Religions & Philosophies

Buddhist-Inflected Sovereignties across the Indian Ocean draws attention to the varied, historically contingent, and sometimes competing, arguments for and about sovereignty that operated in the Pali arena during the first half of the second millennium AD.

This volume explores the dissemination of the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya tradition in Tang China (618-907) in the context of the dispersal of the state bureaucracy throughout the empire and the changing centre-periphery dynamics.The tradition's development in China during the Tang Dynasty has traditionally been associated with northern China, particularly the capital city of Chang'an, where Daoxuan (596-667), the de facto founder of the "vinaya school" in China, resided.

Yoga has offered the Indian state unprecedented opportunities for global, media-savvy political performance. It has promoted yoga tourism; staged mass yoga practices and Indian officials have proposed yoga as a national solution to a range of social problems, from reducing rape to curing cancer. But, as yoga has gone global, the cultural meanings of yoga have spiraled far and wide.

This book will be of great interest to researchers of conspiracy theories, esotericism, extremism, and religion

The Hatata Inquiries are essential to understanding the global history of philosophy, being among the early works of rational philosophy. The book includes a translation by Ralph Lee with Mehari Worku and Wendy Laura Belcher of the Hatata Zara Yaqob and the Hatata Walda Heywat.

From Socratic logos and Chinese xin to reason in 18th-century Germany and equity in Islamic thought, an international team of experts cover a diverse set of ideas and theories originating from thinkers such as Kant, Confucius, Buddha, Dogen, Nietzsche, Zhuangzi, Hegel and Husserl. Divided into three sections organised around the major themes of knowledge, metaphysics, and aesthetics, each short chapter provides an introductory overview with contextual background, supported by discussion questions and further reading suggestions.

This book explores the cross- and trans-cultural dialectic between Tantra and intersecting 'magical' and 'shamanic' practices associated with vernacular religions across Monsoon Asia. With a chronological frame going from the mediaeval Indic period up to the present, a wide geographical framework, and through the dialogue between various disciplines, ...

Albert Welter tells the story of Hangzhou Buddhism through the conceptions, erections, and resurrections of Yongming Stupa, dedicated to the memory of one of Hangzhou's leading Buddhist figures, and Leifeng Pagoda, built to house stupa relics of the historical Buddha.

Religious pluralism, as encountered in multi-faith settings such as Nigeria's biggest city Lagos, challenges much of what we have long taken for granted about religion, including the ready-made binaries of Christianity versus Islam, religion versus secularism, religious monism versus polytheism, and tradition versus modernity. ...

Coining the term ‘Conscious Theatre Practice’, Prendergast presents the scripts of three publicly presented theatrical performances, examined under the ‘three C’s’ research model: Conscious Craft (writing, directing, performance; Conscious Casting; Conscious Collaborations.

An interdisciplinary deep dive into Buddhist jhāna meditation and how it can transform our understanding of self and consciousness States of profound meditative concentration, the jhānas are central to the earliest Buddhist teachings. For centuries in Southeast Asia, oral yogāvacara (yoga practitioner) lineages kept traditional jhāna practices alive, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reforms in Theravāda Buddhism downplayed the importance of jhāna in favor of vipassanā (insight) meditation.

The essays in this book focus on ancient Indian texts within a variety of genres. They identify certain key terms--such as janapada, desa, varṇa, dharma, bhāva--in their empirical contexts to suggest that neither the ideas embedded in these terms nor the idea of Bharatavarsha as a whole are "given entities," but that they evolved historically.

Debate on freedom of religion as a human right takes place not only in the Western world but also in Muslim communities throughout the world. For Muslims concerned for this freedom, one of the major difficulties is the 'punishment for apostasy' - death for those who desert Islam.

Focusing on one of the oldest and most important Tantric traditions, based in Assam, northeast India, Hugh B Urban shows that Tantra is less about optimal sexual pleasure than about harnessing the divine power of the goddess that flows alike through the cosmos, the human body and political society. In a fresh and vital contribution to the field, the author suggests that the 'real' meaning of Tantra lies in helping us rethink not just the history of Indian religions, but also our own modern obsessions with power, sex and the invidious legacies of cultural imperialism.

Belonging is often overlooked in its relationship to society and social change, and yet it forms the bedrock of how we relate to the world around us. Through the work of Marx, Giddens and Goffman, this book covers the familiar terrain of identity theory, while going beyond it to other sites of identification and social change.