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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Non-Western philosophy
The Holy Science is a book of theology written by Swami Sri Yukteswar
Giri in 1894. The text provides a close comparison of parts of the
Christian Bible to the Hindu Upanishads, meant "to show as clearly as
possible that there is an essential unity in all religions...and that
there is but one Goal admitted by all scriptures."
Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri was born Priya Nath Karar in 1855 to a wealthy
family. As a young man, he was a brilliant student of math and science,
astrology and astronomy. He joined a Christian missionary school where
he studied the Bible and later spent two years in medical school.
After completing his formal education, Priya Nath married and had a
daughter. But he continued his intellectual and spiritual pursuits,
depending on the income from his property to support himself and his
family.
After the death of his wife, he entered the monastic Swami order and
became Sri Yuktesvar Giri, before becoming a disciple of famed guru
Lahiri Mahasaya, known for his revitalization of Kriya Yoga. Then in
1894, Sri Yuktesvar Giri met Mahavatar Babaji, an ageless wise man who
is said to have lived for untold hundreds of years. At this meeting,
Mahavatar Babaji gave Sri Yuktesvar the title of Swami, and asked him
to write this book comparing Hindu scriptures and the Christian Bible.
Swami Sri Yuktesvar obeyed.
He also founded two ashrams, including one in his ancestral home. He
lived simply as a swami and yogi, devoted to disciplining his body and
mind, and thus to liberating his soul. Among his disciples was
Paramahansa Yogananda, credited with bringing yoga and meditation to
millions of Westerners.
The Holy Science consists of four chapters. The first is titled "The
Gospel," and is intended to "establish the fundamental truth of
creation." Next is "The Goal," which discusses the three things all
creatures are seeking: "Existence, Consciousness, and Bliss."
Chapter three, "The Procedure," is the most practical of the sections.
It describes the natural way to live for purity and health of body and
mind. The final chapter is called "The Revelation," and discusses the
end of the path for those who are near the "three ideals of life."
Swami Sri Yukteswar also displays his impressive knowledge and
understanding of astrology by proposing his theory of the Yuga Cycle.
Each yuga is an age of the world that tracks the movement of the sun,
Earth, and planets. Each age represents a different state of humanity.
There are four yugas:
- Satya Yuga is the highest and most enlightened age of truth and
perfection.
- Treta Yuga is the age of thought and is more spiritually advanced
than Dwapara Yuga and Kali Yuga.
- Dwapara Yuga is an energetic age, although not a wise one. During
this yuga, people are often self-serving and greedy. The age is marked
by war and disease.
- Kali Yuga is the age of darkness, ignorance, and materialism. This is
the least evolved age.
Today, The Holy Science is highly respected among those seeking to
understand the relationships between world religions and cultures.
While some still believe that we are in Kali Yuga, many others believe
that Swami Sri Yukteswar was accurate, and that his calculations
correct previous errors that artificially inflated the length of the
Yuga Cycle.
This introduction to Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962), the critical
successor of the "father of contemporary Japanese philosophy"
Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), focuses on Tanabe's central
philosophical ideas and perspective on self, world, knowledge, and
the purpose of philosophizing. Addressing Tanabe's life-long study
of the history of Anglo-European philosophy, Takeshi Morisato
explores his notable philosophical ideas including the logic of
species, metanoetics, and philosophy of death. He sets out Tanabe's
belief that the Anglo-European framework of thinking is incapable
of giving sufficient answers to the philosophical questions
concerning the self and the world together and discusses the
central ideas he developed while working in both Judeo-Christian
and Mahayana Buddhist traditions. Featuring comprehensive further
reading lists, discussion questions, and teaching notes, this is an
ideal introductory guide to Tanabe Hajime for anyone interested in
Japanese and World philosophies, as well as the early development
of the Kyoto School.
**Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2021** Coping with the climate
crisis is the greatest challenge we face as a species. We know the
main task is to reduce our emissions as rapidly as possible to
minimise the harm to the world’s population now and for
generations to come. What on earth can philosophy offer us? In this
compelling account of a problem we think we know inside out, the
philosopher Graham Parkes outlines the climatic predicament we are
in and how we got here, and explains how we can think about it anew
by considering the relevant history, science, economics, politics
and, for the first time, the philosophies underpinning them.
