A Metaphorical Study of Saundarananda

A Metaphorical Study of Saundarananda
Author: Linda Covill
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publishe
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN: 9788120833678

Study on Saundarānanda of Aśvaghoṣa, narrative poem on the teachings of Gautama Buddha to his disciple Ananda.

A Yogācāra Buddhist Theory of Metaphor

A Yogācāra Buddhist Theory of Metaphor
Author: Roy Tzohar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2018-04-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 019066441X

Buddhist philosophy is fundamentally ambivalent toward language. Language is paradoxically seen as both obstructive and necessary for liberation. In this book, Roy Tzohar delves into the ingenious response to this tension from the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism: that all language-use is metaphorical. Exploring the profound implications of this claim, Tzohar makes the case for viewing the Yogacara account as a full-fledged theory of meaning, one that is not merely linguistic, but also applicable both in the world as well as in texts. Despite the overwhelming visibility of figurative language in Buddhist philosophical texts, this is the first sustained and systematic attempt to present an indigenous Buddhist theory of metaphor. By grounding the Yogacara pan-metaphorical claim in a broader intellectual context, of both Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools, the book uncovers an intense philosophical conversation about metaphor and language that reaches across sectarian lines. Tzohar's analysis radically reframes the Yogacara controversy with the Madhyamaka school of philosophy, sheds light on the Yogacara application of particular metaphors, and explicates the school's unique understanding of experience.

A Yog=ac=ara Buddhist Theory of Metaphor

A Yog=ac=ara Buddhist Theory of Metaphor
Author: Roy Tzohar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2018-04-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190664401

Buddhist philosophy is fundamentally ambivalent toward language. Language is paradoxically seen as both obstructive and necessary for liberation. In this book, Roy Tzohar delves into the ingenious response to this tension from the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism: that all language-use is metaphorical. Exploring the profound implications of this claim, Tzohar makes the case for viewing the Yogacara account as a full-fledged theory of meaning, one that is not merely linguistic, but also applicable both in the world as well as in texts. Despite the overwhelming visibility of figurative language in Buddhist philosophical texts, this is the first sustained and systematic attempt to present an indigenous Buddhist theory of metaphor. By grounding the Yogacara pan-metaphorical claim in a broader intellectual context, of both Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools, the book uncovers an intense philosophical conversation about metaphor and language that reaches across sectarian lines. Tzohar's analysis radically reframes the Yogacara controversy with the Madhyamaka school of philosophy, sheds light on the Yogacara application of particular metaphors, and explicates the school's unique understanding of experience.

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics
Author: Keith Lloyd
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 602
Release: 2020-06-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000066274

The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics offers a broad and comprehensive understanding of comparative or world rhetoric, from ancient times to the modern day. Bringing together an international team of established and emergent scholars, this Handbook looks beyond Greco-Roman traditions in the study of rhetoric to provide an international, cross-cultural study of communication practices around the globe. With dedicated sections covering theory and practice, history, pedagogy, hybrids and the modern context, this extensive collection will provide the reader with a solid understanding of: how comparative rhetoric evolved how it re-defines and expands the field of rhetorical studies what it contributes to our understanding of human communication its implications for the advancement of related fields, such as composition, technology, language studies, and literacy. In a world where understanding how people communicate, argue, and persuade is as important as understanding their languages, The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics is an essential resource for scholars and students of communication, composition, rhetoric, cultural studies, cultural rhetoric, cross-cultural studies, transnational studies, translingual studies, and languages.

Navigating Deep River

Navigating Deep River
Author: Mark W. Dennis
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1438477988

In Navigating Deep River, Mark W. Dennis and Darren J. N. Middleton have curated a wide-ranging discussion of Shūsaku Endō's final novel, Deep River, in which four careworn Japanese tourists journey to India's holy Ganges in search of spiritual as well as existential renewal. Navigating Deep River evaluates and probes Endō's decades-long search to find the words to explain Transcendent Mystery, the difficult tension between faith and doubt, the purpose of spiritual journeys, and the challenges posed by the reality of religious pluralism in an increasingly diverse world. The contributors, including Van C. Gessel who translated Deep River into English in 1994, offer an engaged and patient exploration of this major text in world fiction, and this anthology promises to deepen academic appreciation for Endō, within and beyond the West.

