddess traditions and relates them to the contemporary
gender debates, especially to the issues of mansplaining and
womansplaining. These traditions present a paradigm of female
speech that compels its male audience to reframe the configurations
of "masculinity." This tradition of authoritative female speech
forms a continuum, even though there are many points of disjuncture
as well as conjuncture between the Vedic, Upanishadic, puranic, and
tantric figurations of the Goddess as an authoritative speaker. The
book underlines the Goddess's role as the spiritual mentor of her
devotee, exemplified in the Devi Gitas, and re-situates the female
gurus in Hinduism within the traditions that find in Devi's speech
ultimate spiritual authority. Moreover, it explores whether the
figure of Devi as Womansplainer can encourage a more dialogic
structure of gender relations in today's world where female voices
are still often undervalued.
The Dancing God: Staging Hindu Dance in Australia charts the
sensational and historic journey of de-provincialising and
popularising Hindu dance in Australia. In the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, colonialism, orientalism and nationalism
came together in various combinations to make traditional Hindu
temple dance into a global art form. The intricately symbolic Hindu
dance in its vital form was virtually unseen and unknown in
Australia until an Australian impresario, Louise Lightfoot, brought
it onto the stage. Her experimental changes, which modernised
Kathakali dance through her pioneering collaboration with Indian
dancer Ananda Shivaram, moved the Hindu dance from the sphere of
ritualistic practice to formalised stage art. Amit Sarwal argues
that this movement enabled both the authentic Hindu dance and
dancer to gain recognition worldwide and created in his persona a
cultural guru and ambassador on the global stage. Ideal for anyone
with an interest in global dance, The Dancing God is an in-depth
study of how a unique dance form evolved in the meeting of
travellers and cultures.
A celebrated Hindu pilgrimage site, Hardwar lies on the river
Ganges at the edge of the Himalayas. Its identity as a holy place
is inextricably tied to the mythology and reality of the Ganges,
and traditional sources overwhelmingly stress this connection.
Virtually nothing has been written about Hardwar's history and
development, although the historical record reveals striking
changes of the past few centuries. These changes have usually
reflected worldly forces such as shifting trade routes, improved
transportation, or political instability. Yet such mundane
influences have been ignored in the city's sacred narrative, which
presents a fixed, unchanging identity. The city's complex identity,
says Lochtefeld, lies in the tension between these differing
narratives. In this fieldwork-based study, Lochtefeld analyzes
modern Hardwar as a Hindu pilgrimage center. He looks first at
various groups of local residents -- businessmen, hereditary
priests, and ascetics -- and assesses their differing roles in
managing Hardwar as a holy place. He then examines the pilgrims and
the factors that bring them to Hardwar. None of these groups is as
pious as popularly depicted, but their interactions in upholding
their own interest create and maintain Hardwar's religious
environment. In conclusion, he addresses the wider context of
Indian pilgrimage and the forces shaping it in the present day. He
finds that many modern Hindus, like many modern Christians, feel
some dissonance between traditional religious symbols and their
21st-century world, and that they are reinterpreting their
traditional symbols to make them meaningful for their time.
This book explores past expressions of the Jewish interest in
Hinduism in order to learn what Hinduism has meant to Jews living
mainly in the 12th through the 19th centuries. India and Hinduism,
though never at the center of Jewish thought, claim a place in its
history, in the picture Jews held of the wider world, of other
religions and other human beings. Each chapter focuses on a
specific author or text and examines the literary context as well
as the cultural context, within and outside Jewish society, that
provided images and ideas about India and its religions. Overall
the volume constructs a history of ideas that changed over time
with different writers in different settings. It will be especially
relevant to scholars interested in Jewish thought, comparative
religion, interreligious dialogue, and intellectual history.
This book explores the diversity of Hindu goddesses and the variety
of ways in which they are worshiped. Although they undoubtedly have
ancient origins, Hindu goddesses and their worship is still very
much a part of the fabric of religious engagement in India today.
The book offers an introduction to a complex and often baffling
field of study. Part I, "Beliefs" provides a series of encounters
with a range of Hindu goddesses starting with the idea of 'Goddess'
as a philosophical concept. Topics include textual evidence for
belief structures, goddess mythology, and the importance of 'the
Goddess' in Tantrism. Part II, "Practices" leads the reader through
the tangled web of goddess worship, pausing along the way to
examine the contrast between temple and local worship, the
splendour of festivals and the importance of pilgrimage to those
places in India where goddesses are considered to reside. A
Conclusion provides details of contemporary developments in goddess
worship, such as the appearance of new deities who supply the needs
of worshipers in the twenty-first century. No prior knowledge is
necessary as the book is aimed at undergraduate students and anyone
interested in the religions and philosophy of India.
The Arthasastra is the foundational text of Indic political thought
and ancient India's most important treatise on statecraft and
governance. It is traditionally believed that politics in ancient
India was ruled by religion; that kings strove to fulfil their
sacred duty; and that sovereignty was circumscribed by the sacred
law of dharma. Mark McClish's systematic and thorough evaluation of
the Arthasastra's early history shows that these ideas only came to
prominence in the statecraft tradition late in the classical
period. With a thorough chronological exploration, he demonstrates
that the text originally espoused a political philosophy
characterized by empiricism and pragmatism, ignoring the mandate of
dharma altogether. The political theology of dharma was
incorporated when the text was redacted in the late classical
period, which obscured the existence of an independent political
tradition in ancient India altogether and reinforced the erroneous
notion that ancient India was ruled by religion, not politics.
