Self, Sacrifice, and Cosmos: Vedic Thought, Ritual, and Philosphy PDF Download

Author: Lauren M. Bausch
Publisher: Primus Books
ISBN: 9789352903450
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The eleven articles in this volume mark a significant advance in Vedic studies. Contributions range widely across critical topics in early, middle, and late Vedic texts and their commentaries, as well as classical themes in contemporary Sanskrit literature. Essays elucidate the explanations and arguments found in Brāhmana texts, the historical and ecological development of Vedic ritual, concepts and underlying messages in Vedic texts, anachronisms in commentarial exegesis, and literary devices in narrative. From a variety of philological, philosophical, ritual, gender, and literary approaches, these articles shed new light on our understanding of these seminal texts of Indian religion and philosophy. This book is dedicated to the life and work of Professor Ganesh Umakant Thite.

Author: Seaford Richard Seaford
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474411002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
From the sixth century BCE onwards there occurred a revolution in thought, with novel ideas such as such as that understanding the inner self is both vital for human well-being and central to understanding the universe. This intellectual transformation is sometimes called the beginning of philosophy. And it occurred - independently it seems - in both India and Greece, but not in the vast Persian Empire that divided them. How was this possible? This is a puzzle that has never been solved. This volume brings together Hellenists and Indologists representing a variety of perspectives on the similarities and differences between the two cultures, and on how to explain them. It offers a collaborative contribution to the burgeoning interest in the Axial Age and will be of interest to anyone intrigued by the big questions inspired by the ancient world.

Author: Michael J. Puett
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684170419
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Evidence from Shang oracle bones to memorials submitted to Western Han emperors attests to a long-lasting debate in early China over the proper relationship between humans and gods. One pole of the debate saw the human and divine realms as separate and agonistic and encouraged divination to determine the will of the gods and sacrifices to appease and influence them. The opposite pole saw the two realms as related and claimed that humans could achieve divinity and thus control the cosmos. This wide-ranging book reconstructs this debate and places within their contemporary contexts the rival claims concerning the nature of the cosmos and the spirits, the proper demarcation between the human and the divine realms, and the types of power that humans and spirits can exercise. It is often claimed that the worldview of early China was unproblematically monistic and that hence China had avoided the tensions between gods and humans found in the West. By treating the issues of cosmology, sacrifice, and self-divinization in a historical and comparative framework that attends to the contemporary significance of specific arguments, Michael J. Puett shows that the basic cosmological assumptions of ancient China were the subject of far more debate than is generally thought.

Author: Robin A. Parry
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1630876224
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Bible. When we read Scripture we often imagine that the world inhabited by the Bible's characters was much the same as our own. We would be wrong. The biblical world is an ancient world with a flat earth that stands at the center of the cosmos, and with a vast ocean in the sky, chaos dragons, mystical mountains, demonic deserts, an underground zone for the dead, stars that are sentient beings, and, if you travel upwards and through the doors in the solid dome of the sky, God's heaven--the heart of the universe. This book takes readers on a guided tour of the biblical cosmos with the goal of opening up the Bible in its ancient world. It then goes further and seeks to show how this very ancient biblical way of seeing the world is still revelatory and can speak God's word afresh into our own modern worlds.

Author: Anthony E. Mansueto
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761822011
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Religion and Dialectics carries to a new level, the critical dialogue between religious belief, dialectical thinking, and socialist practice, which has given birth, among other things, to the theology of liberation and to a new Marxist sociology of religion. On the one hand, Anthony Mansueto argues that, contrary to the claims of Marx and the dialectical materialist tradition, religion is fundamentally a force for human development and social progress and that atheism, far from being integral to the socialist project, in fact helps to legitimate the market order. On the other hand, Mansueto sharpens considerably the dialectical critique of Christianity, asking just what elements of this tradition are conducive to human development and social progress, and which are not.

Author: P. T. Raju
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438416784
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
"No other work treating Indian philosophy on a comparable scale contains the illuminating comparisons between doctrines of Indian schools and the thought of Western philosophy ranging from Plato to Sartre and Wittgenstein...It will, moreover, contribute to the understanding of Western philosophy by Indian thinkers and vice versa...Raju has an intimate acquaintance with a remarkable range of Western thinkers and this distinguishes his work from most of what has gone before...Raju, moreover, is himself a critical thinker and consequently, although he has written a history, he treats the ideas and doctrines in a philosophical mode and his assessments of positions are often original and illuminating." -- John E. Smith, Clark Professor of Philosophy, Yale University "Purpose: To deal with Indian philosophy in a fashion reflecting the way the best German historians of philosophy deal with Western philosophy...The book is remarkable for its comprehensiveness in combination with extensive critical discussions...Raju's book...is more critical than Radhakrishnan's and more philosophical than Dasgupta's. Radhakrishnan's comments are far less philosophically sophisticated and interesting than Raju's....a monument to a senior Indian philosopher's lifelong study and thoughtful critical consideration of the great classical systems of his tradition." -- Karl H. Potter, Professor of Philosophy, University of Washington "Raju's credentials are impeccable. He is one of the few scholars in the world who could presume to write a major work on Indian thought. Accordingly, his knowledge of the Indian schools is accurate and impressive. To the extent that one of his intentions is to cast those schools in terms which make them more intelligible to western readers, his work measures up very well." -- Harold H. Oliver, Professor of Philosophy, Boston University

Author: William K. Mahony
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791435809
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Provides an accessible introduction to the Vedic religious world by focusing on the role of divine and human imagination in sacred texts.

Author: Diana Lobel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231153147
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Lobel crosses Eastern and Western philosophical and religious traditions to discover a beauty and purpose at the heart of reality that makes life worth living. This title does not treat philosophy as an abstract, theoretical discipline but as living experience.

Author: Robert Powell
Publisher: SteinerBooks
ISBN: 9780880104807
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
The rising interest in goddess spirituality expresses our current need to understand the feminine side of God, the Sophia (or Divine Wisdom), and her relationship to the masculine aspects of God. Offering a new perspective, the author draws on his own research and on the teaching of Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky, according to whom Sophia has a relationship to the masculine Trinity as an independent spiritual being. Robert Powell discusses Sophia as a Trinity-as Mother, Daughter, and Holy Soul- and as the feminine aspect of Divine Godhead. He connects our reawakening to the feminine aspect of God with many of the changes now taking place in the world. Also included is an introduction to the Divine Feminine by Daniel Andreev, author of The Rose of the World.

Author: Linn Marie Tonstad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317383621
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
God and Difference interlaces Christian theology with queer and feminist theory for both critical and constructive ends. Linn Marie Tonstad uses queer theory to show certain failures of Christian thinking about God, gender, and sexuality. She employs queer theory to dissect trinitarian discourse and the resonances found in contemporary Christian thought between sexual difference and difference within the trinity. Tonstad critiques a broad swath of prominent Christian theologians who either use queer theory in their work or affirm the validity of same-sex relationships, arguing that their work inadvertently promotes gendered hierarchy. This volume contributes to central debates in Christianity over divine and human personhood, gendered relationality, and the trinity, and provides original accounts of God, sexual difference, and Christian community that are both theologically rich and thoroughly queer.