Download or read book Courtesans and Tantric Consorts written by Serinity Young and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Courtesans and Tantric Consorts, Serinity Young takes the reader on a journey through more than 2000 years of Buddhist history, revealing the colourful mosaic of beliefs that inform Buddhist views about gender and sexuality.
Download or read book Tantric Buddhism in East Asia written by Richard K. Payne and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Indian and Tibetan versions of tantric Buddhism are increasingly recognized, the East Asian variations on this practice remain largely overlooked. The only book to present the entire breadth of tantric Buddhism in East Asia, this collection remedies that situation with 12 key essays drawn from rare sources. Organized into four sections--China and Korea, Japan, Deities and Practices, and Influences on Japanese Religion--the book brings together a "critical mass" of scholarship, with the potential to create a sea change in the understanding of this subject
Download or read book Women who Fly written by Serinity Young and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines the motif of the flying woman as it appears in a wide variety of cultures and historical periods, in legends, myths, rituals, sacred narratives, and artistic productions. ... Throughout, Young demonstrates that female power has always been inextricably linked with female sexuality and that the desire to control it is a pervasive theme in these stories."--Jacket flap.
Download or read book Love and Liberation written by Sarah H. Jacoby and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love and Liberation reads the autobiographical and biographical writings of one of the few Tibetan Buddhist women to record the story of her life. Sera Khandro Künzang Dekyong Chönyi Wangmo (also called Dewé Dorjé, 1892–1940) was extraordinary not only for achieving religious mastery as a Tibetan Buddhist visionary and guru to many lamas, monastics, and laity in the Golok region of eastern Tibet, but also for her candor. This book listens to Sera Khandro's conversations with land deities, dakinis, bodhisattvas, lamas, and fellow religious community members whose voices interweave with her own to narrate what is a story of both love between Sera Khandro and her guru, Drimé Özer, and spiritual liberation. Sarah H. Jacoby's analysis focuses on the status of the female body in Sera Khandro's texts, the virtue of celibacy versus the expediency of sexuality for religious purposes, and the difference between profane lust and sacred love between male and female tantric partners. Her findings add new dimensions to our understanding of Tibetan Buddhist consort practices, complicating standard scriptural presentations of male subject and female aide. Sera Khandro depicts herself and Drimé Özer as inseparable embodiments of insight and method that together form the Vajrayana Buddhist vision of complete buddhahood. By advancing this complementary sacred partnership, Sera Khandro carved a place for herself as a female virtuoso in the male-dominated sphere of early twentieth-century Tibetan religion.
Download or read book Knowledge and Context in Tibetan Medicine written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-06-17 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge and Context in Tibetan Medicine is a collection of ten essays in which a team of international scholars describe and interpret Tibetan medical knowledge. With subjects ranging from the relationship between Tibetan and Greco-Arab conceptions of the bodily humors, to the rebranding of Tibetan precious pills for cross-cultural consumption in the People’s Republic of China, each chapter explores representations and transformations of medical concepts across different historical, cultural, and/or intellectual contexts. Taken together this volume offers new perspectives on both well-known Tibetan medical texts and previously unstudied sources, blazing new trails and expanding the scope of the academic study of Tibetan medicine. Contributors include: Henk W.A. Blezer, Yang Ga, Tony Chui, Katharina Sabernig, Tawni Tidwell, Tsering Samdrup, Carmen Simioli, William A. McGrath, Susannah Deane and Barbara Gerke
Download or read book Women Gender and Art in Asia c 1500 1900 written by MeliaBelli Bose and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women, Gender and Art in Asia, c. 1500?1900 brings women's engagements with art into a pan-Asian dialogue with essays that examine women as artists, commissioners, collectors, and subjects from India, Southeast Asia, Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. The artistic media includes painting, sculpture, architecture, textiles, and photography. The book is broadly concerned with four salient questions: How unusual was it for women to engage directly with art? What factors precluded more women from doing so? In what ways did women's artwork or commissions differ from those of men? And, what were the range of meanings for woman as subject matter? The chapters deal with historic individuals about whom there is considerable biographical information. Beyond locating these uncommon women within their socio-cultural milieux, contributors consider the multiple strands that twined to comprise their complex identities, and how these impacted their works of art. In many cases, the woman's status-as wife, mother, widow, ruler, or concubine (and multiple combinations thereof), as well as her religion and lineage-determined the media, style, and content of her art. Women, Gender and Art in Asia, c. 1500?1900 adds to our understanding of works of art, their meanings, and functions.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies written by Payne and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 1273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Since the earliest encounters between tantric traditions and Western scholars, tantra has posed a challenge. Representation of tantra has tended to emphasize the antinomian, decadent aspects, which, as attention-grabbing as they were for Western audiences, hampered the study of the field. The Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies is intended to overcome these obstacles, facilitating collaboration between scholars working on different forms of tantra, and in different disciplines. With more than forty chapters and a global pool of contributors, the Handbook aims to be the definitive reference work in the field, exploring core topics such as action, transformation, embodiment, art, language, and social movements. The first chapter provides an overview of major issues confronting the field today, including debates regarding the definition and category of "tantra," historical origins and dating, and recent developments in gender studies and tantra, ethnography and "lived tantra," and cognitive approaches to the study of tantra. Using a topical framework, the opening section explores the concept of action, one of the most prominent features of tantra, which includes performing rituals, practicing meditation, chanting, embarking on a pilgrimage, or reenacting moments from a sacred text. From there, the sections cover broad topics such as transformation (e.g., soteriology and healing), gender and embodiment, "extraordinary" beings (such as deities and saints), art and visual expressions, language and literature, social organizations, and the history and historiography of tantra. Keywords tantric studies, tantra, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, ritual, soteriology, meditation, embodiment, yoga"--
