Download or read book Living Banaras written by Bradley R. Hertel and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By focusing on contemporary popular religious traditions, the book represents a substantial contribution to the study of modern religious practices in Banaras, holy city of India. This book offers in-depth, ethnographic views of many contemporary popular religious practices that have, for the most part, received little attention by scholars. Topics covered include the Ramlila celebrations, devotion to Hanuman, and goddess worship, and the way that Banarsi Boli, the local dialect of Banaras, supports its users in their identification with the sacred city.
Download or read book Banaras written by Winand M. Callewaert and published by Hemkunt Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Banaras written by Diana L. Eck and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-06-05 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sacred city of Banāras on the River Ganges is one of the oldest living cities in the world—as old as Jerusalem, Athens, and Peking. It is the place where Shiva, the Lord of All, is said to have made his permanent home since the dawn of creation. There are few cities in India as traditionally Hindu and as symbolic of the whole of Hindu culture as Banāras. In this eloquent, finely observed study, Diana Eck shows how the city over the centuries has become a lens through which the Hindu vision of the world is precisely focused. She reveals the spiritual and historical resonance of this holy place where great sages such as the Buddha and Shankara were taught, where ashrams, palaces, and universities were built, where God has been imagined and imagined in a thousand ways. She describes the rites of its temples, the busy life of its riverfront, and the exuberance of its festivals. She tells how people travel from all over India to Banāras for the privilege of dying a good death here, for they believe that on the banks of the River Ganges where “the atmosphere of devotion is improbable in its strength,” it is possible to be released from the earthly round forever. In her account of the sacred history, geography, and art of the city, its elaborate and thriving rituals, its myths and literature, and its importance to pilgrims and seekers, Diana Eck uses her wealth of scholarship to make the Hindu tradition come powerfully alive so that we come to understand the meaning of this sacred city to the millions of believers who have been coming here for over 2,500 years.
Download or read book Death in Banaras written by Jonathan P. Parry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-07-07 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of Hindu death rituals and the sacred specialists who perform them in the Indian city of Banaras.
Download or read book Cosmic Order and Cultural Astronomy written by Rana Singh and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the Indian subcontinent there are territories and areas wherein culture, geography, and the archetypal cosmos interact with each other to create a sacredscape that is infused with meaning, cultural performances and transcendent power. These sacred sites possess extensive mythological associations where believed that spirit can cross between different realms. In a broad perspective such studies falls within the realm of cultural astronomy, which has two broad areas, viz. archaeoastronomy, concerned with the study of the use of astronomy and its role in ancient cultures and civilizations; and ethnoastronomy that studies the use of astronomy and its role in contemporary cultures. The seven essays in this volume deals with the critical appraisal of studying cultural astronomy and cosmic order and its implications in India, illustrated with case studies like heritagescape of Khajuraho, where stone speaks; manescape of Gaya, where manes come and bless the devotees; Deviscape of Vindhyachal, where goddess resorts; Shivascape of Kashi, where Shiva dances in making order; Shaktiscape of Kashi, that possesses the spatial ordering of goddesses; and Naturscape of Chitrakut, where mother earth blesses.
Download or read book Indian Esoteric Buddhism written by Ronald M. Davidson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002-12-18 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the rapid spread of Buddhism—especially the esoteric system of Tantra, one of its most popular yet most misunderstood forms—the historical origins of Buddhist thought and practice remain obscure. This groundbreaking work describes the genesis of the Tantric movement in early medieval India, where it developed as a response to, and in some ways an example of, the feudalization of Indian society. Drawing on primary documents—many translated for the first time—from Sanskrit, Prakrit, Tibetan, Bengali, and Chinese, Ronald Davidson shows how changes in medieval Indian society, including economic and patronage crises, a decline in women's participation, and the formation of large monastic orders, led to the rise of the esoteric tradition in India that became the model for Buddhist cultures in China, Tibet, and Japan.
