Maternal Affection for a Divine Son: A Spirituality of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa

AbstractLove for God as an actual concrete activity of a human being is sometimes obscured in contemporary American Christian culture. This essay studies the role of maternal affection for the divine child Kṛṣṇa, humanly embodied as a male child, in order to serve as a cross-cultural catalyst for the traditions of Christian love for Christ. The focus is the tenth-century Hindu Vaiṣṇava text, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Vaiṣṇavas promote the experience of loving God through imaginative participation in narratives of Kṛṣṇa's loves and by identification with human women who loved him, particularly his mothers. They are the exemplars of a maternal love for a divine child. This imaginative participation and identification is open to both men and women. This study illustrates the roles of gender, narrative, and imagination in the experience of loving God with one's whole heart, soul, and might.

Download Full-text

A Sentimental Journey: Mapping the Interior Frontier of Japanese Settlers in Colonial Korea

The Journal of Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021911811000878 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 70 (3) ◽

pp. 706-729 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Jun Uchida

Keyword(s):

Cross Cultural ◽

Colonial Rule ◽

School Life ◽

Colonial Korea ◽

Japanese Men ◽

Cultural Encounters ◽

Men And Women ◽

The World ◽

Young Offspring

This article explores the role of affect and sentiment in shaping cross-cultural encounters in late colonial Korea, as seen and experienced through the eyes of Japanese men and women who grew up in Seoul. By interweaving the oral and written testimonies of former settlers who came of age on the peninsula between the late 1920s and the end of colonial rule in 1945, the paper attempts to reconstruct their emotional journey into adulthood as young offspring of empire: specifically, how they apprehended colonialism, what they felt when encountering different segments of the Korean population, and in what ways their understanding of the world and themselves changed as a result of these interactions. Focusing on the intimate and everyday zones of contact in family and school life, this study more broadly offers a way to understand colonialism without reducing complex local interactions to abstract mechanisms of capital and bureaucratic rule.

Download Full-text

Devotion in the Bhāgavata Purāna and Christian Love: Bhakti, Agape, Eros

Horizons ◽

10.1017/s0360966900018892 ◽

1981 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 260-278 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Daniel P. Sheridan

Keyword(s):

Ninth Century ◽

The Other ◽

Bhāgavata Purāṇa ◽

Christian Love ◽

Love Of God ◽

Bhagavata Purana ◽

Spiritual Union ◽

The Universe

AbstractThe Bhāgavata Purāna, a ninth century encyclopedic Hindu text, combines Vedantic non-dualism and Vaiṣṇava devotionalism or love of God. Its non-dualism accommodates the reality of the universe with its individual selves in the all-encompassing reality of God. The BhP has two forms of devotion: one is a meditation which absorbs the devotee within the unity of God's reality; the other is an ecstasy which glories in separation from God in order to love God more. The Eros-Agape motif is used to compare this tradition of the love of God with those of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Like them, the BhP stresses the personhood of God; unlike them, it stresses an ontological, not a mystical or spiritual, union of Deity and devotee.

Download Full-text

Pradyumna-Kāmadeva in the Major Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas

Pradyumna ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190054113.003.0005 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 83-110

Author(s):

Christopher R. Austin

Keyword(s):

Key Factors ◽

Bhāgavata Purāṇa ◽

Bhagavata Purana

Chapter 4 documents Pradyumna’s changing identity and significance in the context of the evolving Vaiṣṇava tradition, chiefly through an analysis of the abduction narrative as it is retold in the Viṣṇu, Bhāgavata, and Brahmavaivarta Purāṇas. Without radically changing the original Harivaṃśa scene, the sources reveal that three characteristics of Pradyumna have begun to emerge through a process of mutual fertilization: he is Kāmadeva, the handsome God of Love incarnate; he is a master of māyā or illusion; and he is a double of his father Kṛṣṇa. Important shifts in the meaning and role of bhakti (devotion) in Kṛṣṇa worship between the fifth and tenth centuries CE are identified as key factors underlying these developments. Particularly, Pradyumna’s identity as both the God of Love reborn and the double of Kṛṣṇa becomes hugely significant for the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, which is deeply invested in a theology of Kṛṣṇa as a magnetic object of desire.

Download Full-text

Advanced astronomy in Bhagavata Purana: the role of the Sun and a tale from 108

Applied Mathematical Sciences ◽

10.12988/ams.2018.8115 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 12 (5) ◽

pp. 229-254

Author(s):

R. Caimmi

Keyword(s):

The Sun ◽

Bhāgavata Purāṇa ◽

Bhagavata Purana

Download Full-text

Enough Already: Universities Do Not Need More Christianity

After Cloven Tongues of Fire ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691158426.003.0009 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

David A. Hollinger

Keyword(s):

Higher Education ◽

Critical Distance ◽

Scientific Thought ◽

Men And Women ◽

American Higher Education ◽

Private Realm ◽

Christian Culture ◽

Christian Commitment ◽

Role Of Religion

This chapter tries to bring clarity to the often frustrating debates over the role of religion in higher education, and defends a balance between critical distance and empathic appreciation. Persons worried about the decline of Christianity's role in American higher education are often reluctant to confront the honorable reasons men and women have had over the course of the last two centuries for rejecting Christian commitment, or drifting away from it, or restricting it to a private realm. It argues that the affirmation of Christian values by faculties and administrators in our society has been historically bound up with discrimination against Jews. It also considers the effort to conceal a campaign to reestablish Christian culture hegemony under the guise of a “pluralism,” which reduces the entirety of modern scientific thought to simply one of a number of “paradigms.”

Download Full-text

Bhāgavata Purāna and the Kārikās of Gaudapāda

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies ◽

10.1017/s0041977x00081118 ◽

1935 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

pp. 107-111

Author(s):

Amarnath Ray

Keyword(s):

Tenth Century ◽

Fifth Century ◽

The Other ◽

Present Writer ◽

Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute ◽

Bhāgavata Purāṇa ◽

Bhagavata Purana ◽

Research Institute

A Bout three years ago, I sent a paper on “The Date of the Bhāga-vata Purāṇa” to the I.H.Q. The publication of the paper was delayed, and it was forestalled by B. N. Krishnamurti Sarma's paper on the same subject, which appeared in the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, vol. xiv, pts. iii-iv. The object of both the papers was the same, viz. to controvert the views of Vaidya and Winternitz who proposed the tenth century A.D. as the date of the Bh.P. Sarma suggests that this Purana was composed in the fifth century, if not earlier. My own view is that the work came into being some time between A.D. 550 and 650. The mention therein of the Huns (ii, 7, 26) and of the Tamil Saints (xi, 5, 38–40) would go against Sarma's hypothesis. Sarma and the present writer adopted somewhat different lines of attack upon the position taken up by Vaidya and Winternitz. It is unnecessary, however, to state the additional matter my paper contained, or to publish it. This will be done if the other view finds a defender who has to be refuted.

Download Full-text