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Images Miracles And Authority In Asian Religious Traditions
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Book Synopsis Images, Miracles And Authority In Asian Religious Traditions by : Richard Davis
Download or read book Images, Miracles And Authority In Asian Religious Traditions written by Richard Davis and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 1998-04-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this edited volume, Richard Davis and his colleagues examine how religious images are understood by practitioners in Asia and what social, cultural, and political aspects are connected to the "mira"
Book Synopsis Miracle as Modern Conundrum in South Asian Religious Traditions by : Corinne G. Dempsey
Download or read book Miracle as Modern Conundrum in South Asian Religious Traditions written by Corinne G. Dempsey and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2009-01-07 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claims of the miraculous are foundational to faith and skepticism, making and breaking religious careers and movements in their wake. Drawing on a variety of South Asian religious traditions-Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity-this book revolves around the theme of conundrum, demonstrating how miracles offer divine proof, tenacious embarrassment, and, in many cases, both. The contributors explore not only how modern miracles are conundrums themselves but also how they make conundrums out of assumed divides between scientific and supernatural realms, modernity and tradition, the West and the rest, and ethnographer and native. Book jacket.
Book Synopsis Images in Asian Religions by : Phyllis Granoff
Download or read book Images in Asian Religions written by Phyllis Granoff and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection offers a challenge to any simple understanding of the role of images by looking at aspects of the reception of image worship that have only begun to be studied, including the many hesitations that Asian religious traditions expressed about image worship. Written by eminent scholars of anthropology, art history, and religion with interests in different regions (India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia), this volume takes a fresh look at the many ways in which images were defined and received in Asian religions. Buddha Dharma Kyokai Foundation Book on Buddhism and Comparative Religion
Book Synopsis Vernacular Catholicism, Vernacular Saints by : Reid B. Locklin
Download or read book Vernacular Catholicism, Vernacular Saints written by Reid B. Locklin and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of Rajs groundbreaking ethnographic studies of vernacular Catholic traditions in Tamil Nadu, India. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Selva J. Raj (19522008) was one of the most important scholars of popular Indian Christianity and South Asian religion in North America. Vernacular Catholicism, Vernacular Saints gathers together, for the first time in a single volume, a series of his groundbreaking studies on the distinctively vernacular Catholic traditions of Tamil Nadu in southeast India. This collection, which focuses on four rural shrines, highlights ritual variety and ritual transgression in Tamil Catholic practice and offers clues to the ritual exchange, religious hybridity, and dialogue occurring at the grassroots level between Tamil Catholics and their Hindu and Muslim neighbors. Raj also advances a new and alternative paradigm for interreligious dialogue that radically differs from models advocated by theologians, clergy, and other religious elite. In addition, essays by other leading scholars of Indian Christianity and South Asian religionsMichael Amaladoss, Purushottama Bilimoria, Corinne G. Dempsey, Eliza F. Kent, and Vasudha Narayananare included that amplify and creatively extend Rajs work. a fine volume about the interaction between Hinduism and Christianity in South India. from the Afterword by Wendy Doniger
Book Synopsis Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces by : Bruce M. Sullivan
Download or read book Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces written by Bruce M. Sullivan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have long recognized that many objects in museums were originally on display in temples, shrines, or monasteries, and were religiously significant to the communities that created and used them. How, though, are such objects to be understood, described, exhibited, and handled now that they are in museums? Are they still sacred objects, or formerly sacred objects that are now art objects, or are they simultaneously objects of religious and artistic significance, depending on who is viewing the object? These objects not only raise questions about their own identities, but also about the ways we understand the religious traditions in which these objects were created and which they represent in museums today. Bringing together religious studies scholars and museum curators, Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces is the first volume to focus on Asian religions in relation to these questions. The contributors analyze an array of issues related to the exhibition in museums of objects of religious significance from Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh traditions. The “lives” of objects are considered, along with the categories of “sacred” and “profane”, “religious” and “secular”. As interest in material manifestations of religious ideas and practices continues to grow, Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces is a much-needed contribution to religious and Asian studies, anthropology of religion and museums studies.