Download or read book American Women Artists 1935 1970 written by Helen Langa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Numerous American women artists built successful professional careers in the mid-twentieth century while confronting challenging cultural transitions: shifts in stylistic avant-gardism, harsh political transformations, and changing gender expectations for both women and men. These social and political upheavals provoked complex intellectual and aesthetic tensions. Critical discourses about style and expressive value were also renegotiated, while still privileging masculinist concepts of aesthetic authenticity. In these contexts, women artists developed their careers by adopting innovative approaches to contemporary subjects, techniques, and media. However, while a few women working during these decades have gained significant recognition, many others are still consigned to historical obscurity. The essays in this volume take varied approaches to revising this historical silence. Two focus on evidence of gender biases in several exhibitions and contemporary critical writings; the rest discuss individual artists' complex relationships to mainstream developments, with attention to gender and political biases, cultural innovations, and the influence of racial/ethnic diversity. Several also explore new interpretative directions to open alternative possibilities for evaluating women's aesthetic and formal choices. Through its complex, nuanced approach to issues of gender and female agency, this volume offers valuable and exciting new scholarship in twentieth-century American art history and feminist studies.
Download or read book Postcolonial Amazons written by Walter Duvall Penrose Jr. and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long been divided on the question of whether the Amazons of Greek legend actually existed. Notably, Soviet archaeologists' discoveries of the bodies of women warriors in the 1980s appeared to directly contradict western classicists' denial of the veracity of the Amazon myth, and there have been few concessions between the two schools of thought since. Postcolonial Amazons offers a ground-breaking re-evaluation of the place of martial women in the ancient world, bridging the gap between myth and historical reality and expanding our conception of the Amazon archetype. By shifting the center of debate to the periphery of the region known to the Greeks, the startling conclusion emerges that the ancient Athenian conception of women as weak and fearful was not at all typical of the region of that time, even within Greece. Surrounding the Athenians were numerous peoples who held that women could be courageous, able, clever, and daring, suggesting that although Greek stories of Amazons may be exaggerations, they were based upon a real historical understanding of women who fought. While re-examining the sources of the Amazon myth, this compelling volume also resituates the Amazons in the broader context from which they have been extracted, illustrating that although they were the quintessential example of female masculinity in ancient Greek thought, they were not the only instance of this phenomenon: masculine women were masqueraded on the Greek stage, described in the Hippocratic corpus, took part in the struggle to control Alexander the Great's empire after his death, and served as bodyguards in ancient India. Against the backdrop of the ongoing debates surrounding gender norms and fluidity, Postcolonial Amazons breaks new ground as an ancient history of female masculinity and demonstrates that these ideas have a much longer and more durable heritage than we may have supposed.
Download or read book Buddhist Tantra Methodology and Historiography written by Pranshu Samdarshi and published by SABHI (Students for the Awareness of Buddhist Heritage of India), Delhi, India.. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses our conventional ways of looking at Buddhism in general and Buddhist tantra in particular. It investigates how the frameworks and structures that were developed for European and Biblical studies have been deployed to interpret various facets of Buddhism. Many such models that still dominate the historical imagination of Buddhist studies have been examined in this book. This book also proposes an alternative approach towards the Buddhist studies and advocates incorporating the critical study of tantra texts from the perspective of traditional accounts.
Download or read book Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism written by José Ignacio Cabezón and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 631 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prolific scholar surveys classical Buddhism’s approach to sex, gender, and sexual orientation in this landmark volume. More than twenty-five years in the making, this detailed sourcebook on Buddhist understandings of sexuality, desire, ethics, and deviance in classical South Asia is filled with both engaging translations and original and provocative analysis. Jose Cabezon, the XIVth Dalai Lama Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, marshals an incredible array of scriptures, legal and medical texts, and philosophical treatises, explaining the subtleties of this ancient literature in lucid prose. This work will be of immense interest not only to scholars of Buddhism and gender studies but also to lay readers who want to learn more about traditional Buddhist attitudes toward sex.
Download or read book Head and Heart written by Mary Storm and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-12 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extensive study of self-sacrificial images in Indian art, this book examines concepts such as head-offering, human sacrifice, blood, suicide, valour, self-immolation, and self-giving in the context of religion and politics to explore why these images were produced and how they became paradigms of heroism.
