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Argument and Design: The Unity of the Mahābhārata
Argument and Design features fifteen essays by leading scholars of the Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, discussing the Mahābhārata’s upākhyānas, subtales that branch off from the central storyline and provide vantage points for reflecting on it. Contributors include: Vishwa Adluri, Joydeep Bagchee, Greg Bailey, Adam Bowles, Simon Brodbeck, Nicolas Dejenne, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Robert P. Goldman, Alf Hiltebeitel, Thennilapuram Mahadevan, Adheesh Sathaye, Bruce M. Sullivan, and Fernando Wulff Alonso.
Narrating Karma and Rebirth
This book explores how multi-life stories served to construct, communicate, and challenge ideas about karma and rebirth within early South Asia.
Nyāya Sūtra – on Philosophical Method
Nyāya Sūtra offers a new English translation of the text ascribed to Akṣapāda, an Indian philosopher who lived around the beginning of the Common Era. The translation is accompanied by the original Sanskrit text and an original commentary. The commentary explains every sūtra separately and identifies the sources of the Nyāya Sūtra. It analyses the way older ideas on epistemology, logic, and soteriology were presented as a new coherent system of thought. The book puts forward the main goal of the Nyāya Sūtra: to define what it considered the basic tenets of a soteriology and how the goal of this soteriology could be reached by rationally applying epistemological and logical methods ...
Violence Denied
In the course of millennia of dealing with problems of violence, South Asia has not only elaborated the ideal of total avoidance of violence in a unique manner, it also developed arguments justifying and rationalizing its employment under certain circumstances. Some of these arguments seemingly transform all sorts of ‘violence’ into ‘non-violence’. Historical and cultural aspects of the tensions between violence and its denial and rationalization in South Asia are taken up in the contributions of this volume which deal with topics ranging from the origins of the concept of ahiṃsā, to the iconography and interpretation of a self-beheading goddess, and violent heroines in Ajñeya’s Hindi short stories.
Gandhi's Ascetic Activism
More than six decades after his death, Mohandas Gandhi continues to inspire those who seek political and social liberation through nonviolent means. Uniquely, Gandhi placed celibacy and other renunciatory disciplines at the center of his nonviolent political strategy, conducting original experiments with their possibilities to gain practical, moral, and even miraculous powers for social change. Gandhi's abstinence in marriage, eccentric views on sexuality, and odd ways of including his female associates in his practices continue to cause ambivalence among scholars and students. Through a comprehensive study of Gandhi's own words, select Indian religious texts and myths that he used, and the historical and cultural context of his activism, Veena R. Howard shows how Gandhi's ascetic disciplines helped him mobilize millions. She explores Gandhi's creative use of renunciation in challenging established paradigms of confrontational politics, passive asceticism, and oppressive social customs. Howard's book sheds new light on the creative possibilities Gandhi discovered in combining personal renunciation, sacrifice, ritual, and myth for modern day social action.
How Do Madhyamikas Think?
Intro -- Title -- Contents -- Publisher's Acknowledgment -- Introduction -- Madhyamaka's Promise as Philosophy -- 1. Trying to Be Fair -- 2. How Far Can a Mādhyamika Reform Customary Truth? Dismal Relativism, Fictionalism, Easy-Easy Truth, and the Alternatives -- Logic and Semantics -- 3. How Do Mādhyamikas Think? Notes on Jay Garfield, Graham Priest, and Paraconsistency -- 4. "How Do Mādhyamikas Think?" Revisited -- 5. Prasaṅga and Proof by Contradiction in Bhāviveka, Candrakīrti, and Dharmakīrti -- 6. Apoha Semantics: What Did Bhāviveka Have to Do with It? -- 7. What Happened to the Third and Fourth Lemmas in the Tibetan Madhyamaka? -- Ethics and the Spiritual Path -- 8. Madhyamak...
When the Goddess was a Woman
Explicitly acknowledging its status as a strī-śūdra-veda (a Veda for women and the downtrodden), the Mahābhārata articulates a promise to bring knowledge of right conduct, fundamental ethical, philosophical, and soteriological teachings, and its own grand narrative to all classes of people and all beings. Hiltebeitel shows how the Mahābhārata has more than lived up to this promise at least on the ground in Indian folk traditions. In this three-part volume, he journeys over the overlapping terrains of the south Indian cults of Draupadī (part I) and Kūttāṇṭavar (part II), to explore how the Mahābhārata continues to be such a vital source of meaning, and, in part III, then conne...
The Cambridge Companion to Religion and War
Why is religion intertwined with war and violence? These chapters offer nuanced discussions of the key histories and themes.
Epic Undertakings
Recent years have witnessed continued and growing interest in the massive and fascinating poems we know as the Sanskrit epics. This interest has manifested itself in the continuing translations of texts, a steady stream of publications and numerous scholarly meeting of Sanskrit epic scholars. A number of these scholars assembled in Helsinki to constitute the Epic Section of the 12th World Sanskrit Conference in the summer of 2003. The present volume places before the indological community the sixteen learned papers presented at the conference by the distinguished group of scholars who were in attendance. The topics and methodologies of the authors are as varied and diverse as the contents of the monumental poems themselves but each contribution sheds new light on some aspect of he genetic and /or receptive history of these works, their relationship to each other and to other index texts, or the representation and analysis of specific characters and episodes in the poems
The Rise of Mahāsena
This book studies the early development of Skanda-Kārttikeya’s Hindu cult from its earliest textual and material sources to the end of the Gupta Empire in the north of India. The text argues that Skanda’s early ‘popular’ cult is found in Graha and Mātṛ traditions oriented towards appeasing potentially dangerous spirits. Once propitiated, however, Skanda and his Grahas/ Mātṛs could become fierce protectors of their followers. During the Kuṣāṇa and Gupta empires, this tradition gains the attention of rulers, who transform the deity’s protective cult into one focused on the ruler’s military prowess and right to rule. Once detached from his former popular traditions the deity’s cult begins to falter in the north as it becomes increasingly focused on elite agendas.
