Download or read book Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of iva written by Wendy Doniger and published by London ; New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1973 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, O'Flaherty applies structural methods to trace the development of an Indian approach to navigating the conflict between spiritual aspirations and human desires by examining several Hindu myths featuring the god Shiva. In the myths that she analyses Shiva encounters and confronts two themes that are seemingly contradictory, especially to those from other cultures: asceticism and eroticism. O'Flaherty makes a point of clearly delineating the contradiction as she explains Shiva, generally considered to be "the great ascetic," is simultaneously "the god of the phallus." O'Flaherty identifies numerous myths about Shiva that engage with myriad themes and ideas, including different sexual orientations demonstrated by Shiva and his Vedic antecedents, Shiva's role as the sexual creator in opposition to Bhrama's role as the Creator of the Universe, the importance of Shiva's off-spring, Shiva testing the sages for their chastity and teaching them that spiritual meditation is the only way to overcome sexual desire, and the probable dangers that are caused due to extreme chastity. There are even references to ancient medical procedures that can be compared to the modern-day practice of surrogacy, as in one myth when Shiva's seed is dropped into the Ganges River, and impregnates the wives of seven sages who were bathing in it at the time. O'Flaherty also examines different sexual forms of Shiva in various myths as both androgynous and intersexual. This orientation is commonly known as Shiva's Ardhanadheshwara avatar, which is often depicted as possessing physical characteristics that are half-male and half-female. Throughout the book, she examines interlinking aspects portrayed in several myths related to Shiva with a particular focus on the balance she sees between asceticism and eroticism in his identity and actions.
Download or read book Siva written by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1981-05-28 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published under the title Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva, this book traces the development of an Indian approach to an enduring human dilemma: the conflict between spiritual aspirations and human desires. The work examines hundreds of related myths and a wide range of Indian texts--Vedic, Puranic, classical, modern, and tribal--centering on the stories of the great ascetic, Siva, and his erotic alter ego, Kama.
Download or read book Theory and Practice of Yoga written by Knut A. Jacobsen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-08-14 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays on Yoga in honour of Professor Gerald James Larson provides fascinating new insights into the yoga traditions of India as a historical and pluralistic phenomenon flourishing in a variety of religious and philosophical contexts.
Download or read book Ascetics and Brahmins written by Patrick Olivelle and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together papers on Indian ascetical institutions and ideologies published by Patrick Olivelle over a span of about thirty years. Asceticism represents a major strand in the religious and cultural history of India, providing some of the most creative elements within Indian religions and philosophies. Most of the major religions, such as Buddhism and Jainism, and religious philosophies both within these new religions and in the Brahmanical tradition, were created by world-renouncing ascetics. Yet ascetical institutions and ideologies developed in a creative tension with other religious institutions that stressed the centrality of family, procreation and society. It is this tension that has articulated many of the central features of Indian religion and culture. The papers collected in this volume seek to locate Indian ascetical traditions within their historical, political and ideological contexts.
Download or read book Blasphemies Compared written by Anne Stensvold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines both historical developments and contemporary expressions of blasphemy across the world. The transgression of religious boundaries incurs more or less severe sanctions in various religious traditions. This book looks at how religious and political authorities use ideas about blasphemy as a means of control. In a globalised world where people of different faiths interact more than ever before and world-views are an increasingly important part of identity politics, religious boundaries are a source of controversy. The book goes beyond many others in this field by widening its scope beyond the legal aspects of freedom of expression. Approaching blasphemy as effective speech, the chapters in this book focus on real-life situations and ask the following questions: who are the blasphemers, who are their accusers and what does blasphemy accomplish? Utilising case studies from Europe, the Middle East and Asia that encompass a wide variety of faith traditions, the book guides readers to a more nuanced appreciation of the historical roots, political implications and religious rationale of attitudes towards blasphemy. Incorporating historical and contemporary approaches to blasphemy, this book will be of great use to academics in Religious Studies and the Sociology of Religion as well as Political Science, Media Studies, History.
