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An extensive, illustrated bibliography for the Hindu god Śiva in the arts of South and Southeast Asia, offering detailed indices and easy access to resource repositories.
When I was seven years old, I was invested with the sacred thread and renamed as Venkatanatha after Vedantha Desika. I have been an avid reader and chanter of his devotional verses ever since. More recently, I have had the good fortune of reading some of his other works in some depth. I was astonished by the range and extent of his literary and philosophical compositions. In due course, the writing instinct in me impelled me to undertake this arduous task of critically analysing his contributions and their relevance to the present day.
In Hinduism, as in all of the great religious traditions from around the globe, the repeating or singing of a sacred name is an integral part of prayer and daily life. With chapters that explore the contribution of Mahatma Gandhi and Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, this edited collection of the writing of renowned Indian scholar, V. Raghavan, examines the lives and contributions of the main exponents of the tradition in India.
Theistic Vedānta originated with Rāmānuja (1077-1157), who was one of the foremost theologians of Viśistādvaita Vedānta and also an initiate of the Śrīvaisnava sectarian tradition in South India. As devotees of the God Visnu and his consort Śrī, the Śrīvaisnavas established themselves through various processes of legitimation as a powerful sectarian tradition. One of the processes by which the authority of the Śrīvaisnavas was consolidated was Rāmānuja’s synthesis of popular Hindu devotionalism with the philosophy of Vedānta. This book demonstrates that by incorporating a text often thought to be of secondary importance - the Visnu Purāna (1st-4th CE) - into his reading o...
'Singing the Body of God' is a study of the devotional poetry of the 14th-century poet-philosopher Vedāntadeśika, one of the most influential figures in the Hindu tradition of Sri-Vaishnavism.
In this companion volume to Singing the Body of God (Oxford 2002), Steven P. Hopkins has translated into contemporary American English verse poems written by the South Indian Srivaisnava philosopher and saint-poet Venkatesa (c. 1268-1369). These poems, in three different languages - Sanskrit, Tamil, and Maharastri Prakrit -- composed for one particular Hindu god, Vishnu Devanayaka, the "Lord of Gods" at Tiruvahindrapuram, form a microcosm of the saint-poet's work. They encompass major themes of Venkatesa's devotional poetics, from the play of divine absence and presence in the world of religious emotions; the "telescoping" of time past and future in the eternal "present" of the poem; love, h...
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.
Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship, author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavata Purana, spanning the precolonial period of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries in India. He shows that Brahmin intellectuals writing in Sanskrit were neither impervious to the quotidian religious practices of bhakti, nor uninterested in its politics of language and caste. They supported, contested, and repurposed the social commentary of bhakti even in highly technical wo...
On the life and works of Rāmānuja, 1017-1137, Vaishnavite leader and propagator of the Viśishtādvaita school in Hindu philosophy.