Download or read book The Origins of Yoga and Tantra written by Geoffrey Samuel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-27 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yoga, tantra and other forms of Asian meditation are practised in modernized forms throughout the world today, but most introductions to Hinduism or Buddhism tell only part of the story of how they developed. This book is an interpretation of the history of Indic religions up to around 1200 CE, with particular focus on the development of yogic and tantric traditions. It assesses how much we really know about this period, and asks what sense we can make of the evolution of yogic and tantric practices, which were to become such central and important features of the Indic religious scene. Its originality lies in seeking to understand these traditions in terms of the total social and religious context of South Asian society during this period, including the religious practices of the general population with their close engagement with family, gender, economic life and other pragmatic concerns.
Download or read book The P la Sena Schools of Sculpture written by Susan L Huntington and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-08-21 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Geography of Gandh ran Art written by Wannaporn Rienjang and published by Archaeopress. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gandhāran art is usually regarded as a single phenomenon – a unified regional artistic tradition or 'school'. Indeed it has distinctive visual characteristics, materials, and functions, and is characterized by its extensive borrowings from the Graeco-Roman world. Yet this tradition is also highly varied. Even the superficial homogeneity of Gandhāran sculpture, which constitutes the bulk of documented artistic material from this region in the early centuries AD, belies a considerable range of styles, technical approaches, iconographic choices, and levels of artistic skill. The geographical variations in Gandhāran art have received less attention than they deserve. Many surviving Gandhāran artefacts are unprovenanced and the difficulty of tracing substantial assemblages of sculpture to particular sites has obscured the fine-grained picture of its artistic geography. Well documented modern excavations at particular sites and areas, such as the projects of the Italian Archaeological Mission in the Swat Valley, have demonstrated the value of looking at sculptures in context and considering distinctive aspects of their production, use, and reuse within a specific locality. However, insights of this kind have been harder to gain for other areas, including the Gandhāran heartland of the Peshawar basin. Even where large collections of artworks can be related to individual sites, the exercise of comparing material within and between these places is still at an early stage. The relationship between the Gandhāran artists or 'workshops', particular stone sources, and specific sites is still unclear. Addressing these and other questions, this second volume of the Gandhara Connections project at Oxford University’s Classical Art Research Centre presents the proceedings of a workshop held in March 2018. Its aim is to pick apart the regional geography of Gandhāran art, presenting new discoveries at particular sites, textual evidence, and the challenges and opportunities of exploring Gandhāra’s artistic geography.
Download or read book Dak i a Kosala written by Natasja Bosma and published by . This book was released on 2018-06-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the early development of Śaivism in ancient Dakṣiṇa Kosala, the region that roughly corresponds to the modern state of Chhattisgarh, plus the districts of Sambalpur, Balangir and Kalahandi of Odhisha (formerly Orissa). At the end of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh century, this region was under the control of the Pāṇḍava king Śivagupta alias ‘Bālārjuna’ hailing from Śrīpura (the modern village of Sirpur), who was a great patron of religion. Epigraphical evidence, supported by archaeological remains, has shown that by the time of Śivagupta’s reign, which lasted for at least fifty-seven years, Dakṣiṇa Kosala was already a rich center of early Śaivism. In the context of this setting the following research questions were formulated: what circumstances fostered the rise and development of Śaivism in this area, and did the Skandapurāṇa, an important and contemporaneous religious scripture, play any role in that development? An answer to these questions would not only shed light on the religious processes at work in Dakṣiṇa Kosala, but would also touch upon the interplay of political, social, economic and geographical factors.
Download or read book European Paganism written by Ken Dowden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European Paganism provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of ancient pagan religions throughout the European continent. Before there where Christians, the peoples of Europe were pagans. Were they bloodthirsty savages hanging human offerings from trees? Were they happy ecologists, valuing the unpolluted rivers and mountains? In European Paganism Ken Dowden outlines and analyses the diverse aspects of pagan ritual and culture from human sacrifice to pilgrimage lunar festivals and tree worship. It includes: a 'timelines' chart to aid with chronology many quotations from ancient and modern sources translated from the original language where necessary, to make them accessible a comprehensive bibliography and guide to further reading
Download or read book Candi Space and Landscape written by Véronique Degroot and published by Sidestone Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central Javanese temples were not built anywhere and anyhow. On the contrary: their positions within the landscape and their architectural designs were determined by socio-cultural, religious and economic factors. This book explores the correlations between temple distribution, natural surroundings and architectural design to understand how Central Javanese people structured the space around them, and how the religious landscape thus created, developed. Besides questions related to territory and landscape, Degroot's book analyzes the structure of the built space and its possible relations with conceptualized space, showing the influence of imported Indian concepts, as well as their limits. Going off the beaten track, this book explores the hundreds of small sites that scatter the landscape of Central Java. It is also one of very few studies to apply the methods of spatial archaeology to Central Javanese temples and the first in almost a century to present a descriptive inventory of the remains of this region.
Download or read book Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics written by Kenneth R. Valpey and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-02 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book provides both a broad perspective and a focused examination of cow care as a subject of widespread ethical concern in India, and increasingly in other parts of the world. In the face of what has persisted as a highly charged political issue over cow protection in India, intellectual space must be made to bring the wealth of Indian traditional ethical discourse to bear on the realities of current human-animal relationships, particularly those of humans with cows. Dharma, yoga, and bhakti paradigms serve as starting points for bringing Hindu—particularly Vaishnava Hindu—animal ethics into conversation with contemporary Western animal ethics. The author argues that a culture of bhakti—the inclusive, empathetic practice of spirituality centered in Krishna as the beloved cowherd of Vraja—can complement recently developed ethics-of-care thinking to create a solid basis for sustaining all kinds of cow care communities.