Download or read book Miracles written by Patrick J. Hayes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-01-11 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Miracles give hope to the hopeless and exemplify the intersection of the divine and the mundane. They have shaped world history and continue to influence us through their presence in films, television, novels, and popular culture. This encyclopedia provides a unique resource on the philosophical, historical, religious, and cross-cultural conceptions of miracles that cut across denominational lines. Multidisciplinary in approach, this informative yet entertaining encyclopedia covers major aspects of miraculous phenomena through more than 150 alphabetically arranged entries that document how humanity's belief in religious miracles over multiple places, periods, and faiths have affected society—even changed the course of history. Written for high school students and general readers, the coverage enables readers to learn about different civilizations and cultures, the controversies surrounding different beliefs, and the often uncomfortable engagement of religion with science. This single-volume book provides a one-stop ready-reference that addresses a broad variety of subject matter on miraculous phenomena and guides further investigations into the subject. Helpful illustrations and lucid explanations of the ancillary concepts associated with miraculous phenomena make learning about this topic more engaging. Readers will be able to link the doctrinal concepts, such as "grace" or "prayer," with the descriptions of miraculous events, especially those associated with saints or holy objects. The examination of the controversial aspects of different belief systems along with the book's balanced coverage of the interpretation of miracles will encourage students to weigh different explanations, thus fostering the development of their critical thinking skills.
Book Synopsis The Language of History by : Audrey Truschke
Download or read book The Language of History written by Audrey Truschke and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over five hundred years, Muslim dynasties ruled parts of northern and central India, starting with the Ghurids in the 1190s through the fracturing of the Mughal Empire in the early eighteenth century. Scholars have long drawn upon works written in Persian and Arabic about this epoch, yet they have neglected the many histories that India’s learned elite wrote about Indo-Muslim rule in Sanskrit. These works span the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire and discuss Muslim-led kingdoms in the Deccan and even as far south as Tamil Nadu. They constitute a major archive for understanding significant cultural and political changes that shaped early modern India and the views of those who lived through this crucial period. Audrey Truschke offers a groundbreaking analysis of these Sanskrit texts that sheds light on both historical Muslim political leaders on the subcontinent and how premodern Sanskrit intellectuals perceived the “Muslim Other.” She analyzes and theorizes how Sanskrit historians used the tools of their literary tradition to document Muslim governance and, later, as Muslims became an integral part of Indian cultural and political worlds, Indo-Muslim rule. Truschke demonstrates how this new archive lends insight into formulations and expressions of premodern political, social, cultural, and religious identities. By elaborating the languages and identities at play in premodern Sanskrit historical works, this book expands our historical and conceptual resources for understanding premodern South Asia, Indian intellectual history, and the impact of Muslim peoples on non-Muslim societies. At a time when exclusionary Hindu nationalism, which often grounds its claims on fabricated visions of India’s premodernity, dominates the Indian public sphere, The Language of History shows the complexity and diversity of the subcontinent’s past.
Download or read book Making a Mantra written by Ellen Gough and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-10-13 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jainism originated in India and shares some features with Buddhism and Hinduism, but it is a distinct tradition with its own key texts, art, rituals, beliefs, and history. One important way it has often been distinguished from Buddhism and Hinduism is through the highly contested category of Tantra: Jainism, unlike the others, does not contain a tantric path to liberation. But in Making a Mantra, historian of religions Ellen Gough refines and challenges our understanding of Tantra by looking at the development over two millennia of a Jain incantation, or mantra, that evolved from an auspicious invocation in a second-century text into a key component of mendicant initiations and meditations that continue to this day. Typically, Jainism is characterized as a celibate, ascetic path to liberation in which one destroys karma through austerities, while the tantric path to liberation is characterized as embracing the pleasures of the material world, requiring the ritual use of mantras to destroy karma. Gough, however, argues that asceticism and Tantra should not be viewed in opposition to one another. She does so by showing that Jains perform “tantric” rituals of initiation and meditation on mantras and maṇḍalas. Jainism includes kinds of tantric practices, Gough provocatively argues, because tantric practices are a logical extension of the ascetic path to liberation.
Book Synopsis The Materiality of the Past by : Anne Murphy
Download or read book The Materiality of the Past written by Anne Murphy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anne Murphy offers a groundbreaking exploration of material representations of the Sikh past, showing how objects, as well as historical sites, and texts, have played a vital role in the production of the Sikh community as an evolving historical and social formation from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing together work in religious studies, postcolonial studies, and history, Murphy explores how 'relic' objects such as garments and weaponry have, like sites, played dramatically different roles across political and social contexts-signifiers of authority and even sovereignty in one; collected, revered, and displayed with religious significance in another-and are connected to a broader engagement with the representation of the past that is central to the formation of the Sikh community. By highlighting the connections between relic objects and historical sites, and how the status of sites changed in the colonial period, she also provides crucial insight into the circumstances that brought about the birth of a new territorial imagination of the Sikh past in the early twentieth century, rooted in existing precolonial historical imaginaries centered in place and object. The life of the object today and in the past, she suggests, provides unique insight into the formation of the Sikh community and the crucial role representations play in it.
