Episoder
-
The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, the monumental Sanskrit epic of the life of Rama, ideal man and incarnation of the great god Visnu, has profoundly affected the literature, art, religions, and cultures of South and Southeast Asia from antiquity to the present. Filled with thrilling battles, flying monkeys, and ten-headed demons, the work, composed almost 3,000 years ago, recounts Prince Rama’s exile and his odyssey to recover his abducted wife, Sita, and establish a utopian kingdom. Now, the definitive English translation of the critical edition of this classic is available in The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: The Complete English Translation (Princeton UP, 2022).
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
A candid conversation with renowned Sanskritist and online teacher Antonia Ruppel on her love of the language, teaching philosophy, views on academia, and online programs, here and here.
Antonia Ruppel is a researcher on the project Uncovering Sanskrit Syntax. She did her PhD in Classics at the University of Cambridge and was subsequently the Townsend Senior Lecturer in the Greek, Latin and Sanskrit Languages at Cornell University. Her research interests include comparative philology, syntax, compounding, the history of linguistics, and language pedagogy.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Mangler du episoder?
-
Consisting of about 25,000 verses in Valmiki's Rāmāyaṇa, the story of Rāma was summarized in 704 verses in eighteen chapters in the Rāmopākhyāna, which comprises chapters 258--275 of the Aranyaka Parvan of the great epic Mahābhārata. Peter Scharf's Ramopakhyana - the Story of Rama in the Mahabharata (The Sanskrit Library, 2023) is suitable for students who have completed an introductory Sanskrit course to continue reading Sanskrit on their own, but it may also be used in a second-year Sanskrit course, or by beginning Sanskrit students.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Professor Gavin Flood of Oxford University discusses new insights on tantra to be released in an upcoming publication stemming from his Continuing Studies teaching at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Flood's online Tantra course is here.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
The Cidvilāsastava is one of the most comprehensive treatments of the esoteric contemplation of ritual found within the Śrīvidyā tradition and Śaiva tantra in general. This short forty-verse hymn offers esoteric knowledge and creative contemplations (bhāvanā) for critical steps in the ritual worship of Tripurasundarī. Although belonging to the Śrīvidyā tradition, the Cidvilāsastava will likely be of great interest to all who perform pūjā as many of the verses deal with topics and procedures that are common to all traditional forms of ritual worship. The full tex is available here.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King (Yale UP, 2024) is the first biography of the great Emperor Ashoka relying solely on his own words. Ashoka sought not only to rule his territory but also to give it a unity of purpose and aspiration, to unify the people of his vastly heterogeneous empire not by a cult of personality but by the cult of an idea—“dharma”—which served as the linchpin of a new moral order. In this deeply researched book, Patrick Olivelle draws on Ashoka’s inscriptions and on the art and architecture he pioneered to craft a detailed picture of Ashoka as a ruler, a Buddhist, a moral philosopher, and an ecumenist who governed a vast multiethnic, multilinguistic, and multireligious empire.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Through engaging, contemporary examples, Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters (Wisdom Publications, 2023) reveals the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism as a coherent system of ideas and practices for the path to liberation, contextualizing its key texts and rendering them accessible and relevant. The Yogacara, or Yoga Practice, school is one of the two schools of Mahayana Buddhism that developed in the early centuries of the common era. Though it arose in India, Mahayana Buddhism now flourishes in China, Tibet, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. While the other major Mahayana tradition, the Madhyamaka (Middle Way), focuses on the concept of emptiness—that all phenomena lack an intrinsic essence—the Yogacara school focuses on the cognitive processes whereby we impute such essences. Through everyday examples and analogues in cognitive science, author William Waldron makes Yogacara’s core teachings—on the three turnings of the Dharma wheel, the three natures, the storehouse consciousness, and mere perception—accessible to a broad audience. In contrast to the common characterization of Yogacara as philosophical idealism, Waldron presents Yogacara Buddhism on its own terms, as a coherent system of ideas and practices, with dependent arising its guiding principle.