Download or read book History of civilizations of Central Asia written by Asimov, Muhammad Seyfeydinovich and published by UNESCO Publishing. This book was released on 1998-12-31 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part One: The Historical, Social and Economic SettingDuring the eight centuries covered in this volume, the new faith of Islam arose in Arabia and gradually spread eastwards and northwards, eventually affecting much of Central Asia, the southern fringes of Siberia and the eastern regions of China. These were also the centuries in which nomadic and military empires arose in the heart of Asia, impinging on the history of adjacent, well-established civilizations and cultures (China, India, Islamic Western Asia and Christian eastern and central Europe) to an unparalleled extent. Lamaist Buddhism established itself inthe Mongolian region and in Tibet and Islam among the Turkish people of Transoxania, southern Siberia and Xinjiang. It was in Eastern Europe, above all in Russia, that the Turco-Mongol Golden Horde was to have a major, enduring influence on the course of the region's history.
Download or read book Arts Humanities Citation Index written by and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Obscure Religious Cults written by Shashi Bhushan Dasgupta and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sources of Mongolian Buddhism written by Vesna A. Wallace and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite Mongolia's centrality to East Asian history and culture, Mongols themselves have often been seen as passive subjects on the edge of the Qing formation or as obedient followers of so-called "Tibetan Buddhism," peripheral to major literary, religious, and political developments. But in fact Mongolian Buddhists produced multi-lingual and genre-bending scholastic and ritual works that profoundly shaped historical consciousness, community identification, religious knowledge, and practices in Mongolian lands and beyond. In Sources of Mongolian Buddhism, a team of leading Mongolian scholars and authors have compiled a collection of original Mongolian Buddhist works--including ritual texts, poetic prayers and eulogies, legends, inscriptions, and poems--for the first time in any European language.
Download or read book The Destruction of Da Derga s Hostel written by Ralph O'Connor and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-02-28 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irish saga literature represents the largest collection of vernacular narrative in existence from the early Middle Ages, using the tools of Christian literacy to retell myths and legends about the pagan past. This unique corpus remains marginal to standard histories of Western literature: its tales are widely read, but their literary artistry remains a puzzle to many even within Celtic studies. This book, the first to offer a systematic literary analysis of any single native Irish tale, aims to show how one particularly celebrated saga 'works' as a story: the Middle Irish tale Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel), which James Carney called 'the finest saga of the early period'. This epic tale tells how the legendary king Conaire was raised by a shadowy Otherworld to the kingship of Tara and, after a fatal error of judgement, was hounded by spectres to an untimely death at Da Derga's Hostel at the hands of his own foster-brothers. By turns lyrical and laconic, and rich in native mythological imagery, the story is told with a dramatic intensity worthy of Greek tragedy, and the intricate symmetry of its narrative procedure recalls the visual patterning of illuminated manuscripts such as The Book of Kells. This book invites the reader to enjoy and understand this literary masterpiece, explaining its narrative artistry within its native, classical and biblical literary contexts. Against a historical backdrop of shifting ideologies of Christian kingship, it interprets the saga's possible significance for contemporary audiences as a questioning exploration of the challenges and paradoxes of kingship.
Download or read book The Concept of Bharatavarsha and Other Essays written by B. D. Chattopadhyaya and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of key terms related to social and political order, found in early Indian texts, challenges the idea of a unified ancient India and a unified national identity at that time. This collection explores what may be called the idea of India in ancient times. Its undeclared objective is to identify key concepts which show early Indian civilization as distinct and differently oriented from other formations. The essays focus on ancient Indian texts within a variety of genres. They identify certain key termssuch as janapada, desa, var?a, dharma, bh?vain their empirical contexts to suggest that neither the ideas embedded in these terms nor the idea of Bharatavarsha as a whole are given entities, but that they evolved historically. Professor Chattopadhyaya examines these texts to unveil historical processes. Without denying comparative history, he stresses that the internal dynamics of a society are best decoded via its own texts. His approach bears very effectively on understanding ongoing interactions between Indias Great Tradition and Little Traditions. As a whole, this book is critical of the notion of overarching Indian unity in the ancient period. It punctures the retrospective thrust of hegemonic nationalism as an ideology that has obscured the diverse textures of Indian civilization. Renowned for his scholarship on the ancient Indian past, Professor Chattopadhyayas latest collection only consolidates his high international reputation.
Download or read book When Running Made History written by Roger Robinson and published by . This book was released on 2019-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Imagined States written by Luisa Del Giudice and published by . This book was released on 2001-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An international ensemble of folklore scholars looks at varied ways in which national and ethnic groups have traditionally and creatively used imagined states of existence-some idealizations, some demonizations-in the construction of identities for themselves and for others. Drawing on oral traditions, especially as represented in traditional ballads, broadsides, and tale collections, the contributors consider fertile landscapes of the mind where utopias overflow with bliss and abundance, stereotyped national and ethnic caricatures define the lives of "others," nostalgia glorifies home and occupation, and idealized and mythological animals serve as cultural icons and guideposts to harmonious social life.
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore written by Patricia Monaghan and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an illustrated A to Z reference containing over 1,000 entries providing information on Celtic myths, fables and legends from Ireland, Scotland, Celtic Britain, Wales, Brittany, central France, and Galicia.
Download or read book South India and Her Muhammadan Invaders written by Sakkottai Krishnaswami Aiyangar and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