Book Synopsis Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade by : Tansen Sen
Download or read book Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade written by Tansen Sen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-09-11 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relations between China and India underwent a dramatic transformation from Buddhist-dominated to commerce-centered exchanges in the seventh to fifteenth centuries. The unfolding of this transformation, its causes, and wider ramifications are examined in this masterful analysis of the changing patterns of the interaction between the two most important cultural spheres in Asia. Tansen Sen offers a new perspective on Sino-Indian relations during the Tang dynasty (618–907), arguing that the period is notable not only for religious and diplomatic exchanges but also for the process through which China emerged as a center of Buddhist learning, practice, and pilgrimage. Before the seventh century, the Chinese clergy—given the spatial gap between the sacred Buddhist world of India and the peripheral China—suffered from a “borderland complex.” A close look at the evolving practice of relic veneration in China (at Famen Monastery in particular), the exposition of Mount Wutai as an abode of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, and the propagation of the idea of Maitreya’s descent in China, however, reveals that by the eighth century China had overcome its complex and successfully established a Buddhist realm within its borders. The emergence of China as a center of Buddhism had profound implications on religious interactions between the two countries and is cited by Sen as one of the main causes for the weakening of China’s spiritual attraction toward India. At the same time, the growth of indigenous Chinese Buddhist schools and teachings retrenched the need for doctrinal input from India. A detailed examination of the failure of Buddhist translations produced during the Song dynasty (960–1279), demonstrates that these developments were responsible for the unraveling of religious bonds between the two countries and the termination of the Buddhist phase of Sino-Indian relations. Sen proposes that changes in religious interactions were paralleled by changes in commercial exchanges. For most of the first millennium, trading activities between India and China were closely connected with and sustained through the transmission of Buddhist doctrines. The eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, witnessed dramatic changes in the patterns and structure of mercantile activity between the two countries. Secular bulk and luxury goods replaced Buddhist ritual items, maritime channels replaced the overland Silk Road as the most profitable conduits of commercial exchange, and many of the merchants involved were followers of Islam rather than Buddhism. Moreover, policies to encourage foreign trade instituted by the Chinese government and the Indian kingdoms contributed to the intensification of commercial activity between the two countries and transformed the China-India trading circuit into a key segment of cross-continental commerce.
Book Synopsis Reading the Mahāvamsa by : Kristin Scheible
Download or read book Reading the Mahāvamsa written by Kristin Scheible and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vamsa is a dynamic genre of Buddhist history filled with otherworldly characters and the exploits of real-life heroes. These narratives collapse the temporal distance between Buddha and the reader, building an emotionally resonant connection with an outsized religious figure and a longed-for past. The fifth-century Pali text Mahavamsa is a particularly effective example, using metaphor and other rhetorical devices to ethically transform readers, to stimulate and then to calm them. Reading the Mahavamsa advocates a new, literary approach to this text by revealing its embedded reading advice (to experience samvega and pasada) and affective work of metaphors (the Buddha's dharma as light) and salient characters (nagas). Kristin Scheible argues that the Mahavamsa requires a particular kind of reading. In the text's proem, special instructions draw readers to the metaphor of light and the nagas, or salient snake-beings, of the first chapter. Nagas are both model worshippers and unworthy hoarders of Buddha's relics. As nonhuman agents, they challenge political and historicist readings of the text. Scheible sees these slippery characters and the narrative's potent and playful metaphors as techniques for refocusing the reader's attention on the text's emotional aims. Her work explains the Mahavamsa's central motivational role in contemporary Sri Lankan Buddhist and nationalist circles. It also speaks broadly to strategies of reading religious texts and to the internal and external cues that give such works lives beyond the page.
