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Breaking Barriers is a collection of invited contributions by distinguished philosophers, scientists, and religious thinkers of East and West in honor of Professor Ramakrishna Puligandla. The twenty-three essays in this volume may be divided into four groups: (1) Philosophy of Advaita, (2) Buddhism, (3) Indian Philosophy and Physics, and (4) Asian and Comparative Thought. Contributors have written on topics such as the phenomenology of consciousness, science and religion, and comparative philosophy and religion. The volume is designed to stimulate the interest of students, professors, and all those who wish to explore new knowledge. In this volume, the creative thought of leading thinkers from principal universities in India and elsewhere transcends words without insight, barren arguments, and all limiting paradigms. Breaking Barriers thus represents a multi-disciplinary approach informed by cross-cultural philosophical vision. Modern physics and classical Indian philosophy exist here in unity.
Saptavidha-anupapatti represents a live-debate in the traditions of Vedanta initiated by Ramanujacarya. The central issue of this debate is to examine whether maya-avidya, postulated by Advaita-vedant, is philosophically sustainable, logically viable, and experientially reliable. While Sankara builds up the superstructure of Advaita on the basis of this concept, Ramanuja vociferously reacts to its philosophical ingenuity. This dispute between the Advaita and Visistadvaita schools with seven objections, which forms the manor theme of this book, has been going on for more than a millennium and is alive even today among Vedanta scholars. The volume contains, besides historical as well as philosophical explorations of the concept of maya-avidya, the arguments and counter arguments, formulation and counter-formulation to accommodate and reject the corresponding philosophical predilections of both the above schools by some of the preeminent philosophical minds of Indian philosophy of our times.
A study of ‘AbhijñānaŚākuntalam’ has to situate the contexts in ancient through medieval Indian literature and scholarship before it comes to the colonial and the contemporary. In epistemological privileging, this text has become either a Hindoo play in the colonial, Hindu drama in the Hindutva and a love story in the Western theoretical paradigms of scholarship. The essays in ‘Memory, Metaphor and Mysticism in Kalidasa’s ‘AbhijñānaŚākuntalam’ attempt to restore contexts, especially philosophical contexts, for reading this play.
Contemporary dilemmas, whether in business or politics, bear an uncanny resemblance to the predicaments witnessed in the ever-timely epic, the Mahabharata. Who else but Bhishma Pitamah then to the rescue of the modern-day manager, politician or bureaucrat! In the epic, Bhishma is the upholder of truth and dharma, his life shaped by the difficult choices he makes. He isn’t always infallible, but even where his decisions are questionable, he serves as a role model. Prof. N. Balasubramanian uses this powerful figure and his selfless values as a guide to make the right choices in The Bhishma Way. He discusses the importance of values, dharma, truth, justice and governance in businesses and governments. Analyses of real-life cases—among them, Union Carbide and the Bhopal gas tragedy, James Hardie and asbestos in Australia, and Ok Tedi in Papua New Guinea—complement the mythological stories and insightful anecdotes in this illuminating and thought-provoking book. This serves as an instructive read for anyone striving for a higher moral code in day-to-day decision-making and leadership.
This book brings together different intercultural philosophical points of view discussing the philosophical impact of what we call the ‘appropriated’ religions of Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is home to most of the world religions. Buddhism is predominantly practiced in Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Singapore, Laos, and Cambodia; Islam in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei; and Christianity in the Philippines and Timor-Leste. Historical data show, however, that these world religions are imported cultural products, and have been reimagined, assimilated, and appropriated by the culture that embraced them. In this collection, we see that these ‘appropriated’ religions imply a culturally nu...
Is there a language of transcendence which does not fall under the well-worn categories of monism, theism, pantheism, biblical or pagan monotheism, personal or tripersonal God, or an impersonal absolute, conceived as immanent and/or transcendent? The present set of studies from different fields of research centers on the question whether it is possible to speak at all of transcendence or a divinity, and if it is, under what limitations does such speech proceed. In current discussion in theology and in philosophy of religion, there is a pervasive awareness that the inherited terms and alternatives, developed in the western tradition, no longer facilitate an adequate understanding of the divin...
This collection of original essays provides fascinating insights into yoga as a historical and pluralistic phenomenon flourishing in a variety of religious and philosophical contexts. They cover a wide variety of traditions and topics related to Yoga: Classical Yoga, Sāṃkhya, Tantric Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, the Guru, Indic Islamic traditions of Yoga, Yoga and asceticism in contemporary India, and the reception of Yoga in the West. The essays are written by eighteen professors in the field of the history of religions, most of them former graduate students of Gerald James Larson, Larson is Rabindranath Tagore Professor Emeritus, Indiana University, Bloomington, Professor Emeritus, Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, an internationally acclaimed scholar on the history of religions and philosophies of India, and one of the world's foremost authorities on the Samkhya and Yoga traditions. The publication is in honour of him.
About the Book: The canvas of India’s history, literature, science, and culture spans not just centuries, but several millennia. This book provides a bird’s eye view of everything Indian or simply the proverbial ‘omnibus capsule’. For modern readers who have little time to read eclectic sources, the ‘omnibus capsule‘ hopes to provide a comprehensive compendium about India. Part I narrates the fascinating history of Board Games and Martial Arts in India. Race Games like Pachisi, Moksha Patam, and Ashtapada became channels for many popular games like Ludo, Snake & Ladders, and Backgammon. Pachisi was however appropriated by Alfred Collier, who took the game to England and called it...
The Variegated Plumage Encounters with Indian Philosophy a commemorative volume dedicated to the memory of Pandit Jankinath Kaul Kamal` is a collection of diverse scholarly articles and research papers contributed by the veterans who are specialists in their respective fields. The present volume adequately covers different aspects of Indian Philosophy and culture. The extensive section will provide impetus to further research in the subject. The second section is a collection of papers dealing with a wide range of issues in Indian Philosophy and culture.
Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th Indian Conference on Logic and Its Applications, ICLA 2011, held in Delhi, India, in January 2011. The 14 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. The papers present current research in all aspects of formal logic ranging from pure and applied logic to history of logic.