Download or read book Sinister Yogis written by David Gordon White and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged. But our modern conception of yoga derives much from nineteenth-century European spirituality, and the true story of yoga’s origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and more entertaining than most of us realize. To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on yoga’s practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asia’s vast and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilities—which can include raising the dead, possession, and levitation—to acquire power, wealth, and sexual gratification. As White shows, even those yogis who aren’t downright villainous bear little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. At turns rollicking and sophisticated, Sinister Yogis tears down the image of yogis as detached, contemplative teachers, finally placing them in their proper context.
Download or read book Yoga written by Debra Diamond and published by Smithsonian Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Published by the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Yoga: The Art of Transformation, October 19, 2013 - January 26, 2014. Organized by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the exhibition travels to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, February 22-May 18, 2014, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, June 22-September 7, 2014."
Download or read book Is This Yoga written by Anya Foxen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a rigorously researched, critically comparative introduction to yoga. Is This Yoga? Concepts, Histories, and the Complexities of Contemporary Practice recognizes the importance of contemporary understandings of yoga and, at the same time, provides historical context and complexity to modern and pre-modern definitions of yogic ideas and practices. Approaching yoga as a vast web of concepts, traditions, social interests, and embodied practices, it raises questions of knowledge, identity, and power across time and space, including the dynamics of "East" and "West." The text is divided into three main sections: thematic concepts; histories; and topics in modern practice. This accessible guide is essential reading for undergraduate students approaching the topic for the first time, as well as yoga teachers, teacher training programs, casual and devoted practitioners, and interested non-practitioners.
Download or read book Yoga Meditation and Mysticism written by Kenneth Rose and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-09-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemplative experience is central to Hindu yoga traditions, Buddhist meditation practices, and Catholic mystical theology, and, despite doctrinal differences, it expresses itself in suggestively similar meditative landmarks in each of these three meditative systems. In Yoga, Meditation and Mysticism, Kenneth Rose shifts the dominant focus of contemporary religious studies away from tradition-specific studies of individual religious traditions, communities, and practices to examine the 'contemplative universals' that arise globally in meditative experience. Through a comparative exploration of the itineraries detailed in the contemplative manuals of Theravada Buddhism, Patañjalian Yoga, and Catholic mystical theology, Rose identifies in each tradition a moment of sharply focused awareness that marks the threshold between immersion in mundane consciousness and contemplative insight. As concentration deepens, the meditator steps through this threshold onto a globally shared contemplative itinerary, which leads through a series of virtually identical stages to mental stillness and insight. Rose argues that these contemplative universals, familiar to experienced contemplatives in multiple traditions, point to a common spiritual, mental, and biological heritage. Pioneering the exploration of contemplative practice and experience with a comparative perspective that ranges over multiple religious traditions, religious studies, philosophy, neuroscience, and the cognitive science of religion, this book is a landmark contribution to the fields of contemplative practice and religious studies.
Download or read book Pop Culture Yoga written by Kristen C. Blinne and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pop Culture Yoga: A Communication Remix was born out of a series of questions about the paradoxical nature of yoga: How do individuals and groups define yoga? What does it mean to “practice yoga,” and what does this practice involve? What are some of the most important principles, guidelines, or philosophical tenets of yoga that shape people’s definitions and practices? Who has the power and authority to define yoga? What are the limits, if any, of shared definitions of yoga? Kristen C. Blinne explores the myriad ways “yoga” is communicatively constructed and defined in and through popular culture in the United States. In doing so, Blinne offers insight into the many identity work processes in play in the construction of yoga categories, illuminating how individuals’ and groups’ words and actions represent practices of claiming—part of a complex communicative process centered around membership categorization—based on a range of authenticity discourses. Employing popular culture writing styles, Blinne ultimately contends that the majority of yoga styles practiced in the United States are remixes that can be classified as pop culture yoga, a distinct way of understanding this complex phenomenon.
Download or read book The Assimilation of Yogic Religions through Pop Culture written by Paul G. Hackett and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-10-23 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image of the meditating yogi has become a near-universal symbol for transcendent perfection used to market everything from perfume and jewelry to luxury resorts and sports cars, and popular culture has readily absorbed it along similar lines. Yet the religious traditions grounding such images are often readily abandoned or caricatured beyond recognition, or so it would seem. The essays contained in The Assimilation of Yogic Religions through Pop Culture explore the references to yogis and their native cultures of India, Tibet, and China as they are found in the stories of many famous icons of popular culture, from Batman, Spider-Man, and Doctor Strange to Star Trek, Doctor Who, Twin Peaks, and others. In doing so, the authors challenge the reader to look deeper into the seemingly superficial appropriation of the image of the yogi and Asian religious themes found in all manner of comic books, novels, television, movies, and theater and to carefully examine how they are being represented and what exactly is being said.