The first half of Making Sense of Mind Only explores the historical context for Yogacara’s development. Waldron examines early Buddhist texts that show how our affective and cognitive processes shape the way objects and worlds appear to us, and how we erroneously grasp onto them as essentially real—perpetuating the habits that bind us to samsara. He then analyzes the early Madhyamaka critique of essences.
This context sets the stage for the book’s second half, an examination of how Yogacara texts such as the Samdhinirmocana Sutra and Asanga’s Stages of Yogic Practice (Yogacarabhumi) build upon these earlier ideas by arguing that our constructive processes also occur unconsciously. Not only do we collectively, yet mostly unknowingly, construct shared realities or cultures, our shared worlds are also mediated through the storehouse consciousness (alayavijñana) functioning as a cultural unconscious. Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses argues that we can learn to recognize such objects and worlds as “mere perceptions” (vijñaptimatra) and thereby abandon our enchantment with the products of our own cognitive processes. Finally, Maitreya’s Distinguishing Phenomena from Their Ultimate Nature (Dharmadharmatavibhaga) elegantly lays out the Mahayana path to this transformation. In Waldron’s hands, Yogacara is no mere view but a practical system of transformation. His presentation of its key texts and ideas illuminates how religion can remain urgent and vital in our scientific and pluralistic age.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Pravina Rodrigues' book A Sakta Method for Comparative Theology: Upside Down, Inside Out (Lexington, 2023) discusses the issue of the missing Hindu interlocutors in the disciplines of theology of religions, interreligious dialogue, and comparative theology. It fills the gap left by the missing Hindu interlocutors by offering a first-ever Śākta thealogy of religions and a Śākta method for comparative theology.
For Śāktas, the thread of religious diversity is part of the rich tapestry of cosmological, topographical, environmental, and bio-diversity, which is the Goddess’ collective (samaṣṭi) and individuated (vyaṣṭi) forms. Śākta religious diversity is "complex, layered, and paradoxical, allowing ontological similarities, ontological differences, and irreducibility." A Śākta thealogy of religious diversity transcends humans and the borders of religion, politics, society, and speciesism.
Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Professor William Waldron teaches courses on the South Asian religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, Tibetan religion and history, comparative psychologies and philosophies of mind, and theory and method in the study of religion at Middlebury College. His publications focus on the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism and its dialogue with modern thought. He is the author of Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters (Wisdom Publications, 2023).
In this conversation, we look at Yogacara thought, idealism, constructivism and the impact on the practitioner and tackle the following;
Why thinking of Yogacara as Mind Only is deeply problematic
Why seeing Yogacara as essentially constructivist is more accurate
Why seeing constructivism in dualistic terms is to miss the point
Why interdependence is central to Yogacara rather than the doctrine of emptiness
Why the signature concepts of; the three natures, the storehouse consciousness, and mere perception are liberational and key to understanding Yogacara’s ethics
Why Madhyamaka became dominant and a mistaken view of Yogacara developed as a consequence
How the insights of Yogacara can help us to understand concepts of liberation today
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Shakuntala Gawde's book Narrative Analysis of Bhagavata Purana: Selected Episodes from the Tenth Skandha (Dev Publishers, 2023) presents an analytical study of selected narratives of the tenth skandha of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa with the framework of Narratology. It checks the possibilities of interpretation of some popular narratives from Kṛṣṇa saga. Book gives an exhaustive introduction dealing with Purāṇas, the growth of Vaiṣṇnavism and Narratology with special reference to Bhāgavata Purāṇa which sets precursor to the further analysis. It undertakes hermeneutic interpretation of episodes – Lord Kṛṣṇa’s birth story, Lifting of Govardhana Mountain, Syamantaka jewel, exploits of Pūtanā and other demons, uprooting of Arjuna trees, the expulsion of Kāliya, Gopīcīraharaṇam, Rāsapaῆcādhyāyī, story of Kubjā, story of Śrīdāman and Rukmiṇī Svayaṁvara.
