Download or read book The Vedas in Indian Culture and History Proceedings of the 4th International Vedic Workshop written by J. P. Brereton and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Vedas in Indian Culture and History written by Joel P. Brereton and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Embodying the Vedas written by Borayin Larios and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-04-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popularly Hinduism is believed to be the world’s oldest living religion. This claim is based on a continuous reverence to the oldest strata of religious authority within the Hindu traditions, the Vedic corpus, which began to be composed more than three thousand years ago, around 1750–1200 BCE. The Vedas have been considered by many as the philosophical cornerstone of the Brahmanical traditions (āstika); even previous to the colonial construction of the concept of “Hinduism.” However, what can be pieced together from the Vedic texts is very different from contemporary Hindu religious practices, beliefs, social norms and political realities. This book presents the results of a study of the traditional education and training of Brahmins through the traditional system of education called gurukula as observed in 25 contemporary Vedic schools across the state of Maharasthra. This system of education aims to teach Brahmin males how to properly recite, memorize and ultimately embody the Veda. This book combines insights from ethnographic and textual analysis to unravel how the recitation of the Vedic texts and the Vedic traditions, as well as the identity of the traditional Brahmin in general, are transmitted from one generation to the next in contemporary India.
Download or read book The Rigveda 3 Volume Set written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-23 with total page 1725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rigveda is the oldest Sanskrit text, consisting of over one thousand hymns dedicated to various divinities of the Vedic tradition. Orally composed and orally transmitted for several millennia, the hymns display remarkable poetic complexity and religious sophistication. As the culmination of the long tradition of Indo-Iranian oral-formulaic praise poetry and the first monument of specifically Indian religiosity and literature, the Rigveda is crucial to the understanding both of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian cultural prehistory and of later Indian religious history and high literature. This new translation represents the first complete scholarly translation into English in over a century and utilizes the results of the intense research of the last century on the language and the ritual system of the text. The focus of this translation is on the poetic techniques and structures utilized by the bards and on the ways that the poetry intersects with and dynamically expresses the ritual underpinnings of the text.
Download or read book Soul and Self in Vedic India written by Per-Johan Norelius and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-06-19 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the Vedic Indians think of life, consciousness, and personhood? How did they envisage man’s fate after death? Did some part of the person survive the death of the body and depart for the beyond? Is it possible to speak of a “soul” or “souls” in the context of Vedic tradition? This book sets out to answer these questions in a systematic manner, subjecting the relevant Vedic beliefs to a detailed chronological investigation. Special attention is given to the ways in which the early Indians’ answers to the above problems changed over time, with an early pluralism of soul-like concepts later giving way to the unified “self” of the Upaniṣads.
Download or read book G hastha written by Patrick Olivelle and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For scholars of ancient Indian religions, the wandering mendicants who left home and family for a celibate life and the search for liberation represent an enigma. The Vedic religion, centered on the married household, had no place for such a figure. Much has been written about the Indian ascetic but hardly any scholarly attention has been paid to the married householder with wife and children, generally referred to in Sanskrit as grhastha: "the stay-at-home." The institution of the householder is viewed implicitly as posing little historical problems with regard to its origin or meaning. This volume problematizes the figure of the householder within ancient Indian culture and religion. It shows that the term grhastha is a neologism and is understandable only in its opposition to the ascetic who goes away from home (pravrajita). Through a thorough and comprehensive analysis of a wide range of inscriptions and texts, ranging from the Vedas, Dharmasastras, Epics, and belle lettres to Buddhist and Jain texts and texts on governance and erotics, this volume analyses the meanings, functions, and roles of the householder from the earliest times unti about the fifth century CE. The central finding of these studies is that the householder bearing the name grhastha is not simply a married man with a family but someone dedicated to the same or similar goals as an ascetic while remaining at home and performing the economic and ritual duties incumbent on him. The grhastha is thus not a generic householder, for whom there are many other Sanskrit terms, but a religiously charged concept that is intended as a full-fledged and even superior alternative to the concept of a religious renouncer.