Download or read book Illness and Immortality written by Patricia Sauthoff and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illness and Immortality examines a medieval Sanskrit text, the Netra Tantra, which is devoted to health and healing through a yogic practice dedicated to the chanting of mantras, the building of mandalas, and meditation. Patricia Sauthoff examines the role of such ritual elements in rites to alleviate illness and death. She includes analysis of the various forms of the deity Amrtesa or Mrtyuñjaya (Conqueror of Death), the nature of mantra, and the relationship between the tantric practitioner and the patient. This work explores what is meant by immortality within the medieval context and how one goes about attaining it. It asks how ritual alleviates illness, what role the deity plays in health and healing, and finally who has access to the rites described within the text. Central to this study is the conception of a body vulnerable to demons and reliant on deities for continued existence, and how the three yogic bodies (sthula, suksma, and para) play a role in physical and spiritual well-being. Featuring new translations of large sections of the Netra Tantra, the book offers readers various points of entry into the text so that tantric practitioners and scholars alike can access the influential and important concepts and practices found within this long-revered but under-studied work.
Download or read book Foucault and the Kamasutra written by Sanjay K. Gautam and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-06-22 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kamasutra is best known in the West for its scandalous celebration of unbridled sensuality. Yet, there is much, much more to it; embedded in the text is a vision of the city founded on art and aesthetic pleasure. In Foucault and the "Kamasutra", Sanjay K. Gautam lays out the nature and origin of this iconic Indian text and engages in the first serious reading of its relationship with Foucault. Gautam shows how closely intertwined the history of erotics in Indian culture is with the history of theater-aesthetics grounded in the discourse of love, and Foucault provides the framework for opening up an intellectual horizon of Indian thought. To do this, Gautam looks to the history of three inglorious characters in classical India: the courtesan and her two closest male companions—her patron, the dandy consort; and her teacher and advisor, the dandy guru. Foucault’s distinction between erotic arts and the science of sexuality drives Gautam’s exploration of the courtesan as a symbol of both sexual-erotic and aesthetic pleasure. In the end, by entwining together Foucault’s works on the history of sexuality in the West and the classical Indian texts on eros, Gautam transforms our understanding of both, even as he opens up new ways of investigating erotics, aesthetics, gender relations, and subjectivity.
Download or read book Tracing the Path of Yoga written by Stuart Ray Sarbacker and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clear, accessible, and meticulously annotated, Tracing the Path of Yoga offers a comprehensive survey of the history and philosophy of yoga that will be invaluable to both specialists and to nonspecialists seeking a deeper understanding of this fascinating subject. Stuart Ray Sarbacker argues that yoga can be understood first and foremost as a discipline of mind and body that is represented in its narrative and philosophical literature as resulting in both numinous and cessative accomplishments that correspond, respectively, to the attainment of this-worldly power and otherworldly liberation. Sarbacker demonstrates how the yogic quest for perfection as such is situated within the concrete realities of human life, intersecting with issues of politics, economics, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as reflecting larger Indic religious and philosophical ideals.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion written by John Corrigan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-02 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The academic study of religion recently has turned to the investigation of emotion as a crucial aspect of religious life. Researchers have set out in several directions to explore that new terrain and have brought with them an assortment of instruments useful in charting it. This volume collects essays under four categories: religious traditions, religious life, emotional states, and historical and theoretical perspectives. In this book, scholars engaged in cutting edge research on religion and emotion describe the ways in which emotions have played a role in Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other religions. They analyze the manner in which key components of religious life -- ritual, music, gender, sexuality and material culture -- represent and shape emotional performance. Some of the essays included here take a specific emotion, such as love or hatred, and observe the place of that emotion in an assortment of religious traditions and cultural settings. Other essays analyze the thinking of figures such as St. Augustine, Soren Kierkegaard, Jonathan Edwards, Emile Durkheim, and William James. This collection offers a range of critical perspectives on the academic study of religion and emotion, in the form of syntheses, provocations, and prospective observations, that will inform the work of those already engaged in the field. Taken together, the writings included in this handbook serve as an ideal entry point for anyone wishing to familiarize themselves with the new academic study of religion and emotion.
Download or read book Yogini in South Asia written by István Keul and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In different stages in the history of South Asian religions, the term yoginī has been used in various contexts to designate various things: a female adept of yoga, a female tantric practitioner, a sorceress, a woman dedicated to a deity, or a certain category of female deities. This book brings together recent interdisciplinary perspectives on the medieval South Asian cults of the Yoginis, such as textual-philological, historical, art historical, indological, anthropological, ritual and terminological. The book discusses the medieval yoginī cult, as illustrated in early Śaiva tantric texts, and their representations in South Asian temple iconography. It looks at the roles and hypostases of yoginīs in contemporary religious traditions, as well as the transformations of yoginī-related ritual practices. In addition, this book systematizes the multiple meanings, and proposes definitions of the concept and models for integrating the semantic fields of ‘yoginī.’ Highlighting the importance of research from complementary disciplines for the exploration of complex themes in South Asian studies, this book is of interest to scholars of South Asian Studies and Religious Studies.
