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Imagining a Place for Buddhism
This study argues that, in early medieval south India, it was in the literary arena that religious ideals and values were publicly contested.
A Guide to Writing in Religious Studies
The Harvard Writing Project's disciplinary writing guides aim to introduce students to some of the basic practices and conventions of writing and conducting research in the various academic disciplines. This guide began as a pledge by professors to think about why we assign writing. We should not assign essays just because our professors did; students should not write essays just to fulfill requirements. We want you to engage and argue with the sources you are reading. We want you to take ideas in new directions. Some of what follows might look formulaic. But these guidelines are actually less constraining than the five-paragraph formula you might have learned in high school. We provide them here as a template from which you can make your own essays. It is the template we use when launching our own essays, so we know it can work.
Imagining a Place for Buddhism
While Tamil-speaking South India is celebrated for its preservation of Hindu tradition, other religious communities have played a significant role in shaping the region's religious history. Among these non-Hindu communities is that of the Buddhists, who are little-understood because of the scarcity of remnants of Tamil-speaking Buddhist culture. Here, focusing on the two Buddhist texts in Tamil that are complete (a sixth-century poetic narrative and an eleventh-century treatise on grammar and poetics), Monius sheds light on the role of literature and literary culture in the formation, articulation, and evolution of religious identity and community.
Alternative Krishnas
Krishna—widely venerated and adored in the Hindu tradition—is a deity of many aspects. An ancient manifestation of the Supreme God Vishnu, or the Godhead itself, Krishna is the bringer of Yoga philosophy and the creator of the universe, the destroyer of evil tyrants, and the hero of the epic Mahabharata. He is also described in classical Sanskrit texts as having human characteristics and enjoying very human pursuits: Krishna is the butter thief, cowherd, philanderer, and flute player. Yet even these playful depictions are based upon descriptions found in the Sanskrit canon, and mostly reflect familiar, classical Pan-Indian images. In this book, contributors examine the alternative, or un...
Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History
The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.
Constructing Indian Christianities
This volume offers insights into the current ‘public-square’ debates on Indian Christianity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork as well as rigorous analyses, it discusses the myriad histories of Christianity in India, its everyday practice and contestations and the process of its indigenisation. It addresses complex and pertinent themes such as Dalit Indian Christianity, diasporic nationalism and conversion. The work will interest scholars and researchers of religious studies, Dalit and subaltern studies, modern Indian history, and politics.
The Routledge Handbook of Indian Buddhist Philosophy
The Routledge Handbook of Indian Buddhist Philosophy is the first scholarly reference volume to highlight the diversity and individuality of a large number of the most influential philosophers to have contributed to the evolution of Buddhist thought in India. By placing the author at the center of inquiry, the volume highlights the often unrecognized innovation and multiplicity of India’s Buddhist thinkers, whose unique contributions are commonly subsumed in more general doctrinal presentations of philosophical schools. Here, instead, the reader is invited to explore the works and ideas of India’s most important Buddhist philosophers in a manner that takes seriously the weight of their p...
Shared Devotion, Shared Food
"This book is about the deceptively simple question: when Hindu devotional or bhakti traditions welcomed marginalized people-women, low castes, and Dalits-were they promoting social equality? This the modern formulation of the bhakti-caste question. It is what Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar had in mind when he concluded that the saints promoted spiritual equality but did not transform society. While taking Ambedkar's judgment seriously, when viewed in the context of intellectual history and social practice, the bhakti-caste question is more complex. This book dives deeply in Marathi sources to explore how one tradition in western India worked out the relationship between bhakti and caste on its...
Translating Wisdom
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. During the height of Muslim power in Mughal South Asia, Hindu and Muslim scholars worked collaboratively to translate a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. Translating Wisdom reconstructs the intellectual processes and exchanges that underlay these translations. Using as a case study the 1597 Persian rendition of the Yoga-Vasistha—an influential Sanskrit philosophical tale whose popularity stretched across the subcontinent—Shankar Nair illustrates how these early modern Muslim and Hindu scholars drew upon their respective religious, philosophical, and literary traditions to forge a common vocabulary through which to understand one another. These scholars thus achieved, Nair argues, a nuanced cultural exchange and interreligious and cross-philosophical dialogue significant not only to South Asia’s past but also its present.