Download or read book Yoga in Practice written by David Gordon White and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of primary texts drawn from the diverse yoga traditions of India, greater Asia, and the West. Focuses on the lived experiences in the many world of yoga.
Download or read book Essays on Women in Western Esotericism written by Amy Hale and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-21 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first collection to feature histories of women in Western Esotericism while also highlighting women’s scholarship. In addition to providing a critical examination of important and under researched figures in the history of Western Esotericism, these fifteen essays also contribute to current debates in the study of esotericism about the very nature of the field itself. The chapters are divided into four thematic sections that address current topics in the study of esotericism: race and othering, femininity, power and leadership and embodiment. This collection not only adds important voices to the story of Western Esotericism, it hopes to change the way the story is told.
Download or read book The Awakening Storm A Graphic Novel City of Dragons 1 written by Jaimal Yogis and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grace and her friends must protect a newly hatched dragon from mysterious evildoers. When Grace moves to Hong Kong with her mom and new stepdad, her biggest concern is making friends at her fancy new boarding school. But when a mysterious old woman gifts her a dragon egg during a field trip, Grace discovers that the wonderful stories of dragons she heard when she was a young girl might actually be real--especially when the egg hatches overnight. The dragon has immense powers that Grace has yet to understand. And that puts them both in danger from mysterious forces intent on abusing the dragon's power. And now it's up to Grace and her school friends to uncover the sinister plot threatening the entire city!
Download or read book Hell Bent Obsession Pain and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga written by Benjamin Lorr and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lorr explores the fascinating, often surreal world of Bikram Yoga, a style taught to millions by a very living guru, Bikram Choudhury. Bikram Yoga is distinguished by the extreme heat it is practiced in, an overt focus on pain, and the materialism of its founder.
Download or read book Yoga Powers written by Knut A. Jacobsen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book offers a number of new insights in the history of yoga powers in the South Asian religious traditions, analyzes the position of the powers in the salvific process and in conceptions of divinity, and explores the rational explanations of the powers provided by the traditions.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Hindu Christian Relations written by Chad M. Bauman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 957 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historical interplay of Hinduism as an ancient Indian religion and Christianity as a religion associated (in India, at least) with foreign power and colonialism, continues to animate Hindu–Christian relations today. On the one hand, The Routledge Handbook of Hindu–Christian Relations describes a rich history of amicable, productive, even sometimes syncretic Hindu–Christian encounters. On the other, this handbook equally attends to historical and contemporary moments of tension, conflict, and violence between Hindus and Christians. Comprising thirty-nine chapters by a team of international contributors, this handbook is divided into seven parts: Theoretical and methodological considerations Historical interactions Contemporary exchanges Sites of bodily and material interactions Significant figures Comparative theologies Responses The handbook explores: how the study of Hindu–Christian relations has been and ought to be done, the history of Hindu–Christian relations through key interactions, ethnographic reflections on current dynamics of Hindu–Christian exchange, important key thinkers, and topics in comparative theology, ultimately providing a framework for further debates in the area. The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations is essential reading for students and researchers in Hindu–Christian studies, Hindu traditions, Asian religions, and studies in Christianity. This handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as anthropology, political science, theology, and history.
Download or read book A Genealogy of Devotion written by Patton E. Burchett and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Patton E. Burchett offers a path-breaking genealogical study of devotional (bhakti) Hinduism that traces its understudied historical relationships with tantra, yoga, and Sufism. Beginning in India’s early medieval “Tantric Age” and reaching to the present day, Burchett focuses his analysis on the crucial shifts of the early modern period, when the rise of bhakti communities in North India transformed the religious landscape in ways that would profoundly affect the shape of modern-day Hinduism. A Genealogy of Devotion illuminates the complex historical factors at play in the growth of bhakti in Sultanate and Mughal India through its pivotal interactions with Indic and Persianate traditions of asceticism, monasticism, politics, and literature. Shedding new light on the importance of Persian culture and popular Sufism in the history of devotional Hinduism, Burchett’s work explores the cultural encounters that reshaped early modern North Indian communities. Focusing on the Rāmānandī bhakti community and the tantric Nāth yogīs, Burchett describes the emergence of a new and Sufi-inflected devotional sensibility—an ethical, emotional, and aesthetic disposition—that was often critical of tantric and yogic religiosity. Early modern North Indian devotional critiques of tantric religiosity, he shows, prefigured colonial-era Orientalist depictions of bhakti as “religion” and tantra as “magic.” Providing a broad historical view of bhakti, tantra, and yoga while simultaneously challenging dominant scholarly conceptions of them, A Genealogy of Devotion offers a bold new narrative of the history of religion in India.