Download or read book Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science written by Jim R. Lewis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-11-19 with total page 940 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been a significant but little-noticed aspect of the interface between science and religion, namely the widespread tendency of religions to appeal to science in support of their truth claims. Though the appeal to science is most evident in more recent religions like Christian Science and Scientology, no major faith tradition is exempt from this pattern. Members of almost every religion desire to see their ‘truths’ supported by the authority of science – especially in the midst of the present historical period, when all of the comforting old certainties seem problematic and threatened. The present collection examines this pattern in a wide variety of different religions and spiritual movements, and demonstrates the many different ways in which religions appeal to the authority of science. The result is a wide-ranging and uniquely compelling study of how religions adapt their message to one of the major challenges presented by the contemporary world.
Download or read book The Future of Ritual written by Richard Schechner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant examination of cultural expression and communal action, The Future of Ritual asks pertinent questions about art, theatre and the changing meaning of 'culture' in today's intercultural world.
Download or read book The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad written by Alexander Rocklin and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can religious freedom be granted to people who do not have a religion? While Indian indentured workers in colonial Trinidad practiced cherished rituals, "Hinduism" was not a widespread category in India at the time. On this Caribbean island, people of South Asian descent and African descent came together—under the watchful eyes of the British rulers—to walk on hot coals for fierce goddesses, summon spirits of the dead, or honor Muslim martyrs, practices that challenged colonial norms for religion and race. Drawing deeply on colonial archives, Alexander Rocklin examines the role of the category of religion in the regulation of the lives of Indian laborers struggling for autonomy. Gradually, Indians learned to narrate the origins, similarities, and differences among their fellows' cosmological views, and to define Hindus, Muslims, and Christians as distinct groups. Their goal in doing this work of subaltern comparative religion, as Rocklin puts it, was to avoid criminalization and to have their rituals authorized as legitimate religion—they wanted nothing less than to gain access to the British promise of religious freedom. With the indenture system's end, the culmination of this politics of recognition was the gradual transformation of Hindus' rituals and the reorganization of their lives—they fabricated a "world religion" called Hinduism.
Download or read book Bodies of Song written by Linda Hess and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-13 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kabir was a great iconoclastic-mystic poet of fifteenth-century North India; his poems were composed orally, written down by others in manuscripts and books, and transmitted through song. Scholars and translators usually attend to written collections, but these present only a partial picture of the Kabir who has remained vibrantly alive through the centuries mostly in oral forms. Entering the worlds of singers and listeners in rural Madhya Pradesh, Bodies of Song combines ethnographic and textual study in exploring how oral transmission and performance shape the content and interpretation of vernacular poetry in North India. The book investigates textual scholars' study of oral-performative traditions in a milieu where texts move simultaneously via oral, written, audio/video-recorded, and electronic pathways. As texts and performances are always socially embedded, Linda Hess brings readers into the lives of those who sing, hear, celebrate, revere, and dispute about Kabir. Bodies of Song is rich in stories of individuals and families, villages and towns, religious and secular organizations, castes and communities. Dialogue between religious/spiritual Kabir and social/political Kabir is a continuous theme throughout the book: ambiguously located between Hindu and Muslim cultures, Kabir rejected religious identities, pretentions, and hypocrisies. But even while satirizing the religious, he composed stunning poetry of religious experience and psychological insight. A weaver by trade, Kabir also criticized caste and other inequalities and today serves as an icon for Dalits and all who strive to remove caste prejudice and oppression.
Download or read book Encompassing a Fractal World written by Gil Daryn and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encompassing a Fractal World presents a groundbreaking, innovative paradigm which opens up new perspectives for understanding and analyzing Hindu life and culture. This book is an interdisciplinary comparative work which attempts to 'connect the dots', moving beyond isolated local village-based studies in order to bridge the gulf between anthropology and Hindu studies.