Download or read book The Rigveda written by Stephanie W. Jamison and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 1725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first complete English translation in over a century of the Rigveda, the oldest Sanskrit text. Its thousand hymns, of remarkable poetic complexity and religious sophistication, are crucial to the understanding of the Indo-Iranian oral tradition from which they emerged and the rich flowering of Indian religious and literary expressions that followed it.
Download or read book Dharma written by Alf Hiltebeitel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-28 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 300 BCE and 200 CE, concepts and practices of dharma attained literary prominence throughout India. Both Buddhist and Brahmanical authors sought to clarify and classify their central concerns, and dharma proved a means of thinking through and articulating those concerns. Alf Hiltebeitel shows the different ways in which dharma was interpreted during that formative period: from the grand cosmic chronometries of kalpas and yugas to narratives about divine plans, gendered nuances of genealogical time, royal biography (even autobiography, in the case of the emperor Asoka), and guidelines for daily life, including meditation. He reveals the vital role dharma has played across political, religious, legal, literary, ethical, and philosophical domains and discourses about what holds life together. Through dharma, these traditions have articulated their distinct visions of the good and well-rewarded life. This insightful study explores the diverse and changing significance of dharma in classical India in nine major dharma texts, as well some shorter ones. Dharma proves to be a term by which to make a fresh cut through these texts, and to reconsider their own chronology, their import, and their relation to each other.
Download or read book Body and Cosmos written by Toke Lindegaard Knudsen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Body and Cosmos presents a series of articles by renowned Indological scholars on the early Indian medical and astral sciences. It is published on the occasion of the 70th birthday of Professor Emeritus Kenneth G. Zysk.
Download or read book Studies in the Atharvaveda written by Robert Leach, Oliver Hellwig, Thomas Zehnder and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-12-30 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Vedas written by Roshen Dalal and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Your essential guide to the Vedas When were the Vedas written, and why? Who were the people who composed them? Where did they come from, how did they live? Questions, conjectures and debates go hand in hand with the Vedas, the sacred keystone texts of Hinduism. Now, noted historian Roshen Dalal sifts through centuries of information and research to present, in a straightforward and succinct manner, an account of the Vedas that is authoritative yet accessible, thus appealing to both scholars and lay readers. In this book, key insights into the Vedas are complemented by a celebration of the poetry that lies within the texts. Using socio-economic data and archaeological and linguistic research, the author introduces us to the Vedic era, enabling us to understand the culture and philosophy that produced these ancient and sublime texts. • Based on original research and numerous authoritative sources, including auxiliary texts and early commentaries • Appendices featuring selected hymns from all four Vedas, and listing all the hymns that make up the Rig Veda • Conveniently cross-referenced with a wealth of information
Download or read book Intercultural Spaces of Law written by Mario Ricca and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-03 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes an interdisciplinary methodology for developing an intercultural use of law so as to include cultural differences and their protection within legal discourse; this is based on an analysis of the sensory grammar tacitly included in categorizations. This is achieved by combining the theoretical insights provided by legal theory, anthropology and semiotics with a reading of human rights as translational interfaces among the different cultural spaces in which people live. To support this use of human rights’ semantic and normative potential, a specific cultural-geographic view dubbed ‘legal chorology’ is employed. Its primary purpose is to show the extant continuity between categories and spaces of experience, and more specifically between legal meanings and the spatial dimensions of people’s lives. Through the lens of legal chorology and the intercultural, translational use of human rights, the book provides a methodology that shows how to make space and law reciprocally transformative so as to create an inclusive legal grammar that is equidistant from social cultural differences. The analysis includes: a critical view on opportunities for intercultural secularization; the possibility of construing a legal grammar of quotidian life that leads to an inclusive equidistance from differences rather than an unachievable neutrality or an all-encompassing universal legal ontology; an interdisciplinary methodology for legal intercultural translation; a chorological reading of the relationships between human rights protection and lived spaces; and an intercultural and geo-semiotic examination of a series of legal cases and current issues such as indigenous peoples’ rights and the international protection of sacred places.