Rethinking 'Classical Yoga' and Buddhism

Rethinking 'Classical Yoga' and Buddhism
Author: Karen O'Brien-Kop
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2021-09-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1350230014

This book revisits the early systemic formation of meditation practices called 'yoga' in South Asia by employing metaphor theory. Karen O'Brien-Kop also develops an alternative way of analysing the reception history of yoga that aims to decentre the Eurocentric and imperialist enterprises of the nineteenth-century to reframe the cultural period of the 1st – 5th centuries CE using categorical markers from South Asian intellectual history. Buddhist traditions were just as concerned as Hindu traditions with meditative disciplines of yoga. By exploring the intertextuality of the Patanjalayogasastra with texts such as Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosabhasya and Asanga's Yogacarabhumisastra, this book highlights and clarifies many ideologically Buddhist concepts and practices in Patanjala yoga. Karen O'Brien-Kop demonstrates that 'classical yoga' was co-constructed systemically by both Hindu and Buddhist thinkers who were drawing on the same conceptual metaphors of the period. This analysis demystifies early yoga-meditation as a timeless 'classical' practice and locates it in a specific material context of agrarian and urban economies.

Entering the Way of the Great Vehicle

Entering the Way of the Great Vehicle
Author: Rongzom Chokyi Zangpo
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1611809614

The first English translation of a classic treatise on how the Tibetan practice of Dzogchen, or Great Perfection, is in fact the culmination of the path of Mahayana Buddhism. Rongzom Chökyi Zangpo wrote this treatise in the eleventh century during the renaissance of Buddhism in Tibet that was spurred by the influx of new translations of Indian Buddhist texts, tantras, and esoteric transmissions from India. For political and religious reasons, adherents of the “new schools” of Tibetan Buddhism fostered by these new translations cast the older tradition of lineages and transmissions as impure and decadent. Rongzompa composed the work translated here in order to clearly and definitively articulate how Dzogchen was very much in line with the wide variety of sutric and tantric teachings espoused by all the Tibetan schools. Using the kinds of philosophic and linguistic analyses favored by the new schools, he demonstrates that the Great Perfection is indeed the culmination and maturation of the Mahāyāna, the Great Vehicle. The central topic of the work is the notion of illusory appearance, for when one realizes deeply that all appearances are illusory, one realizes also that all appearances are in that respect equal. The realization of the equality of all phenomena is said to be the Great Perfection approach to the path, which frees one from both grasping at, and rejecting, appearances. However, for those unable to remain effortlessly within the natural state, in the final chapter Rongzompa also describes how paths with effort are included in the Great Perfection approach.

Birth in Buddhism

Birth in Buddhism
Author: Amy Paris Langenberg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2017-06-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1315512521

Recent decades have seen a groundswell in the Buddhist world, a transnational agitation for better opportunities for Buddhist women. Many of the main players in the transnational nuns movement self-identify as feminists but other participants in this movement may not know or use the language of feminism. In fact, many ordained Buddhist women say they seek higher ordination so that they might be better Buddhist practitioners, not for the sake of gender equality. Eschewing the backward projection of secular liberal feminist categories, this book describes the basic features of the Buddhist discourse of the female body, held more or less in common across sectarian lines, and still pertinent to ordained Buddhist women today. The textual focus of the study is an early-first-millennium Sanskrit Buddhist work, "Descent into the Womb scripture" or Garbhāvakrānti-sūtra. Drawing out the implications of this text, the author offers innovative arguments about the significance of childbirth and fertility in Buddhism, namely that birth is a master metaphor in Indian Buddhism; that Buddhist gender constructions are centrally shaped by Buddhist birth discourse; and that, by undermining the religious importance of female fertility, the Buddhist construction of an inauspicious, chronically impure, and disgusting femininity constituted a portal to a new, liberated, feminine life for Buddhist monastic women. Thus, this study of the Buddhist discourse of birth is also a genealogy of gender in middle period Indian Buddhism. Offering a new critical perspective on the issues of gender, bodies and suffering, this book will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience, including researchers in the field of Buddhism, South Asian history and religion, gender and religion, theory and method in the study of religion, and Buddhist medicine.

Amaravati

Amaravati
Author: Jas Elsner
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 718
Release: 2024-07-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1789149088

A visual exploration of the Buddhist stupa or reliquary mounds at one of ancient India’s most remarkable monuments at Amarāvatī. In this book, Jaś Elsner presents a fresh perspective on the rich visual culture of ancient South Asia, connecting the stupa’s artistic innovations with advancements in Buddhist philosophy and practice. He offers new insights into early Buddhist art in South India, as well as a new understanding of the relationship between early Buddhism and its material culture. The photographs collected here, particularly those featuring objects from the British Museum in London, reveal in detail how the stupa communicated Buddhist teachings and practices to its followers, making this book an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.