Download or read book Religions of the East written by Stephen Hunt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the rubric of 'Religions of the East', which includes Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Janiism and a myriad of Chinese religio-philosophies, are a vast range of views concerning human sexuality. These contrasting attitudes are mapped through this volume on Religions of the East in The Library of Essays on Sexuality and Religion series. Part 1 presents previously-published articles that explore several Eastern Religions in the way they construct sexuality through expressions of their pertinent holy writings and belief systems, as applied in differing historical and cultural contexts. Part 2 takes sexual renunciation and asceticism as its focus through the traditions of Hinduism, Jainism and the Chinese religious systems. Part 3 explores the connection between sexuality, gender and sexuality in Hindu and Buddhist customs in varied social settings. The final part of the volume includes articles examining Eastern religions in their attitudes towards sexual 'variants' including bi-sexuality, trans-sexuality and contested sexual categories.
Download or read book Courtesans and Tantric Consorts written by Serinity Young and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wisest teachings of Buddhism say that, like all oppositions, one must move beyond gender. But as Serinity Young shows in this enlightening work, the rhetoric of Buddhist texts, the symbolism of its iconography, and the performative import of its rituals, tell different, and often contradictory, stories. In Courtesans and Tantric Consorts, Serinity Young takes the reader on a journey through more than 2000 years of biographical writings, iconographic depictions, and ritual practices revealing Buddhism's deep struggles with gender. Juxtaposing empowering images of women with their textual repudiation, beginning with the Buddha himself who abandoned his wife; tantric courtesans who are considered necessary to male enlightenment with fertility rituals designed to ensure male offspring; tales of gender-bending gods and goddesses with all male heavens; Serinity Young draws on a vast range of sources to reveal the colourful, and often troubling, mosaic of beliefs that inform Buddhist views about gender and sexuality.
Download or read book Becoming Male in the Middle Ages written by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1997. Most work in gender studies has focused on women. This volume brings together various forms of gender theory, especially feminist and queer theory, to explore how men made cultures and culture made men, in the Middle Ages.
Download or read book Language Texts and Society written by Patrick Olivelle and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together the research papers of Patrick Olivelle, published over a period of about ten years. The unifying theme of these studies is the search for historical context and developments hidden within words and texts. Words – and the cultural history represented by words – that scholars often take for granted as having a continuous and long history are often new and even neologisms, and thus provide important clues to cultural and religious innovations. Olivelle’s book on the Asramas, as well as the short pieces included in this volume, such as those on ananda and dharma, seek to see cultural innovation and historical changes within the changing semantic fields of key terms. Closer examination of numerous Sanskrit terms taken for granted as central to ‘Hinduism’ provide similar results. Indian texts have often been studied in the past as disincarnate realities providing information on an ahistorical and unchanging culture. This volume is a small contribution towards correcting that method of textual study.
Download or read book Tantra written by Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D. and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 1998-07-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading yoga researcher offers a clear and lively introduction to the history, philosophy, and practice of the Tantric spiritual tradition Tantra—often associated with Kundalini Yoga—is a fundamental dimension of Hinduism, emphasizing the cultivation of “divine power” (shakti) as a path to infinite bliss. Tantra has been widely misunderstood in the West, however, where its practices are often confused with eroticism and licentious morality. Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy dispels many common misconceptions, providing an accessible introduction to the history, philosophy, and practice of this extraordinary spiritual tradition. The Tantric teachings are geared toward the attainment of enlightenment as well as spiritual power and are present not only in Hinduism but also Jainism and Vajrayana Buddhism. In this book, Georg Feuerstein offers readers a clear understanding of authentic Tantra, as well as appropriate guidance for spiritual practice and the attainment of higher consciousness.