Book Synopsis Becoming the Buddha by : Donald K. Swearer
Download or read book Becoming the Buddha written by Donald K. Swearer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Becoming the Buddha is the first book-length study of a key ritual of Buddhist practice in Asia: the consecration of a Buddha image or "new Buddha," a ceremony by which the Buddha becomes present or alive. Through a richly detailed, accessible exploration of this ritual in northern Thailand, an exploration that stands apart from standard text-based or anthropological approaches, Donald Swearer makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Buddha image, its role in Buddhist devotional life, and its relationship to the veneration of Buddha relics. Blending ethnography, analysis, and Buddhist texts related to this mimetic reenactment of the night of the Buddha's enlightenment, he demonstrates that the image becomes the Buddha's surrogate by being invested with the Buddha's story and charged with the extraordinary power of Buddhahood. The process by which this transformation occurs through chant, sermon, meditation, and the presence of charismatic monks is at the heart of this book. Known as "opening the eyes of the Buddha," image consecration traditions throughout Buddhist Asia share much in common. Within the cultural context of northern Thailand, Becoming the Buddha illuminates scriptural accounts of the making of the first Buddha image; looks at debates over the ritual's historical origin, at Buddhological insights achieved, and at the hermeneutics of absence and presence; and provides a thematic comparison of several Buddhist traditions.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice by : Kevin Trainor
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice written by Kevin Trainor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This Handbook provides a state-of-the-art exploration of several key dynamics in current studies of the Buddhist tradition with a focus on practice. Embodiment, materiality, emotion, and gender shape the way most Buddhists engage with their traditions, in contrast to popular representations of Buddhism as spiritual, disembodied, and largely devoid of ritual. This volume highlights how practice often represents a fluid, dynamic, and strategic means of defining identity and negotiating the challenges of everyday life. Essays explore the transformational aims of practices that require practitioners to move, gesture, and emote in prescribed ways, including the ways that scholars' own embodied practices are integral to their research methodology. The chapters are written by acknowledged experts in their respective subject areas and taken together offer an overview of current thinking in the field. The volume is of particular value to scholars who seek an orientation to current perspectives on important conceptual, theoretical, and methodological concerns that are shaping the field in areas outside their primary expertise. The inclusion of substantial, up-to-date bibliographies also makes the volume an important guide to current scholarship"--
Book Synopsis The Goddess Lives in Upstate New York by : Corinne G. Dempsey
Download or read book The Goddess Lives in Upstate New York written by Corinne G. Dempsey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-26 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This profile of an unusual South Indian temple community in Rush, New York, describes how the temple combines orthodox rituals and socioreligious iconoclasm. The author uses the temple's surprising success to analyse the distinctive dynamics of Hinduism, including issues of gender, caste and community"--OCLC
Book Synopsis Heroes and Saints by : Phyllis Granoff
Download or read book Heroes and Saints written by Phyllis Granoff and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume makes a unique contribution to the study of dying in ancient cultures by focusing on what happens in the critical moments before death. Employing a wide range of literary sources, the essays in this volume focus exclusively on the moment of death and practices associated with the transition from this world to the next. Five of the essays deal with Asian religions, primarily Buddhism in India, Tibet, China, and Japan. The other five essays deal with the moment of death in the West, old Norse-Icelandic, Old English, and the Judeo-Christian tradition. The authors explore the many ways in which the good death was envisioned. Remarkable parallels emerge between the good death in religious texts and in heroic sagas . Despite the diversity of cultures, time periods and religious traditions represented in these essays, this volume vividly illustrates the fundamental human need to see in the inevitable moment of death a possibility of choice and a promise of hope.
Book Synopsis Dissimilar Similitudes by : Caroline Walker Bynum
Download or read book Dissimilar Similitudes written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an acclaimed historian, a mesmerizing account of how medieval European Christians envisioned the paradoxical nature of holy objects Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, European Christians used a plethora of objects in worship, not only prayer books, statues, and paintings but also pieces of natural materials, such as stones and earth, considered to carry holiness, dolls representing Jesus and Mary, and even bits of consecrated bread and wine thought to be miraculously preserved flesh and blood. Theologians and ordinary worshippers alike explained, utilized, justified, and warned against some of these objects, which could carry with them both anti-Semitic charges and the glorious promise of heaven. Their proliferation and the reaction against them form a crucial background to the European-wide movements we know today as “reformations” (both Protestant and Catholic). In a set of independent but interrelated essays, Caroline Bynum considers some examples of such holy things, among them beds for the baby Jesus, the headdresses of medieval nuns, and the footprints of Christ carried home from the Holy Land by pilgrims in patterns cut to their shape or their measurement in lengths of string. Building on and going beyond her well-received work on the history of materiality, Bynum makes two arguments, one substantive, the other methodological. First, she demonstrates that the objects themselves communicate a paradox of dissimilar similitude—that is, that in their very details they both image the glory of heaven and make clear that that heaven is beyond any representation in earthly things. Second, she uses the theme of likeness and unlikeness to interrogate current practices of comparative history. Suggesting that contemporary students of religion, art, and culture should avoid comparing things that merely “look alike,” she proposes that humanists turn instead to comparing across cultures the disparate and perhaps visually dissimilar objects in which worshippers as well as theorists locate the “other” that gives religion enduring power.
Book Synopsis Inventing Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch by : John Jorgensen
Download or read book Inventing Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch written by John Jorgensen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-10-01 with total page 888 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hui-neng, the patriarchal ancestor of all existing Ch’an/Zen, was invented by Shen-hui (684-758) based on a fusion of Buddhist and Confucian themes. This propaganda led to the creation of a large hagiographical literature that determined the trajectory of Ch’an.