Download or read book Yoga Traveling written by Beatrix Hauser and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-22 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on yoga’s transcultural dissemination in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the course of this process, the term “yoga” has been associated with various distinctive blends of mental and physical exercises performed in order to achieve some sort of improvement, whether understood in terms of esotericism, fitness, self-actualization, body aesthetics, or health care. The essays in this volume explore some of the turning points in yoga’s historico-spatial evolution and their relevance to its current appeal. The authors focus on central motivations, sites, and agents in the spread of posture-based yoga as well as on its successive (re-)interpretation and diversification, addressing questions such as: Why has yoga taken its various forms? How do time and place influence its meanings, social roles, and associated experiences? How does the transfer into new settings affect the ways in which yogic practice has been conceptualized as a system, and on what basis is it still identified as (Indian) yoga? The initial section of the volume concentrates on the re-evaluation of yoga in Indian and Western settings in the first half of the twentieth century. The following chapters link global discourses to particular local settings and explore meaning production at the micro-social level, taking Germany as the focal site. The final part of the book focuses on yoga advertising and consumption across national, social, and discursive boundaries, taking a closer look at transnational and deterritorialized yoga markets, as well as at various classes of mobile yoga practitioners.
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 Tantra in Practice written by David Gordon White and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 661 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As David White explains in the Introduction to Tantra in Practice, Tantra is an Asian body of beliefs and practices that seeks to channel the divine energy that grounds the universe, in creative and liberating ways. The subsequent chapters reflect the wide geographical and temporal scope of Tantra by examining thirty-six texts from China, India, Japan, Nepal, and Tibet, ranging from the seventh century to the present day, and representing the full range of Tantric experience--Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and even Islamic. Each text has been chosen and translated, often for the first time, by an international expert in the field who also provides detailed background material. Students of Asian religions and general readers alike will find the book rich and informative. The book includes plays, transcribed interviews, poetry, parodies, inscriptions, instructional texts, scriptures, philosophical conjectures, dreams, and astronomical speculations, each text illustrating one of the diverse traditions and practices of Tantra. Thus, the nineteenth-century Indian Buddhist Garland of Gems, a series of songs, warns against the illusion of appearance by referring to bees, yogurt, and the fire of Malaya Mountain; while fourteenth-century Chinese Buddhist manuscripts detail how to prosper through the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper by burning incense, making offerings to scriptures, and chanting incantations. In a transcribed conversation, a modern Hindu priest in Bengal candidly explains how he serves the black Goddess Kali and feeds temple skulls lentils, wine, or rice; a seventeenth-century Nepalese Hindu praise-poem hammered into the golden doors to the temple of the Goddess Taleju lists a king's faults and begs her forgiveness and grace. An introduction accompanies each text, identifying its period and genre, discussing the history and influence of the work, and identifying points of particular interest or difficulty. The first book to bring together texts from the entire range of Tantric phenomena, Tantra in Practice continues the Princeton Readings in Religions series. The breadth of work included, geographic areas spanned, and expert scholarship highlighting each piece serve to expand our understanding of what it means to practice Tantra.
Download or read book The Alchemical Body written by David Gordon White and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] brilliant disquisition on . . . mostly unpublished texts for three allied systems of tantric thought and praxis (sexual, alchemical, and hatha yogic).” —The Journal of Asian Studies The Alchemical Body excavates and centers within its Indian context the lost tradition of the medieval Siddhas. Working from previously unexplored alchemical sources, David Gordon White demonstrates for the first time that the medieval disciplines of Hindu alchemy and hatha yoga were practiced by one and the same people, and that they can be understood only when viewed together. White opens the way to a new and more comprehensive understanding of medieval Indian mysticism, within the broader context of south Asian Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Islam. “White proves a skillful guide in disentangling historical and theoretical complexities that have thus far bedeviled the study of these influential aspects of medieval Indian culture.” —Yoga World “Anyone seriously interested in finding out more about authentic tantra, original hatha yoga, embodied liberation . . . sacred sexuality, paranormal abilities, healing, and of course alchemy will find White’s extraordinary book as fascinating as any Tom Clancy thriller.” —Georg Feuerstein, Yoga Journal “Remarkable . . . a study of the language of mystic experience and expression—the multitudinous symbols, rituals, and doctrines of the medieval siddhis, yogis, and alchemists.” —Skeptic Meditations