Download or read book Strong Arms and Drinking Strength written by Jarrod Whitaker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-13 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jarrod L. Whitaker examines the ritualized poetic construction of male identity in the Rgveda, India's oldest Sanskrit text, arguing that an important aspect of early Vedic life was the sustained promotion and embodiment of what it means to be a true man. The Rgveda contains over a thousand hymns, addressed primarily to three gods: the deified ritual Fire, Agni; the war god, Indra; and Soma, who is none other than the personification of the sacred beverage soma. The hymns were sung in day-long fire rituals in which poet-priests prepared the sacred drink to empower Indra. The dominant image of Indra is that of a highly glamorized, violent, and powerful Aryan male; the three gods represent the ideals of manhood.Whitaker finds that the Rgvedic poet-priests employed a fascinating range of poetic and performative strategies--some explicit, others very subtle--to construct their masculine ideology, while justifying it as the most valid way for men to live. Poet-priests naturalized this ideology by encoding it within a man's sense of his body and physical self. Rgvedic ritual rhetoric and practices thus encode specific male roles, especially the role of man as warrior, while embedding these roles in a complex network of social, economic, and political relationships.Strong Arms and Drinking Strength is the first book in English to examine the relationship between Rgvedic gods, ritual practices, and the identities and expectations placed on men in ancient India.
Download or read book World of Wonders written by Alf Hiltebeitel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-25 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In World of Wonders, Alf Hiltebeitel addresses the Mahabharata and its supplement, the Harivamsa, as a single literary composition. Looking at the work through the critical lens of the Indian aesthetic theory of rasa, "juice, essence, or taste," he argues that the dominant rasa of these two texts is adbhutarasa, the "mood of wonder." While the Mahabharata signposts whole units of the text as "wondrous" in its table of contents, the Harivamsa foregrounds a stepped-up term for wonder (ascarya) that drives home the point that Vishnu and Krishna are one. Two scholars of the 9th and 10th centuries, Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta, identified the Mahabharata's dominant rasa as santarasa, the "mood of peace." This has traditionally been received as the only serious contestant for a rasic interpretation of the epic. Hiltebeitel disputes both the positive claim that the santarasa interpretation is correct and the negative claim that adbhutarasa is a frivolous rasa that cannot sustain a major work. The heart of his argument is that the Mahabharata and Harivamsa both deploy the terms for "wonder" and "surprise" (vismaya) in significant numbers that extend into every facet of these heterogeneous texts, showing how adbhutarasa is at work in the rich and contrasting textual strategies which are integral to the structure of the two texts.
Download or read book Strong Arms and Drinking Strength Masculinity Violence and the Body in Ancient India written by Jarrod L. Whitaker Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions Wake Forest University and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011-03-16 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jarrod L. Whitaker examines the ritualized poetic construction of male identity in the Rgveda, India's oldest Sanskrit text, arguing that an important aspect of early Vedic life was the sustained promotion and embodiment of what it means to be a true man. The Rgveda contains over a thousand hymns, addressed primarily to three gods: the deified ritual Fire, Agni; the war god, Indra; and Soma, who is none other than the personification of the sacred beverage soma. The hymns were sung in day-long fire rituals in which poet-priests prepared the sacred drink to empower Indra. The dominant image of Indra is that of a highly glamorized, violent, and powerful Aryan male; the three gods represent the ideals of manhood. Whitaker finds that the Rgvedic poet-priests employed a fascinating range of poetic and performative strategies--some explicit, others very subtle--to construct their masculine ideology, while justifying it as the most valid way for men to live. Poet-priests naturalized this ideology by encoding it within a man's sense of his body and physical self. Rgvedic ritual rhetoric and practices thus encode specific male roles, especially the role of man as warrior, while embedding these roles in a complex network of social, economic, and political relationships. Strong Arms and Drinking Strength is the first book in English to examine the relationship between Rgvedic gods, ritual practices, and the identities and expectations placed on men in ancient India.
