Kalikapurana

Kalikapurana
Author: Biswanarayan Shastri
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1994
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9788120811249

Kalikapurane Murtivinirdesah, ninth in the series of the Kalamulasastra programme is a compilation of about 550 verses from the Kalika Purana which give physical description of a number of gods, goddesses, and demi-gods etc. While some of them are simply conceptual, others are represented in stone and metallic sculptures.

In Praise of the Goddess

In Praise of the Goddess
Author:
Publisher: Nicolas-Hays, Inc.
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2003-12-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0892546166

About 16 centuries ago, an unknown Indian author or authors gathered together the diverse threads of already ancient traditions and wove them into a verbal tapestry that today is still the central text for worshippers of the Hindu Devi, the Divine Mother. This spiritual classic, the Devimahatmya, addresses the perennial questions of the nature of the universe, humankind, and divinity. How are they related, how do we live in a world torn between good and evil, and how do we find lasting satisfaction and inner peace? These questions and their answers form the substance of the Devimahatmya. Its narrative of a dispossessed king, a merchant betrayed by the family he loves, and a seer whose teaching leads beyond existential suffering sets the stage for a trilogy of myths concerning the all-powerful Divine Mother, Durga, and the fierce battles she wages against throngs of demonic foes. In these allegories, her adversaries represent our all-too-human impulses toward power, possessions, and pleasure. The battlefields symbolize the field of human consciousness on which our lives' dramas play out in joy and sorrow, in wisdom and folly. The Devimahatmya speaks to us across the ages of the experiences and beliefs of our ancient ancestors. We sense their enchantment at nature's bounty and their terror before its destructive fury, their recognition of the good and evil in the human heart, and their understanding that everything in our experience is the expression of a greater reality, personified as the Divine Mother.

The Divine Library

The Divine Library
Author: Rufus C. Camphausen
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Co
Total Pages: 423
Release: 1992-06
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780892813896

Succinctly describes 140 sacred texts, dating from the earliest times to the present, in relation to the cultures that created them.

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian

The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
Author: Nirad C. Chaudhuri
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0520331389

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1951.

Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought

Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought
Author: Dilip M Menon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2023-03-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000859495

This book imagines the ocean as central to understanding the world and its connections in history, literature and the social sciences. Introducing the central conceptual category of ocean as method, it analyzes the histories of movement and traversing across connected spaces of water and land sedimented in literary texts, folklore, local histories, autobiographies, music and performance. It explores the constant flow of people, material and ideologies across the waters and how they make their presence felt in a cosmopolitan thinking of the connections of the world. Going beyond violent histories of slavery and indenture that generate global connections, it tracks the movements of sailors, boatmen, religious teachers, merchants, and adventurers. The essays in this volume summon up this miscegenated history in which land and water are ever linked. A significant rethinking of world history, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially connected history and maritime history, literature, and Global South studies.

Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment

Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment
Author: Aditya Malik
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-05-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199325111

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Central Himalayan region of Kumaon, Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment draws on oral and written narratives, stories, testimonies, and rituals told and performed in relation to the "God of Justice," Goludev, and other regional deities. The book seeks to answer several questions: How is the concept of justice defined in South Asia? Why do devotees seek out Goludev for the resolution of matters of justice instead of using the secular courts? What are the sociological and political consequences of situating divine justice within a secular, democratic, modern context? Moreover, how do human beings locate themselves within the indeterminateness and struggles of their everyday existence? What is the place of language and ritual in creating intimacy and self? How is justice linked to intimacy, truth, and being human? The stories and narratives in this book revolve around Goludev's own story and deeds, as well as hundreds of petitions (manauti) written on paper that devotees hang on his temple walls, and rituals (jagar) that involve spirit possession and the embodiment of the deity through designated mediums. The jagars are powerful, extraordinary experiences, mesmerizing because of their intensity but also because of what they imply in terms of how we conceptualize being human with the seemingly limitless potential to shift, alter, and transform ourselves through language and ritual practice. The petitions, though silent and absent of the singing, drumming, and choreography that accompany jagars, are equally powerful because of their candid and intimate testimony to the aspirations, breakdowns, struggles, and breakthroughs that circumscribe human existence.