All these narratives are categorised into three themes – 1) Assimilation and acculturation 2) Exploits of demons and 3) Bhakti Narratives. The Narrative structure of each episode is analysed to derive the meaning from it. Theoretical frameworks developed by K. Ayyappa Paniker, Genette and Roland Barthes are applied to the selected narratives of the tenth skandha of Bhāg. P. to understand the deeper meaning of the narratives. The toolbox approach is taken into consideration while doing textual exegesis and hermeneutic interpretation. It explores socio-historical, psychological and philosophical aspects of the above narratives through textual analysis of the tenth skandha of Bhāgavata Purāṇa using the tools like intertextuality and intratextuality.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Friendship—particularly interreligious friendship—offers both promise and peril. After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did Muslim scholars grapple with the possibilities and dangers of Hindu-Muslim friendship? How did they negotiate the incongruities between foundational texts and attitudes toward non-Muslims that were informed by the premodern context of Muslim empire and the realities of British colonialism, which rendered South Asian Muslims a political minority?
In Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023), SherAli Tareen, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, explores how leading South Asian Muslim thinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. He argues that often what was at stake in Muslim scholarly debates on Hindu-Muslim friendship were unresolved tensions over the meaning of Islam in the modern world. Tareen’s framework also provides a timely perspective on the historical roots of present-day Hindu-Muslim relations, considering how to overcome thorny legacies and open new horizons for interreligious friendship. In our conversation we discussed Muslim scholarly translations of Hinduism, Hindu-Muslim theological polemics, intra-Muslim debates on cow sacrifice, and debates on emulating Hindu customs and habits.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Philosophical concepts are influential in the theories and methods to study the world religions. Even though the disciplines of anthropology and religious studies now encompass communities and cultures across the world, the theories and methods used to study world religions and cultures continue to be rooted in Western philosophies. In Indic philosophical systems, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism, one of the common views on reality is that the world both within one self and outside is a flow with nothing permanent, both the observer and the observed undergoing constant transformation. Pankaj Jain and Jeffery D. Long's book Indian and Western Philosophical Concepts in Religion (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) is based on such innovative ideas coming from different Indic philosophies and how they can enrich the theory and methods in religious studies.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Religious Minorities Online (RMO) is the premier academic resource on religious minorities worldwide, reflecting the state of the art in scholarship. It is written by leading scholars and is rigorously peer-reviewed.
Available as an Open Access publication and written in an accessible style, Religious Minorities Online is an indispensable resource not only for students and academics but also to broader audiences that include journalists, politicians and policy advisors, activists, NGOs, among others. New articles will be published online twice a year. A printed version, the Handbook of Religious Minorities, will be available at the end of the project.
This project was supported by the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters; UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council under UK-Japan Connection Grant number ES/S013482/1; and The University of Bergen.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
In Who Owns Religion?: Scholars and Their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century (U Chicago Press, 2019), scholar and noted university administrator Laurie Patton looks at the cultural work of religious studies through scholars' clashes with religious communities, especially in the late 1980s and 90s. "Others" about whom scholars wrote to their colleagues were now also readers who could agree or condemn in public forums. These controversies were also fundamentally about something new: the very rights of secular, Western hermeneutics to interpret religions at all. Patton's book holds out hope that scholars can find a space for their work between the university and the communities they study. Their role, she suggests, is similar to that of the wise fool in many classical dramas and indeed in many religious traditions. Scholars of religion have multiple masters and must move between them while speaking a truth that not everyone may be interested in hearing.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Learn about the fascinating Ethno-Indology series now published at Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing which offers inexpensive peer-reviewed Open Access and Print-on-Demand publishing for scholars from all over the world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
In Tamil Nadu, the nine-night autumnal Navarātri festival can be viewed as a celebration of feminine powers in association with the goddess. Ina Marie Lunde Ilkama's book The Play of the Feminine (HASP, 2023) explores Navarātri as it is celebrated in the South Indian temple town of Kanchipuram. It investigates the local mythologies of the goddess, two temple celebrations, and the domestic ritual practice known as kolu (doll displays). The author highlights three intersecting themes: namely the play of the goddess in myth and ritual, the religious agency and images of women and the divine feminine, and notions of playfulness in Navarātri rituals; as articulated in creativity, aesthetics, competition, and dramatic expressions.
