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Author: Richard Davis
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 1998-04-02
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"In this edited volume, Richard Davis and his colleagues examine how religious images are understood by practitioners in Asia and what social, cultural, and political aspects are connected to the "mira"
Author: Richard H. Davis
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
Published: 2015-01-01
Total Pages: 331
ISBN-13: 8120816927
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →For many centuries, Hindus have taken it for granted that the religious images they place in temples and home shrines for purposes of worship are alive. Hindu priests bring them to life through a complex ritual ”establishment” that invokes the god or goddess into material support. Priests and devotees then maintain the enlivened image as a divine person through ongoing liturgical activity: they must awaken it in the morning , bathe it, dress it, feed it, entertain it, praise it, and eventually put it to bed at night. In this linked series of case studies of Hindu religious objects, Richard Davis argues that in some sense these believers are correct: through ongoing interactions with humans, religious objects are brought to life. Davis draws largely on reader response literary theory and anthropological approaches to the study of objects in society in order to trace the biographies of Indian religious images over many centuries. He shows that Hindu priests and worshipers are not the only ones to enliven images. Bringing with them differing religious assumptions, political agendas, and economic motivations, others may animate the very same objects as icons of sovereignty, as polytheistic ”idols,” as ”devils,” as potentially lucrative commodities, as objects of sculptural art, or as symbols for a whole range of new meanings never foreseen by the imagesê makers of original worshipers.
Author: Corinne G. Dempsey
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2009-01-07
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780791476345
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Claims of the miraculous are foundational to faith and skepticism, making and breaking religious careers and movements in their wake. Drawing on a variety of South Asian religious traditions-Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity-this book revolves around the theme of conundrum, demonstrating how miracles offer divine proof, tenacious embarrassment, and, in many cases, both. The contributors explore not only how modern miracles are conundrums themselves but also how they make conundrums out of assumed divides between scientific and supernatural realms, modernity and tradition, the West and the rest, and ethnographer and native. Book jacket.
Author: Phyllis Granoff
Publisher: UBC Press
Published: 2010-10-01
Total Pages: 398
ISBN-13: 0774859806
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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
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Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2015-02-24
Total Pages: 338
ISBN-13: 9004289712
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This volume explores the religious transformation of each nation in modern Asia. When the Asian people, who were not only diverse in culture and history, but also active in performing local traditions and religions, experienced a socio-political change under the wave of Western colonialism, the religious climate was also altered from a transnational perspective. Part One explores the nationals of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan, focusing on the manifestations of Japanese religion, Chinese foreign policy, the British educational system in Hong Kong in relation to Tibetan Buddhism, the Korean women of Catholicism, and the Scottish impact in late nineteenth century Korea. Part Two approaches South Asia through the topics of astrology, the works of a Gujarātī saint, and Himalayan Buddhism. The third part is focused on the conflicts between ‘indigenous religions and colonialism,’ ‘Buddhism and Christianity,’ ‘Islam and imperialism,’ and ‘Hinduism and Christianity’ in Southeast Asia.
Author: Anne Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-11-29
Total Pages: 326
ISBN-13: 0199916276
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Anne Murphy offers a groundbreaking exploration of material representations of the Sikh past, showing how objects, as well as historical sites, and texts, have played a vital role in the production of the Sikh community as an evolving historical and social formation from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing together work in religious studies, postcolonial studies, and history, Murphy explores how 'relic' objects such as garments and weaponry have, like sites, played dramatically different roles across political and social contexts-signifiers of authority and even sovereignty in one; collected, revered, and displayed with religious significance in another-and are connected to a broader engagement with the representation of the past that is central to the formation of the Sikh community. By highlighting the connections between relic objects and historical sites, and how the status of sites changed in the colonial period, she also provides crucial insight into the circumstances that brought about the birth of a new territorial imagination of the Sikh past in the early twentieth century, rooted in existing precolonial historical imaginaries centered in place and object. The life of the object today and in the past, she suggests, provides unique insight into the formation of the Sikh community and the crucial role representations play in it.
