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Head and Heart
An extensive study of self-sacrificial images in Indian art, this book examines concepts such as head-offering, human sacrifice, blood, suicide, valour, self-immolation, and self-giving in the context of religion and politics to explore why these images were produced and how they became paradigms of heroism.
The Death of Sacred Texts
The Death of Sacred Texts draws attention to a much neglected topic in the study of sacred texts: the religious and ritual attitudes towards texts which have become old and damaged and can no longer be used for reading practices or in religious worship. This book approaches religious texts and scriptures by focusing on their physical properties and the dynamic interactions of devices and habits that lie beneath and within a given text. In the last decades a growing body of research studies has directed attention to the multiple uses and ways people encounter written texts and how they make them alive, even as social actors, in different times and cultures. Considering religious people seem t...
Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine
The Hindu pantheon is rich in images of the divine feminine—deities representing a wide range of symbolic, social, and meditative meanings. David Kinsley's new book documents a highly unusual group of ten Hindu tantric goddesses, the Mahavidyas, many of whom are strongly associated with sexuality and violence. What is one to make of a goddess who cuts her own head off, or one who prefers sex with a corpse? The Mahavidyas embody habits, attributes, or identities usually considered repulsive or socially subversive and can be viewed as "antimodels" for women. Yet it is within the context of tantric worship that devotees seek to identify themselves with these forbidding goddesses. The Mahavidy...
Encountering Kali
Encountering Kali explores one of the most ramarkable divinities the world has seen. The Hindu goddess Kali is simultaneously understood as a blood thirsty warrior a deity of ritual possession a tantric sexual partner and an all loving compassionate mothe. Popular and scholarly interest in her has been on the rise in the west in recent years. Responding to this phenomenon McDermott and Kripal`s volume focuses on the complexities involved in interpreting Kali in both her indigenous south Asian settings and her more recent Western incarnation. Through the shifting lenses of scriptural history temple architecture political reflection and the goddess`s recent guises on the Internet the contributors pose questions that illuminate our understanding of Kali while addressing the problems and promises inherent in every act of cross cultural interpretation.
At Play with Krishna
Every year thousands of pilgrims travel to Brindavan, the village where Krishna is said to have lived as a child. There, they witness a series of religious dramas called ras lilas, whose central roles are performed by children. By translating four plays that collectively span this cycle, John Hawley provides a lively perspective on the mythology of Krishna as Hindus experience it today. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The Gitagovinda of Jayadeva
Jayadeva's dramatic lyrical poem Gitagovinda is a unique work in Indian literature and a source of inspiration in both medieval and contemporary Vaisnavism. It concentrates on Krsna's love with the Cowherdess Radha. Intense earthly passion is the example Jayadeva uses to express the complexities of divine and human love. It describes the loves of Krsna and Radha in twelve cantos containing twenty-four songs. The songs are sung by Krsna or Radha or Radha's maid and are connected by a brief narrative of descriptive passages. The appropriate musical mode and rhythm for each song are noted in the text. This poem is really a kind of drama, of the ragakavya type, since it is usually acted. Critical acclaim of the poem has been high, but its frank eroticism has led many Indian commentators to interpret the love between Radha and Krsna as an allegory of the human soul's love for God. Learned and popular audiences in India and elsewhere have continued to appreciate the emotional lyricism the poem expresses in its variations on the theme of separated lover's passion.
Encountering the Goddess
Coburn provides a fresh and careful translation from the Sanskrit of this fifteen-hundred-year-old text. Drawing on field work and literary evidence, he illuminates the process by which the Devī-Māhātmya has attracted a vast number of commentaries and has become the best known Goddess-text in modern India, deeply embedded in the ritual of Goddess worship (especially in Tantra). Coburn answers the following questions among others: Is this document "scripture?" How is it that this text mediates the presence of the Goddess? What can we make of contemporary emphasis on oral recitation of the text rather than study of its written form? One comes away from Coburn's work with a sense of the hist...
The Song of the Goddess
The Devi Gita, literally the "Song of the Goddess," is an Eastern spiritual classic that appeared around the fifteenth century C.E. C. Mackenzie Brown provides a reader-friendly English translation of this sacred text taken from his well-regarded previous book The Devi Gita: The Song of the Goddess, A Translation, Annotation, and Commentary. Here the translation is presented uninterrupted, without the scholarly annotations of the original version, and in its entirety for the pleasure of all readers who wish to encounter this treasure from the world's sacred literature. Often neglected, the Devi Gita deserves to be better known for its presentations of one of the great Hindu visions of the divine conceived in feminine terms. The work depicts the universe as created, pervaded, and protected by a supremely powerful, all-knowing, and wholly compassionate divine female. It also describes the various spiritual paths leading to realization of unity with the Goddess. The author of the Devi Gita intended for the work to supplant the famous teachings of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita (the "Song of the Lord") from a goddess-inspired perspective.
Hindu Goddesses
Hindu Goddesses is a valuable sourcebook and reference work for students and scholars of Hindu goddesses and of Hinduism in general. Each goddess is dealt with as an independent deity with a coherent mythology, theology and, in some cases, cult of her own. Within the complex, diverse, and rich goddess traditions of Hinduism, one can find suggestions of nearly every important theme in the Hindu religion. In many ways, this book is as much a study of the Hindu tradition itself as it is a study of one aspect of that tradition. No other living religious tradition has displayed such an ancient, continuous, and diverse history of goddess worship.