Download or read book Disorienting Dharma written by Emily T. Hudson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-12-19 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Award for Excellence in Religion: Textual Studies from the American Academy of Religion This book explores the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and religion in classical Indian literature and literary theory by focusing on one of the most celebrated and enigmatic texts to emerge from the Sanskrit epic tradition, the Mahabharata. This text, which is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important sources for the study of South Asian religious, social, and political thought, is a foundational text of the Hindu tradition(s) and considered to be a major transmitter of dharma (moral, social, and religious duty), perhaps the single most important concept in the history of Indian religions. However, in spite of two centuries of Euro-American scholarship on the epic, basic questions concerning precisely how the epic is communicating its ideas about dharma and precisely what it is saying about it are still being explored. Disorienting Dharma brings to bear a variety of interpretive lenses (Sanskrit literary theory, reader-response theory, and narrative ethics) to examine these issues. One of the first book-length studies to explore the subject from the lens of Indian aesthetics, it argues that such a perspective yields startling new insights into the nature of the depiction of dharma in the epic through bringing to light one of the principle narrative tensions of the epic: the vexed relationship between dharma and suffering. In addition, it seeks to make the Mahabharata interesting and accessible to a wider audience by demonstrating how reading the Mahabharata, perhaps the most harrowing story in world literature, is a fascinating, disorienting, and ultimately transformative experience.
Download or read book Because It Gives Me Peace of Mind written by Anne Mackenzie Pearson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1996-07-11 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the history and nature of vrats (ritual fasts) in text and practice, and the roles these rites play in the lives of Hindu women in North India.
Download or read book Dev written by John Stratton Hawley and published by Motilal Banarsidass Publ.. This book was released on 1998 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have severely limited the portrayal of the divine as feminine. But in Hinduism "God" very often means "Goddess." This extraordinary collection explores twelve different Hindu goddesses, all of whom are in some way related to Devi, the Great Goddess. They range from the liquid goddess-energy of the River Ganges to the possessing, entrancing heat of Bhagavati and Seranvali. They are local, like Vindhyavasini, and global, like Kali; ancient, like Saranyu, and modern, like "Mother India." The collection combines analysis of texts with intensive fieldwork, allowing the reader to see how goddesses are worshiped in everyday life. In these compelling essays, the divine feminine in Hinduism is revealed as never before--fascinating, contradictory, powerful.
Download or read book Martial Arts of the World 2 volumes written by Thomas A. Green and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-06-11 with total page 807 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference ever published on the wide range of martial arts disciplines practiced in cultures around the world. ABC-CLIO's Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia of History and Innovation is the most authoritative reference ever published on combat disciplines from around the world and across history. Coverage includes Shaolin monks, jousting knights, Roman gladiators, Westerner gunfighters, samurai warriors, and heavyweight boxers. These iconic figures and many more are featured in this title, as well as representatives of less well known but no less fascinating systems, all vividly characterized by expert contributors from around the world who are themselves martial arts practitioners. Martial Arts of the World comprises 120 entries in two volumes. The first volume is organized geographically to explore the historic development of martial arts styles in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The second volume looks at martial arts thematically, with coverage of belief systems, modern martial arts competitions, and a wide range of such topics as folklore, women in martial arts, martial arts and the military, and martial arts and the media.
Download or read book Modern and Global Ayurveda written by Dagmar Wujastyk and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2013-09-09 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive overview of Ayurveda.
Download or read book The Grace of Four Moons written by Pravina Shukla and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because clothing, food, and shelter are basic human needs, they provide excellent entries to cultural values and individual aesthetics. Everyone gets dressed every day, but body art has not received the attention it deserves as the most common and universal of material expressions of culture. The Grace of Four Moons aims to document the clothing decisions made by ordinary people in their everyday lives. Based on fieldwork conducted primarily in the city of Banaras, India, Pravina Shukla conceptualizes and realizes a total model for the study of body art—understood as all aesthetic modifications and supplementations to the body. Shukla urges the study of the entire process of body art, from the assembly of raw materials and the manufacture of objects, through their sale and the interactions between merchants and consumers, to the consumer's use of objects in creating personal decoration.