Download or read book Collected Essays written by Patrick Olivelle and published by Firenze University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book I Lalla written by Lal Dĕd and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-07-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded, popularly known as Lalla, strike us like brief and blinding bursts of light. Emotionally rich yet philosophically precise, sumptuously enigmatic yet crisply structured, these poems are as sensuously evocative as they are charged with an ecstatic devotion. Stripping away a century of Victorian-inflected translations and paraphrases, and restoring the jagged, colloquial power of Lalla’s voice, in Ranjit Hoskote’s new translation these poems are glorious manifestos of illumination.
Download or read book Yoga written by David Carpenter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-12-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The popular perception of yoga in the West remains for the most part that of a physical fitness program, largely divorced from its historical and spiritual roots. The essays collected here provide a sense of the historical emergence of the classical system presented by Patañjali, a careful examination of the key elements, overall character and contemporary relevance of that system (as found in the Yoga Sutra) and a glimpse of some of the tradition's many important ramifications in later Indian religious history.
Download or read book Collected Essays 2 written by Patrick Olivelle and published by Firenze University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Querying the Medieval written by Ronald Inden and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2000-06-08 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Drawing on thinkers as diverse as V. N. Volosinov, R. G. Collingwood, and E. Laclau, this volume challenges the predominant idea of a text as "monological" both in its "authorist" and "contextualist" versions. The authors instead seek to understand texts as "dialogical" moments in the relations that agents have with themselves and with other agents. From this perspective, each author is able to pry open a particular text and reveal the articulative relation that each has had with the world in which it was situated. The result is a revised look at the relationship between history, national identity, and religion in medieval South Asia."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book God and the Land The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil written by Stephanie A. Nelson Boston University and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998-05-18 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pathbreaking book, which includes a powerful new translation of Hesiod's Works and Days by esteemed translator David Grene, Stephanie Nelson argues that a society's vision of farming contains deep indications about its view of the human place within nature, and our relationship to the divine. She contends that both Hesiod in the Works and Days and Vergil in the Georgics saw farming in this way, and so wrote their poems not only about farming itself, but also about its deeper ethical and religious implications. Hesiod, Nelson argues, saw farming as revealing that man must live by the sweat of his brow, and that good, for human beings, must always be accompanied by hardship. Within this vision justice, competition, cooperation, and the need for labor take their place alongside the uncertainties of the seasons and even of particular lucky and unlucky days to form a meaningful whole within which human life is an integral part. Vergil, Nelson argues, deliberately modeled his poem upon the Works and Days, and did so in order to reveal that his is a very different vision. Hesiod saw the hardship in farming; Vergil sees its violence as well. Farming is for him both our life within nature, and also our battle against her. Against the background of Hesiods poem, which found a single meaning for human life, Vergil thus creates a split vision and suggests that human beings may be radically alienated from both nature and the divine. Nelson argues that both the Georgics and the Works and Days have been misread because scholars have not seen the importance of the connection between the two poems, and because they have not seen that farming is the true concern of both, farming in its deepest and most profoundly unsettling sense.
Download or read book Exploring the Yogasutra written by Daniel Raveh and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patañjali's Yogasutra is an ancient canonic Indian text composed in Sanskrit in the 3rd or 4th century. Belonging to a very different cultural milieu, this multi-layered text is philosophical, psychological and practical in nature. Offering a philosophical reading of Patañjali's Yogasutra, this book discusses themes such as freedom, self-identity, time and transcendence, and translation - between languages, cultures and eras. Drawing substantially upon contemporary Indian materials, it discusses for the first time classical yoga as reflected upon by Daya Krishna (1924-2007) with constant reference to Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya's (1875-1949) studies in yoga philosophy. The genuine attempt on behalf of these two original thinkers to engage philosophically with Patañjala-yoga sets the tone of the textual exploration provided here. This book features a new annotated translation of the Yogasutra, and the author provides a useful background to the extensive Samkhya terminology employed by Patañjali. Daniel Raveh also offers a close reflection of the very act of translation, and the book concludes with suggestions for further reading and a glossary of central notions.
