You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Kalpavrksa was composed in the 17th century by the Kashmirian author Sahib Kaul and is edited here in its original Sanskrit for the first time. During the editing process it became clear that the "text" of the Kalpavrksa is only the basis of an elaborate piece of verbal art, a crossword-like carmen cancellatum, which was originally displayed on a large cloth. Three of these are preserved today. The Kalpavrksa is not only the largest carmen cancellatum known in world literature, with its roughly thirty languages used for its intexts, it is also displays a baffling multilingualism.
The Handbook of Hinduism in Europe portrays and analyses Hindu traditions in every country in Europe. It presents the main Hindu communities, religious groups, forms and teachings present in the continent and shows that Hinduism have become a major religion in Europe.
Retellings of the Buddha's life story have animated and sustained Buddhist thought and practice through some 2,500 years of history. To this day, Buddhist holidays and rituals are pinned to the arc of his biography, celebrating his birth, awakening, teaching, and final nirvana. His story is the model that exemplary Buddhists follow. Often, there is a moment of insight akin to the Buddha's experience with the Four Sights, followed by a great departure from home, and a period of searching that it is hoped will lead to final awakening. The Buddha's story is not just the Buddha's story; it is the story of Buddhism. In this book, twelve leading scholars of South Asian texts and traditions articul...
Beginning with an introduction to the scriptural background of the Śaiva religion, this volume presents a translation accompanied by a re-edition of the Sanskrit text with the help of two manuscripts not consulted before, and a running commentary. A fragment of the Śrīkaṇṭī is transcribed in an appendix.
Dara Shukoh was the heir-apparent to the Mughal throne in 1659, when he was executed by his brother Aurangzeb. Today Dara is lionized in South Asia, while Aurangzeb, who presided over the beginnings of imperial disintegration, is scorned. Supriya Gandhi’s nuanced biography asks whether the story really would have been different with Dara in power.
A wide-ranging analysis of the Mokṣopāya, the Indian literary classic that teaches through storytelling how to enjoy an active, successful, worldly life in a spiritually enlightened way. In the Mokṣopāya (also known as the Yogavāsiṣṭha), an eleventh-century Sanskrit poetic text, the great Vedic philosopher Vāsiṣṭha counsels his young protégé Lord Rāma about the ways of the world through sixty-four stories designed to bring Rāma from ignorance to wisdom. Much beloved, this work reflects the philosophy of Kashmir Śaivism. Precisely because all worldly pursuits are dreamlike and fiction-like, the human soul must first come to an experience of non-dualistic, mind-only metaphysics, and after attaining this wisdom, promote moral activism. Engaged Emancipation is a wide-ranging consideration of this work and the philosophical and spiritual questions it addresses by philosophers, Sanskritists, and scholars of religion, literature, and science. Contributors allow readers to walk with Rāma as his melancholy and angst transform into connectivity, peace, and spiritual equipoise.
"This book investigates the history of a popular genre of Sanskrit devotional poetry in Kashmir: the stotra, or hymn of praise. Focusing on literary hymns from the eighth century to the twentieth, it studies the close link between literary and religious expression in South Asia--the relationship between poetry and prayer"--
The Moksopaya ("way to release") is a work with the extent of 30.000 double verses of a Kashmirian anonym from themiddle of the 10th Century. Established without referring to traditional authority it presents a unique cosmography in the Indian history of ideas. Before the discovery of the Kashmirian version, in which the original hides itself, this philosophical piece of literature was only known in India and Europe in a later version ("Yogavasistha" ) that was tendentiously changed by several insertions. While the work on the complete edition of the oldest version at the University of Halle- Wittenberg is still in progress, this volume includes some of the results from the project: - a detailed description of the narration of the queen Lila- a study on the fundamental philosophical ideas- an analysis of the text history and the versions- studies on the construction and dating- studies on the double nature of the work as poetry (kavya) and philosophical paper (sastra)- on its social and religious context.
The first part of the ‘Versified Commentary on the Mālinītantra’ (Mālinīślokvārttika) by the tenth-century theologian Abhinavagupta, which is translated here for the first time, presents a philosophy of Śaiva revelation, conceived of as a descent of the highest non-dual form of knowledge, through the different levels of speech, into the knowledge embodied in the canon of Tantras or Agamas on which the Śaiva religion is based. The aim of the text is to demonstrate the logic behind the claim of the monistic Tantric schools on which Abhinavagupta bases his philosophy. The present volume deals in its introduction with the scriptural background of the Śaiva religion because that is a prerequisite for understanding many of the arguments in the text. The translation is accompanied by a re-edition of the Sanskrit text with the help of two manuscripts not consulted before, and a running commentary. A fragment of the Śrīkaṇṭī, which is probably the source for some of Abhinavaguptas theories of the Śaiva canon, is transcribed in an appendix.