Author: Jamal J. Elias
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2012-11-15
Total Pages: 395
ISBN-13: 0674070666
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Media coverage of the Danish cartoon crisis and the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan left Westerners with a strong impression that Islam does not countenance depiction of religious imagery. Jamal J. Elias corrects this view by revealing the complexity of Islamic attitudes toward representational religious art. Aisha’s Cushion emphasizes Islam’s perceptual and intellectual modes and in so doing offers the reader both insight into Islamic visual culture and a unique way of seeing the world. Aisha’s Cushion evaluates the controversies surrounding blasphemy and iconoclasm by exploring Islamic societies at the time of Muhammad and the birth of Islam; during early contact between Arab Muslims and Byzantine Christians; in medieval Anatolia and India; and in modern times. Elias’s inquiry then goes further, to situate Islamic religious art in a global context. His comparisons with Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu attitudes toward religious art show them to be as contradictory as those of Islam. Contemporary theories about art’s place in society inform Elias’s investigation of how religious objects have been understood across time and in different cultures. Elias contends that Islamic perspectives on representation and perception should be sought not only in theological writings or aesthetic treatises but in a range of Islamic works in areas as diverse as optics, alchemy, dreaming, calligraphy, literature, vehicle and home decoration, and Sufi metaphysics. Unearthing shades of meaning in Islamic thought throughout history, Elias offers fresh insight into the relations among religion, art, and perception across a broad range of cultures.
Author: Anna Korte
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2018-11-13
Total Pages: 365
ISBN-13: 9047402871
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book contains a multidisciplinary collection of studies on women in miracle stories found in texts ranging from religious classics to contemporary literary fiction. Miracle stories are a genre of great importance for the study of women's religious inheritance and for the historical and cultural understanding of women as 'makers of faith'. Miracle stories are very generally speaking more open to popular religion and culture than, for instance, doctrinal and official ecclesiastical texts, and as such, they can be of special interest to the study of women's lives and religious aspirations. Remarkably, up till now this genre has not been looked at from this point of view. This book aims to open this field for further research by presenting case studies from diverse angles and disciplines. Some of the questions this book tries to answer are: What do miracle stories specifically tell us about women? Are there some (types of) miracles that are in particular related to (certain groups of) women? What do these stories tell us about women as performers and/or subjects of miracles? What can be said about the social function and religious meaning of miracles by specifically looking at the way certain groups of women are practising and experiencing miracles? By including research on miracle stories in contemporary fiction written by women this book also wants to acknowledge and research the disputed status of 'miracles' as well of 'women' in our present society which is moving from modernity to post-modernity. Please note that Women and Miracle Stories is previously published by Brill in hardback (ISBN 90 04 16681 8, still available).
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2022-07-11
Total Pages: 586
ISBN-13: 9004508449
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The ERC-funded research project BuddhistRoad aims to create a new framework to enable understanding of the complexities in the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia. Buddhism was one major factor in this exchange: for the first time the multi-layered relationships between the trans-regional Buddhist traditions (Chinese, Indian, Tibetan) and those based on local Buddhist cultures (Khotanese, Uyghur, Tangut) will be explored in a systematic way. The second volume Buddhism in Central Asia II—Practice and Rituals, Visual and Materials Transfer based on the mid-project conference held on September 16th–18th, 2019, at CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) focuses on two of the six thematic topics addressed by the project, namely on "practices and rituals", exploring material culture in religious context such as mandalas and talismans, as well as “visual and material transfer”, including shared iconographies and the spread of ‘Khotanese’ themes.
Author: John Cort
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-01-21
Total Pages: 416
ISBN-13: 9780199739578
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →John Cort explores the narratives by which the Jains have explained the presence of icons of Jinas (their enlightened and liberated teachers) that are worshiped and venerated in the hundreds of thousands of Jain temples throughout India. Most of these narratives portray icons favorably, and so justify their existence; but there are also narratives originating among iconoclastic Jain communities that see the existence of temple icons as a sign of decay and corruption. The veneration of Jina icons is one of the most widespread of all Jain ritual practices. Nearly every Jain community in India has one or more elaborate temples, and as the Jains become a global community there are now dozens of temples in North America, Europe, Africa, and East Asia. The cult of temples and icons goes back at least two thousand years, and indeed the largest of the four main subdivisions of the Jains are called Murtipujakas, or "Icon Worshipers." A careful reading of narratives ranging over the past 15 centuries, says Cort, reveals a level of anxiety and defensiveness concerning icons, although overt criticism of the icons only became explicit in the last 500 years. He provides detailed studies of the most important pro- and anti-icon narratives. Some are in the form of histories of the origins and spread of icons. Others take the form of cosmological descriptions, depicting a vast universe filled with eternal Jain icons. Finally, Cort looks at more psychological explanations of the presence of icons, in which icons are defended as necessary spiritual corollaries to the very fact of human embodiedness.
