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Original and compelling tales of Jain wisdom This fine selection of stories revolves around the concept of renunciation, the essence of Jainism. True and complete knowledge, omniscience and liberation from the endless cycles of transmigratory births can be achieved by lay men and women as well as by monks and nuns. Themes central to Jainism are explored here. Among these are renunciation of the world by young men; the effects of such renunciation upon families, wives and children; the persistence of emotional bonds beyond a single birth; the paradox of friendship and social ties, at once tenacious and transient; the strength of the fidelity and piety of women and the power of love and excessive emotion to delude and entrap. The translations, drawn from texts dating between the seventh and fifteenth centuries B.C., represent a variety of genres: didactic tales, the epics, spiritual autobiographies, pilgrimage texts and folktales. Phyllis Granoff's authentic, modern and reader-friendly rendering from the Sanskrit and Prakrit makes this a rich and remarkable narrative of living Jainism and its literary traditions.
This collection offers a challenge to any simple understanding of the role of images by looking at aspects of the reception of image worship that have only begun to be studied, including the many hesitations that Asian religious traditions expressed about image worship. Written by eminent scholars of anthropology, art history, and religion with interests in different regions (India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia), this volume takes a fresh look at the many ways in which images were defined and received in Asian religions. Buddha Dharma Kyokai Foundation Book on Buddhism and Comparative Religion
This book brings together essays by anthropologists, scholars of religion, and art historians to explore some of the most fundamental challenges that religious groups face as they expand from their homeland or confront the demands of modernity. The chapters span a broad geographical area that includes India, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, and China, and address issues from the classical and medieval period to the present. They show how sacred places have a plurality of meanings for all religious communities and how in their construction, secular politics, private religious experience, and sectarian rivalry can all intersect. A Buddha Dharma Kyokai Foundation Book on Buddhism and Comparative Literature.
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The role of representation in religion is complex. While often perceived as essential, it is also associated in many traditions with the liability of idolatry and provokes iconoclasm. The essays in this volume examine the nuances of representation in religion and the debate concerning its place across a variety of traditions from the three Abrahamic faiths, to those of antiquity and the East. This volume consists of presentations made at an international conference held in honor of Moshe Barasch, art historian and cultural critic, who has done much to elucidate the light which representation and religion shed on each other. It pays tribute to Barasch by expanding the base of understanding and insight he has erected. It should be of interest to students of religion and of art history.
The two essays in this volume explore how monks in medieval India and China wrote about themselves with their fellow monks. The author translates and discusses biographies and autobiographies of two Jain monks, who lives in the 11th and 14th century CE. The book tells us how a community of Chinese Buddhists viewed the life of the founder of their group, and how his biography reflected the changes that the community underwent. The essays are the result of a joint research project on religious biographies in Asia, carried out with assistance from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
The present collection of Essays in Jain Philosophy and Religion contains contributions of world-acclaimed scholars in jain studies. As a through and critical research work in the field of Jaina exploration of the history and background of the exchange of ideas between the Jainas and other systems of thought in India, the book will prove to be a rare document. Each of the four main sections of the present volume pertains to an important aspect within Jaina studies.
Asian religious traditions have always been deeply concerned with "sins" and what to do about them. As the essays in this volume illustrate, what Buddhists in Tibet, India, China or Japan, what Jains, Daoists, Hindus or Sikhs considered to be a "sin" was neither one thing, nor exactly what the Abrahamic traditions meant by the term. "Sins"could be both undesireable behavior and unacceptable thoughts. In different contexts, at different times and places, a sin might be a ritual infraction or a violation of a rule of law; it could be a moral failing or a wrong belief. However defined, sins were considered so grave a hindrance to spiritual perfection, so profound a threat to the social order, that the search for their remedies through rituals of expiation, pilgrimage, confession, recitation of spells, or philosophical reflection, was one of the central quests of the religions studied here.
In Parables in Changing Contexts, new venues in the comparative study of parables are addressed by scholars of Judaism, New Testament, Buddhism and Islam. Essays cover parables in the synoptic Gospels, Rabbinic midrash, and parabolic tales and fables in the Babylonian Talmud. Three essays address parables in Islam and Buddhism. The volume shows how parables are suitably adapted in terms of form and rhetoric to enhance religious identity formation. Parables serve as media, as sensational forms making the sacred present, albeit encoded or riddled, in all cases invoking the listener’s active interpretative participation and cultural imagination. Adapting a multidisciplinary approach to these gems of storytelling, parables in a particular way provide new insights in the cultures that produced them.