Introducing the reality of global warming and its increasingly dire
consequences, he identifies the immediate obstructions to coping
with the problem, outlines the libertarian ideology behind them and
shows how they can be circumvented. Drawing on the wisdom of the
ancients in both the East-Asian and Western traditions (as embodied
in such figures as Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Dogen, Plato,
Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius and Nietzsche), Parkes shows how a
greater awareness of non-Western philosophies, and especially the
Confucian political philosophy advocated by China, can help us deal
effectively with climate change and thrive in a greener future. If
some dominant Western philosophical ideas and their instantiation
in politics and modern technology got us into our current crisis,
Parkes demonstrates persuasively that expanding our philosophical
horizons will surely help get us out.
Bringing together a number of case studies, this book shows how
from early on Chinese philosophical discourses unfolded through
innovation and the subversion of dominant forms of thinking.
Narrowing in on the commonplace Chinese motto that "the three
teachings" of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism "are joined into
one", as if there had never been any substantial differences
between or within these schools of thought, a team of esteemed
contributors challenge established views. They explain how the
Daoist tradition provided a variety of alternatives to prevailing
Confucian master narratives, reveal why the long history of
Confucianism is itself full of ambiguities, disputes, and competing
ideas and discuss how in Buddhist theory and practice, the
subversion of unquestioned beliefs and attitudes has been a prime
methodological and therapeutic device. By drawing attention to
unorthodox voices and subversion as a method, this exciting
collection reveals that for too long the traditional division into
"three teachings" has failed to do justice to the diversity and
subtlety found in the numerous discourses constituting the history
of Chinese philosophy. Critique, Subversion and Chinese Philosophy
finally makes such innovative disruptions visible.
Michael Slote is one of the most prominent philosophers working in
the discipline today. By creating a two-way dialogue between
philosophers specializing in Chinese philosophy and a central
thinker from the Anglo-American tradition, this volume brings
cross-cultural philosophy to life. From his early contributions in
ethics, metaethics, philosophy of mind, moral psychology and
epistemology to his recent investigations into the relationship
between Western philosophy and Chinese philosophy, an international
team of scholars of Chinese philosophy cover Slote’s
sentimentalism, his understanding of Chinese concepts Yin and Yang
and explores the role Early Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism can
play in his work. Each chapter extends Slote’s ideas by
considering them from a Chinese philosophical perspective and Slote
is given the opportunity to respond to each of the contributors’
interpretation of his work. Applied to Classical works such as the
Zhuangzi and the Yijing, his ground-breaking thoughts on morality,
care ethics and empathy are taken in new, exciting directions.
This work offers a new perspective on the work of Confucius, the
great reference of classical Chinese thought. In general,
relatively little work has been done on Confucius' linguistic
concerns, which nevertheless did have an impact in his time and
afterwards. The author starts from a sociolinguistic approach,
based mainly on the ethnography of communication, to analyze the
role played by language in Confucius' texts and its links with the
ethical program proposed therein. It is, therefore, a considerably
novel perspective which, moreover, allows us to cover a very
relevant number of interests. The pages of this work concern
sociolinguists, but also historians of linguistics, philosophers,
and cultural scientists in general. In short, it provides a
different vision of one of the great cultural references of
humanity.
Drawing on a rich variety of premodern Indian texts across multiple
traditions, genres, and languages, this collection explores how
emotional experience is framed, evoked, and theorized in order to
offer compelling insights into human subjectivity. Rather than
approaching emotion through the prism of Western theory, a team of
leading scholars of Indian traditions showcases the literary
texture, philosophical reflections, and theoretical paradigms that
classical Indian sources provide in their own right. The focus is
on how the texts themselves approach those dimensions of the human
condition we may intuitively think of as being about emotion,
without pre-judging what that might be. The result is a collection
that reveals the range and diversity of phenomena that benefit from
being gathered under the formal term “emotion”, but which in
fact open up what such theorisation, representation, and expression
might contribute to a cross-cultural understanding of this term. In
doing so, these chapters contribute to a cosmopolitan, comparative,
and pluralistic conception of human experience. Adopting a broad
phenomenological methodology, this handbook reframes debates on
emotion within classical Indian thought and is an invaluable
resource for researchers and students seeking to understand the
field beyond the Western tradition.
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