This book is available open access here.
Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Pravina Rodrigues' book A Sakta Method for Comparative Theology: Upside Down, Inside Out (Lexington, 2023) discusses the issue of the missing Hindu interlocutors in the disciplines of theology of religions, interreligious dialogue, and comparative theology. It fills the gap left by the missing Hindu interlocutors by offering a first-ever Śākta thealogy of religions and a Śākta method for comparative theology.
For Śāktas, the thread of religious diversity is part of the rich tapestry of cosmological, topographical, environmental, and bio-diversity, which is the Goddess’ collective (samaṣṭi) and individuated (vyaṣṭi) forms. Śākta religious diversity is "complex, layered, and paradoxical, allowing ontological similarities, ontological differences, and irreducibility." A Śākta thealogy of religious diversity transcends humans and the borders of religion, politics, society, and speciesism.
Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
What happens after you die? The book brings together fascinating theological and religious studies perspectives on a controversial yet pervasive idea: reincarnation. An estimated 1 on 5 Americans subscribe to this belief, despite their religious background. Why is this? What are the philosophical, spiritual, pragmatic merits of subscribing to reincarnation? What about the pitfalls? Does believing in reincarnation counter Christian teachings? Is it a uniquely Hindu practice? Join us as we explore these and other questions with Dr. Jeffrey D. Long, Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Elizabethtown College (PA) and editor of the open access peer-reviewed book Perspectives on Reincarnation: Hindu, Christian, Scientific(MDPI Books, 2019).
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Knut A. Jacobsen's edited volume The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Diaspora (Oxford UP, 2023) presents the histories and religious traditions of Hindus with a South Asian ancestral background living outside of South Asia. Hinduism is a global religion with a significant presence in many countries throughout the world. The most important cause of this global expansion is migration. This book presents and analyses the most important of the geographies, migration histories, religious traditions and developments, rituals, places, institutions, and representations of Hinduism in the diasporas, capturing some of the great plurality of Hindu religious traditions.
The first part of the book concentrates on the major regions in the world in which Hindu diasporas are found. The main focus is the modern period, but the book discusses also the possibility of premodern Hindu diasporas in Southeast Asia. The second part focuses on specific central themes such as Vaishnava, Shaiva, and Shakta traditions in diasporas, temples, and traditions of sacred sites and pilgrimage outside of South Asia, Hindutva organizations and the diaspora, as well as relations between Hindu diasporas and new followers of Hindu traditions. The chapters in this book show some of the global presence of the Hindu diasporas and some of the dynamic developments in multiple geographical spaces. Analysing specific spaces and themes, the chapters of the book offer a foundation for understanding the Hindu traditions in its most important global diasporic contexts and the dynamic developments around the world.
Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions -
Mumbai is generally recognized as an environment of extraordinary religious diversity. The city is known at one and the same time for a habitual cosmopolitanism and a series of violent religion-related conflicts and clashes.
While there is much academic scholarship on various aspects of urban history and realities, Michael Stausberg's edited volume Religions, Mumbai Style: Events-Media-Spaces (Oxford UP, 2023) is the first international academic publication focusing on religion(s) in Mumbai. An extended introductory essay provides a scenario of the religious history of the city from the earliest colonial periods to the present; it also discusses such topics as public celebration and landmark religious places. By taking a thematic approach, the contributions highlight the dynamics of religious life in the city. Chapters discuss spatial settings such as so-called slums (Dharavi) and ghettos (Mumbra), but also roadside shrines and taxis. Other chapters focus on class and civil society organizations. Contributions discuss the crossing of religious boundaries, e.g., in dealing with intermarriage and conversion, and challenges faced by religious groups as to how to reconcile the religious diversity of the city with their own desire for recognition. Lines of tension and conflict often run within, and not so much between, communities.The two final chapters of the volume address the reflection of religion in fiction set in Mumbai and in the work of the Bombay poet Arun Kolatkar.
Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions - Se mer
