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Ananda K. Coomaraswamy was engaged in the world not only as a scholarly expositor of traditional culture and philosophy, but also as a radical critic of contemporary life.
Coomaraswamy was perhaps the greatest philosopher-theologian of recent times to have emerged from the East. This ambitious work is the first to present a selection of Coomaraswamy's letters to mystics, theologians, art critics, painters, philosophers, writers, and religious thinkers and scholars. No other source reveals the author's erudition, as well as facets of his life and thought, as completely and delightfully as this collection.
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Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) was a pioneer in Indian art history and in the cultural confrontation of East and West. A scholar in the tradition of the great Indian grammarians and philosophers, an art historian convinced that the ultimate value of art transcends history, and a social thinker influenced by William Morris, Coomaraswamy was a unique figure whose works provide virtually a complete education in themselves. Finding a universal tradition in past cultures ranging from the Hellenic and Christian to the Indian, Islamic, and Chinese, he collated his ideas and symbols of ancient wisdom into the sometimes complex, always rewarding pattern of essays. The Door in the Sky is a collection of the author's writings on myth drawn from his Metaphysics and Traditional Art and Symbolism, both originally published in Bollingen Series. These essays were written while Coomaraswamy was curator in the department of Asiatic Art of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he built the first large collection of Indian art in the United States.
Illustrations: 73 B/w Illustrations Description: Particular significance attaches to Yaksas in Indian mythology, religion and art. Their almost universal presence in the earlier Indian religions, Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina, wherein they are invested with peculiar traits and powers, indicates their importance. Ananda Coomaraswamy's Yaksas is an attempt at bringing together the mass of information from literary and monumental sources about Yaksas and Yaksis, their origin, and development from the conceptual, mythological and iconographical points of view. Coomaraswamy has shown how this non- and pre-Aryan animistic concept originated and, in the historical times, dovetailed with the Hindu, Budd...
This is a new release of the original 1923 edition.
This book represents in many ways the most complete achievement of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947). -- Back cover.