Download or read book When the Goddess was a Woman written by Alf Hiltebeitel and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together Hiltebeitel's major essays on the the Mah?bh?rata, the R?m?ya?a, and the south Indian cults of Draupad? and K?tt???avar along with new articles written especially for this collection, this two volume work offers a comprehensive re-reading of the Indian epic tradition by the foremost scholar in Indian epic studies today.
Download or read book The Vedas written by Arlo Griffiths and published by Groningen Oriental Studies. This book was released on 2004 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Description: Preface (A. Griffiths and J.E.M. Houben) Introduction (J.E.M. Houben) PART I: TEXTUAL HISTORY AND INTERPRETATION - S.S. Bahulkar: The Apocryphal (?) Hymn to Pratyangira in the Paippalada Tradition - T.N. Dharmadhikari: Re-editing the Maitrayani Samhita: a Desideratum - Gerhard Ehlers: Old and New Manuscripts of the Jaiminiya-Brahmana - Shingo Einoo: Notes on the vrsotsarga - Arlo Griffiths: Paippalada Mantras in the Kausikasutra - Konrad Klaus: On the Sources of the Asvalayana-Srautasutra - François Voegeli: On the Kathaka Samhita Hapax pasuyajna and its Relationship with the saddhotr Mantra PART II: LANGUAGE AND STYLE - Dipak Bhattacharya: On yat, tat, uttarat and Similar Forms - Abhijit Ghosh: Problems in Determining Austric Lexical Elements in Sanskrit: a Case from the Atharva-Veda - Stephanie W. Jamison: Poetry and Purpose in the Rgveda: Structuring Enigmas - Jared S. Klein: Nominal and Adverbial AAmre.ditas and the Etymology of Rgvedic nana - Werner Knobl: The Nonce Formation: A more-than-momentary look at the Augenblicksbildung - Georges-Jean Pinault: On the Usages of the Particle iva in the Rgvedic Hymns - Ulrike Roesler: The Theory of Semantic Fields as a Tool for Vedic Research PART III: RITUAL AND RELIGION - Joel P. Brereton: Brahman, Brahman, and Sacrificer - Silvia D?Intino: Vision and Battle in Vedic Hymns: A Remark on the Theme of Battle in the Symbolism of Poetic Creation - Cezary Galewicz: Katavallur Anyonyam: a Competition in Vedic Chanting? - Jan E.M. Houben: Memetics of Vedic Ritual, Morphology of the Agnistoma - Mieko Kajihara: The Upanayana and Marriage in the Atharvaveda - David M. Knipe: Ritual Subversion: Reliable Enemies and Suspect Allies - Charles Malamoud: A Note on abistaka (Taittiriya Aranyaka I) - Sofía Moncó Taracena: Dawn and Song in the Vedic Hymns - Asko Parpola: From Archaeology to a Stratigraphy of Vedic Syncretism: The banyan tree and the water buffalo as Harappan-Dravidian symbols of royalty, inherited in succession by Yama, Varu.na and Indra, divine kings of the first three layers of Aryan speakers in South Asia - Stephanie W. Jamison: Response to Parpola, From Archaeology to a Stratigraphy of Vedic Syncretism - Frits Staal: From pranmukham to sarvatomukham: A Thread through the Srauta Maze - G.U. Thite: Vicissitudes of Vedic Ritual - Jarrod L. Whitaker: Ritual Power, Social Prestige, and Amulets (mani) in the Atharvaveda - Michael Witzel: The Rgvedic Religious System and its Central Asian and Hindukush Antecedents List of Contributors Index of Authors General Index
