Study on a class of Hindu demigods.

In Courtesans and Tantric Consorts, Serinity Young takes the reader on a journey through more than 2000 years of Buddhist history, revealing the colourful mosaic of beliefs that inform Buddhist views about gender and sexuality.

Among the most ancient deities of South Asia, the yaksha straddle the boundaries between popular and textual traditions in both Hinduism and Buddhism and both benevolent and malevolent facets. As a figure of material plenty, the yaksis epitomized as Kubera, god of wealth and king of the yaks In demonic guise, the yaksis related to a large family of demonic and quasi-demonic beings, such as nagas, gandharvas, raks, and the man-eating pisaacas. Translating and interpreting texts and passages from the Vedic literature, the Hindu epics, the Puranas, Kālidāsa's Meghadūta, and the Buddhist Jātaka Tales, Sutherland traces the development and transformation of the elusive yaksfrom an early identification with the impersonal absolute itself to a progressively more demonic and diminished terrestrial characterization. Her investigation is set within the framework of a larger inquiry into the nature of evil, misfortune, and causation in Indian myth and religion.

Robert DeCaroli seeks to place the formation of Buddhism in its appropriate social & political contexts, by analysis of the early monks & nuns, what beliefs they brought with them from their upbringing & how the new faith offered them revolutionary new mechanisms with which to engage minor deities & spirits.

The Present Work Attempts To Study The Development Of Brahmanical Cults And Associated Iconography (C. 400 B.C. To A.D. 600). In This Connection And In Depth Study Of The Sources Both Literary As Well As Archaeological Have Been Made. The Development Of The Brahmanical Cults Have Been Traced In Chrnological Order For The First Time Which Goes To Show How The Cults Reached From Their Formative Stages To The Climax In 600 A.D. It Also Discuss The Iconographic Treatise Written For Making The Perfect Images Of Cult Deities. It Discusses Vaisnava, Saiva, Mother Goddess And Others Include Yaksas, Nagas, Kinnaras, Gandharvas In Detailed Form, Besides Throws Light On The Concept Of Rituals, Puja And Temples. Contents Chapter 1: Introduction, Chapter 2: Sources, Chapter 3: Development Of The Brahmanical Cults; (I) C. 4Th Century And 2Nd Century B.C., (Ii) C. 2Nd Century To The Begining Of Christian Eara, (Iii) C. 1St Century To 3Rd Century A.D., (Iv) C. 3Rd Century To 6Th Century A.D., Chapter 4: Iconographic Froms In Acient Texts, Chapter 5: Iconography Of The Brahmanical Deities; (I) Vaisnava Images, (Ii) Saiva Images, (Iii) Mother Goddesses, (Iv) Other Deities Yaksas, Naga, Gandharvas And Kinnaras, Chapter 6: Conclusion.

Among the most ancient deities of South Asia, the yakshas straddle the boundaries between popular and textual traditions in both Hinduism and Buddhism and both benevolent and malevolent facets. As a figure of material plenty, the yaksis epitomized as Kubera, god of wealth and king of the yaks In demonic guise, the yaksis related to a large family of demonic and quasi-demonic beings, such as nagas, gandharvas, raks, and the man-eating pisaacas. Translating and interpreting texts and passages from the Vedic literature, the Hindu epics, the Puranas, Kālidāsa's Meghadūta, and the Buddhist Jātaka Tales, Sutherland traces the development and transformation of the elusive yaks from an early identification with the impersonal absolute itself to a progressively more demonic and diminished terrestrial characterization. Her investigation is set within the framework of a larger inquiry into the nature of evil, misfortune, and causation in Indian myth and religion.

Post-Enlightenment notions of culture, which have been naturalized in the West for centuries, require that art be autonomously beautiful, universal, and devoid of any practical purpose. The authors of this multidisciplinary volume seek to complicate this understanding of art by examining art objects from across Asia with attention to their functional, ritual, and everyday contexts. From tea bowls used in the Japanese tea ceremony to television broadcasts of Javanese puppet theater; from Indian wedding chamber paintings to art looted by the British army from the Chinese emperor’s palace; from the adventures of a Balinese magical dagger to the political functions of classical Khmer images—the authors challenge prevailing notions of artistic value by introducing new ways of thinking about culture. The chapters consider art objects as they are involved in the world: how they operate and are experienced in specific sites, collections, rituals, performances, political and religious events and imagination, and in individual peoples’ lives; how they move from one context to another and change meaning and value in the process (for example, when they are collected, traded, and looted or when their images appear in art history textbooks); how their memories and pasts are or are not part of their meaning and experience. Rather than lead to a single universalizing definition of art, the essays offer multiple, divergent, and case-specific answers to the question "What is the use of art?" and argue for the need to study art as it is used and experienced. Contributors: Cynthea J. Bogel, Louise Cort, Richard H. Davis, Robert DeCaroli, James L. Hevia, Janet Hoskins, Kaja McGowan, Jan Mrázek, Lene Pedersen, Morgan Pitelka, Ashley Thompson.

This book analyses our conventional ways of looking at Buddhism in general and Buddhist tantra in particular. It investigates how the frameworks and structures that were developed for European and Biblical studies have been deployed to interpret various facets of Buddhism. Many such models that still dominate the historical imagination of Buddhist studies have been examined in this book. This book also proposes an alternative approach towards the Buddhist studies and advocates incorporating the critical study of tantra texts from the perspective of traditional accounts.

Tantric Revisionings presents stimulating new perspectives on Hindu and Buddhist religion, particularly their Tantric versions, in India, Tibet or in modern Western societies. Geoffrey Samuel adopts an historically and textually informed anthropological approach, seeking to locate and understand religion in its social and cultural context. The question of the relation between 'popular' (folk, domestic, village, 'shamanic') religion and elite (literary, textual, monastic) religion forms a recurring theme through these studies. Six chapters have not been previously published; the previously published studies included are in publications which are difficult to locate outside major specialist libraries.

Scholars of popular Hindu religion in India have always been fascinated by oral texts and rituals, but surprisingly only few attempts have as yet been made to analyse the relationship between rituals and texts systematically. This book contributes to the filling of this gap. Focusing on the dynamics of a local (non-Brahmanical) ritual, its modular organisation and inner logic, the interaction between narrative text and ritual, and the significance of the local versus translocal nature of the text in the ritual context, the study provides a broad range of issues for comparison. It demonstrates that examining texts in their context helps to understand better the complexity of religious traditions and the way in which ritual and text are programmatically employed. The author offers a vivid description of a hitherto unnoticed ritual system, along with the first translation of a text called the Icakkiyamman-Katai (IK). Composed in the Tamil language, the IK represents a substantially longer and embellished form of a core versio which probably goes as far back as the seventh century C.E. Unlike the classical source, this text has been incorporated into a living tradition, and is being constantly refashioned. A range of text versions have been encapsulated in the form of a conspectus, which will shed light on the text's variability or fixity and will add to our knowledge of bardic creativity. Includes a film by the author on DVD.