|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru helped create the myth of a
nonviolent ancient India while building a modern independence
movement on the principle of nonviolence (ahimsa). But this myth
obscures a troubled and complex heritage: a long struggle to
reconcile the ethics of nonviolence with the need to use violence
to rule. Upinder Singh documents the dynamic tension between
violence and nonviolence in ancient Indian political thought and
practice over twelve hundred years. Political Violence in Ancient
India looks at representations of kingship and political violence
in epics, religious texts, political treatises, plays, poems,
inscriptions, and art from 600 BCE to 600 CE. As kings controlled
their realms, fought battles, and meted out justice, intellectuals
debated the boundary between the force required to sustain power
and the excess that led to tyranny and oppression. Duty (dharma)
and renunciation were important in this discussion, as were
punishment, war, forest tribes, and the royal hunt. Singh reveals a
range of perspectives that defy rigid religious categorization.
Buddhists, Jainas, and even the pacifist Maurya emperor Ashoka
recognized that absolute nonviolence was impossible for kings. By
600 CE religious thinkers, political theorists, and poets had
justified and aestheticized political violence to a great extent.
Nevertheless, questions, doubt, and dissent remained. These debates
are as important for understanding political ideas in the ancient
world as for thinking about the problem of political violence in
our own time.
The birth of Buddhism goes back to the sixth century BCE and, over
the centuries, there has been considerable variety as well as
considerable change in its doctrines, practices and propagation
across the different parts of Asia. This volume showcases the
expansion in the religion's contours and popularity in Asia in
modern times. Focusing on India, Sri Lanka and China, the essays in
the book highlight the cross-fertilization between Buddhism and
contemporary discourses which makes the phenomenon of Buddhist
revival in Asia unambiguously modern. They also show how this
resurgence assumed a great variety of forms depending on the
specificities of the historical and cultural context, including
Buddhism's encounter with other religious traditions. Continuities
with the past are not absent, and revivalist movements have been
characterized and propelled by a strong sense of history and yet
this, in effect, involved crafting new interpretations of a distant
past, and the introduction of new ideas and practices. The term
reinvention seems to capture this aspect of dynamic change better
than revival. At the same time, as this volume reveals, the choice
of terms is not as important as tracing the trajectories of the
phenomenon and the awareness that its impact extended far beyond
the religious domain into many spheres, including those of cultural
practice, national identity and international relations. This is a
historically rich and readable volume which will interest general
readers as well as students and scholars of history and of
Buddhism.
|
|