Selected Studies on Ritual in the Indian Religions

Selected Studies on Ritual in the Indian Religions
Author: Kloppenborg
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2018-08-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004378642

Preliminary Material /Ria Kloppenborg -- Introduction /Ria Kloppenborg -- The Concluding Bath of the Varunapraghāsa /Jan Gonda -- The Fourth Priest (The Brahmán) in Vedic Ritual /Henk W. Bodewitz -- The Changing Pattern of Pāñcarātra Initiation: A Case Study in the Reinterpretation of Ritual /Sanjukta Gupta -- Some Beliefs and Rituals Concerning Time and Death in the Kubjikāmata /Teun Goudriaan -- Protective Covering (Kavaca) /Karel R. van Kooij -- Interpreting Fire-Walking /Kees W. Bolle -- A Magic Kĕris from Kalimantan /Jan A. Schoterman -- The Earliest Buddhist Ritual of Ordination /Ria Kloppenborg -- Spells on the Life-Wood. An Introduction to the Tibetan Buddhist Ceremony of Consecration /Losang Paldhen Gyalzur and Antony H.N. Verwey -- Index of Ritual Terms /Ria Kloppenborg -- Notes on Authors /Ria Kloppenborg -- Bibliography D.J. Hoens /Ria Kloppenborg.

A System's Evaluation of Global History of Indian Architecture

A System's Evaluation of Global History of Indian Architecture
Author: Joy Sen
Publisher: https://copalpublishing.com
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2016-12-02
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 8192473317

Deep within an inner cave (guhahitam) of our existence remains our potential Divinity. It is the place where our reflected sentient being (the First Bird) is trying to probe into to recover the hidden sun. The allegory is evident in the parable of the Cave once preached by the Upanishads and later by the Greek philosopher Plato. The probe is to push forward the First Bird to surge higher in the resplendent celestial blue under the full radiance of the Solar world, which is the Second, resulting in an explosion of an infinite all-pervading Divinity. Till the union and the rapture is attained, there are the two Birds – one, the psychic being, which is within us and the other one, which is the direct portion of the Divine. The direct portion is constantly trying to guide and work within us, so that evolution goes on and on. In the words of Sri Aurobindo, it is the Çhaitya Purusha, the direct portion of the Divine in the human, which is working incessantly till the rapture is activated. Ancient roots are evident in the ancient Swetaswatara Upanishad hailed by the primordial Sage Kapila and coded originally in a later text called the Bhagabat Purana, The Çhaitya Purusha is also the being that is behind the Chitta, Sri Aurobindo says. Millenniums later, the inspired Architects in the most ancient of all Buddhist ages had carved out the sacred idea in form of rock-cut expressions called the Chaitya hall. As the Mahayana Sutra of the foremost Shurangama at the Crown of the Great Buddha says: …the way of practicing the Samadhi is not singular and its actual method of cultivation depends upon the functioning of mind and mental concomitants (Citta-Chaitya pravritti) of each being and their interconnectedness (Mahat)… It is in the recovery or a re-tracing of the two as a DIVINITY that is originally ONE, an individual's journey called evolution and a collective journey called civilization itself are sustained. It is also from the deeper embedded patterns of this journey the gems of the system's foundation can be quarried.

Deconstructing Derrida

Deconstructing Derrida
Author: M. Peters
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2005-11-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1403980640

Responding to Jacques Derrida's vision for what a 'new' humanities should strive toward, Peter Trifonas and Michael Peters gather together in a single volume original essays by major scholars in the humanities today. Using Derrida's seven programmatic theses as a springboard, the contributors aim to reimagine, as Derrida did, the tasks for the new humanities in such areas as history of literature, history of democracy, history of profession, idea of sovereignty, and history of man. Deconstructing Derrida engages Jacques Derrida's polemic on the future of the humanities to come and expands on the notion of what us proper to the humanities in the current age of globalism and change.