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The present volume contains studies of crucial periods and important areas in the history of the Sanskrit language, from the earliest, Vedic and pre-Vedic periods, through the period of "Greater India," up to the recent history of Sanskrit in India.
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 "ahi?s?," to the iconography and interpretation of a self-beheading goddess, and violent heroines in Ajneya's Hindi short stories.
The present volume is the outcome of a seminar on the Ideology and Status of Sanskrit held in Leiden under the auspices of the International Institute for Asian Studies. The book contains studies of crucial periods and important areas in the history of the Sanskrit language, from the earliest, Vedic and pre-Vedic periods, through the period in which the (restricted) use of Sanskrit spread over practically all of South (including part of Central) and Southeast Asia (sometimes referred to as the period of "Greater India"), up to the recent history of Sanskrit in India. The contributions of this volume are divided into three sections: (1) Origins and Creation of the "Eternal Language"; (2) Transculturation, Vernacularization, Sanskritization; (3) The Sanskrit Tradition: Continuity from the past or Construction from the present?
Teaching Religion and Violence is designed to help instructors to equip students to think critically about religious violence, particularly in the multicultural classroom.
A Communion of Subjects is the first comparative and interdisciplinary study of the conceptualization of animals in world religions. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including Thomas Berry (cultural history), Wendy Doniger (study of myth), Elizabeth Lawrence (veterinary medicine, ritual studies), Marc Bekoff (cognitive ethology), Marc Hauser (behavioral science), Steven Wise (animals and law), Peter Singer (animals and ethics), and Jane Goodall (primatology) consider how major religious traditions have incorporated animals into their belief systems, myths, rituals, and art. Their findings offer profound insights into the relationship between human beings and animals, and a deeper understanding of the social and ecological web in which we all live.
Using religio-philosophical discourses and narratives from epic, puranic, and hagiographical literature, Indian Asceticism focuses on the powers exhibited by ascetics of India from ancient to modern time.
The history of the Vedanta school is well known since the time of sankara but its prehistory before sankara is quite obscure. However there is a period of a thousand years between the compilation of the major Uapanisads ot sankara without loss of the tradition of the upanisads there appeared many philosophers and dogmaticians although their thoughts are not clearly known. In a history of early vedanta Philosophy the author made clear the details of the pre sankara vedanta philosophy utilizing not only sanskrit materials but also Pali prakrit as well as Tibetan and Chinese sources. In this respect this epoch making work was awarded the imparial prize by the Japan Academy.
In this text, 11 leading scholars of Hinduism explore the complex relationship between Hindu women's ritual activities and their lives beyond ritual.
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Language of the Snakes traces the history of the Prakrit language as a literary phenomenon, starting from its cultivation in courts of the Deccan in the first centuries of the common era. Although little studied today, Prakrit was an important vector of the kavya movement and once joined Sanskrit at the apex of classical Indian literary culture. The opposition between Prakrit and Sanskrit was at the center of an enduring “language order” in India, a set of ways of thinking about, naming, classifying, representing, and ultimately using languages. As a language of classical literature that nevertheless retained its associations with more demotic language practices, Prakrit both embodies major cultural tensions—between high and low, transregional and regional, cosmopolitan and vernacular—and provides a unique perspective onto the history of literature and culture in South Asia.
This volume is the outcome of the international seminar on Bhartrhari: Thought, Language and Reality held in New Delhi on 12-14 December 2003 as part of the centenary celebrations of Motilal Banarasidass. In this seminar, scholars from all over the world presented their interpretations of Bhartrhariês philosophy, some of the light of the modern trends in philosophy and linguistics, others in the backdrop of Indian tradition. This volume contains almost all the papers presented at the seminar along with some other papers invited from scholars who could not participate in the seminar to make it comprehensive. The papers discuss the metaphysics of Bhartrhari and his ideas about questions concerned language and reality. Some of the papers compare Bhartrhari with Western Philosophers and linguists like Wittgenstein, Grice, Searle, Humboldt, Chomsky and Goldbert, thus showing his relevance to problems in contemporary philosophy and linguistics. It is clear that after the initial efforts in the fourth to sixth decades of the twentieth century, Bhartrhari studies have now gained a significant momentum.