The authoritative new translation of the epic Ramayana, as retold
by the sixteenth-century poet Tulsidas and cherished by millions to
this day. The Epic of Ram presents a new translation of the
Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas (1543-1623). Written in Avadhi, a
literary dialect of classical Hindi, the poem has become the most
beloved retelling of the ancient Ramayana story across northern
India. A devotional work revered and recited by millions of Hindus
today, it is also a magisterial compendium of philosophy and lore
and a literary masterpiece. Volume 5 encompasses the story's three
middle episodes-Ram's meetings with forest sages, his battles with
demons, the kidnapping of his wife, his alliance with a race of
marvelous monkeys-and climaxes with the god Hanuman's heroic
journey to the island city of Lanka to locate and comfort Sita.
This new translation into free verse conveys the passion and
momentum of the inspired poet and storyteller. It is accompanied by
the most widely accepted edition of the Avadhi text, presented in
the Devanagari script.
If by monotheism we mean the idea of a single transcendent God who
creates the universe out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo), as in the
Abrahamic religions, then that is not found in the history of
Hinduism. But if we mean a supreme, transcendent deity who impels
the universe, sustains it and ultimately destroys it before causing
it to emerge once again, who is the ultimate source of all other
gods who are her or his emanations, then this idea does develop
within that history. It is a Hindu monotheism and its nature that
is the topic of this Element.
Since its discovery and the initial efforts toward its critical
edition, the Paippaladasamhita of the Atharvaveda (PS) has
attracted the attention of Vedic scholars and Indologists for
several reasons. It constitutes a precious source for the study of
the development of the earliest language. The text contains
important information about various rites and magical practices,
and hints about the oldest Indo-Iranian and Indo-European myths.
All of this makes the PS a text of inestimable value for the study
of Indian language and culture.
Ishita Pande's innovative study provides a dual biography of
India's path-breaking Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) and of
'age' itself as a key category of identity for upholding the rule
of law, and for governing intimate life in late colonial India.
Through a reading of legislative assembly debates, legal cases,
government reports, propaganda literature, Hindi novels and
sexological tracts, Pande tells a wide-ranging story about the
importance of debates over child protection to India's coming of
age. By tracing the history of age in colonial India she
illuminates the role of law in sculpting modern subjects,
demonstrating how seemingly natural age-based exclusions and
understandings of legal minority became the alibi for other
political exclusions and the minoritization of entire communities
in colonial India. In doing so, Pande highlights how childhood as a
political category was fundamental not just to ideas of sexual
norms and domestic life, but also to the conceptualisation of
citizenship and India as a nation in this formative period.
The Kanwar is India's largest annual religious pilgrimage. Millions
of participants gather sacred water from the Ganga and carry it
across hundreds of miles to dispense as offerings in Siva shrines.
These devotees-called bhola, gullible or fools, and seen as
miscreants by many Indians-are mostly young, destitute men, who
have been left behind in the globalizing economy. But for these
young men, the ordeal of the pilgrimage is no foolish pursuit, but
a means to master their anxieties and attest their good faith in
unfavorable social conditions. Vikash Singh walked with the
pilgrims of the Kanwar procession, and with this book, he
highlights how the procession offers a social space where
participants can prove their talents, resolve, and moral worth.
Working across social theory, phenomenology, Indian metaphysics,
and psychoanalysis, Singh shows that the pilgrimage provides a
place in which participants can simultaneously recreate and prepare
for the poor, informal economy and inevitable social uncertainties.
In identifying with Siva, who is both Master of the World and yet a
pathetic drunkard, participants demonstrate their own sovereignty
and desirability despite their stigmatized status. Uprising of the
Fools shows how religion today is not a retreat into tradition, but
an alternative forum for recognition and resistance within a
rampant global neoliberalism.
It is often said that the real confrontation between Christianity
and the great religions of the world is only just beginning. Bishop
Kulandran's book on the pivotal religious doctrine of Grace marks
the first stage in the new encounter between Christianity and
Hinduism. The result of considerable research and theological
reflection, Bishop Kulandran's book is an objective and scholarly
appraisal of Christianity and Hinduism, their similarities and
differences, and of the two different worlds in which they move.
Hinduism's uncertainty about the character of God and
Christianity's dogmatic certainty are examined in detail. The sense
of man's need of God's grace in Christianity, and Hinduism's
rejection of any act of reconciliation are seen by Bishop Kulandran
as central to the dialogue between the two religions. As Dr.
Hendrik Kraemer says in the foreword, Bishop Kulandran's book "is
animated by the desire for fair presentation and understanding and
is a new and important contribution to the subject and not merely a
repetition of what has often been said before". The author belonged
by birth and experience to the Indian world and as a Bishop of the
Church of South India knew the power as well as the limitations of
the Christian mission in the world of Hinduism. This scholarly work
is a valuable contribution to comparative religion and is an
illuminating exploration of two of the world's most important
religions.
With historical-critical analysis and dialogical even-handedness,
the essays of this book re-assess the life and legacy of Swami
Vivekananda, forged at a time of colonial suppression, from the
vantage point of socially-engaged religion at a time of global
dislocations and international inequities. Due to the complexity of
Vivekananda as a historical figure on the cusp of late modernity
with its vast transformations, few works offer a contemporary,
multi-vocal, nuanced, academic examination of his liberative vision
and legacy in the way that this volume does. It brings together
North American, European, British, and Indian scholars associated
with a broad array of humanistic disciplines towards
critical-constructive, contextually-sensitive reflections on one of
the most important thinkers and theologians of the modern era.
|
You may like...
Kali Ma
Sunita Shah
Paperback
R207
Discovery Miles 2 070
|