Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 287-298
Author(s):  
Hamsa Stainton
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Religious Practice

This concluding chapter returns to the recurring themes introduced in Chapter 1—Kashmir, poetry, poetics, stotra, bhakti, and prayer—in light of the arguments developed throughout this book. It explores how stotras are about relationships and connections, and it argues that these Sanskrit hymns are critical sources for studying the history and historiography of bhakti traditions in South Asia. It summarizes the appeal of the stotra form as a genre for religious practice and reflection, and it revisits what this study of Sanskrit hymns contributes to the study of prayer more broadly. As a whole, this chapter serves as a commentary on the title of the book, unpacking what it means to study poetry as prayer in the stotras of Kashmir.

scholarly journals Dyeing the Springtime: The Art and Poetry of Fleeting Textile Colors in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 627
Author(s):  
Sylvia Houghteling
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Devotional Poetry ◽  
Literary Arts ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
South Asian Art ◽  
Regional Histories ◽  
Early Modern South Asia

This paper explores the metaphorical and material significance of short-lived fabric dyes in medieval and early modern South Asian art, literature, and religious practice. It explores dyers’ manuals, paintings, textiles, and popular and devotional poetry to demonstrate how the existence of ephemeral dyes opened up possibilities for mutability that cannot be found within more stable, mineral pigments, set down on paper in painting. While the relationship between the image and the word in South Asian art is most often mutually enhancing, the relationship between words and color, and particularly between poetry and dye color, operates on a much more slippery basis. In the visual and literary arts of South Asia, dye colors offered textile artists and poets alike a palette of vibrant hues and a way to capture shifts in emotions and modes of devotion that retained a sense of impermanence. More broadly, these fragile, fleeting dye materials reaffirm the importance of tracing the local and regional histories even of objects, like textiles, that circulated globally.

The Body of the Buddha

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Powers
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Cultivation ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Buddha

Buddhist discussions of the body, particularly in South Asia, encode a number of ambiguities and conceptual tensions. A pervasive trope in this literature characterizes bodies as foul, oozing fluids, prone to offensive smells, decaying and causing pain, and as containing a range of disgusting substances within a bag of skin, including urine, feces, mucus, and bile. People are warned of the dangers of emotional investment in their bodies because this leads to inevitable suffering and loss. On the other hand, beautiful bodies are proof of past or present moral cultivation and of success in religious practice. The most exalted bodies—surpassing those of all other beings, even gods—are those of buddhas, and their perfect physiques proclaim their supreme attainments.

Analyzing Secularization and Religiosity in Asia

2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEVEN R. REED
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Identification ◽  
Spiritual World ◽  
Significant Relationships ◽  
Religious Services

Using the 2005 and 2006 AsiaBarometer surveys I analyze religiosity and secularization in Asia. I find that, in South Asia, identification with a particular religion is the norm and most people pray every day but, in East Asia, religious identification and religious practice are both much less common. Even in secular East Asia, however, the demand for religious services is high and belief in a spiritual world is common. I conclude that secularization does not necessarily produce uniformly secular societies. Turning to the causes and consequences of religiosity, I find surprisingly few significant relationships, results that echo similar analyses in Western Europe. I then discuss the implications of these non-findings.

Dirty, Sacred Rivers

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Colopy
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Soft Drink ◽  
Industrial Effluents ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
The West ◽  
Spiritual Meaning ◽  
Barren Ground ◽  
Gangotri Glacier ◽  
The Ganges

I wanted to see the source of what we in the West call the Ganges. Here in South Asia people call it Mother Ganga, Gangaji, the Great Ganga. At the edge of the icy river that flows from the Gangotri glacier I scooped Gangajal—Ganges water—into plastic soft drink bottles. I planned to take some of this water to friends in Kathmandu, practicing Hindus for whom the drops of glacial melt would have spiritual meaning. Along with its tremendous religious and ritual value, the water of the Ganga has been shown to be both antimicrobial and richer in oxygen than that of other rivers. Revered beyond all others, this river is now abused in equal measure: harnessed for hydropower near its holy mountain source, polluted with every imaginable waste as it runs its course for more than 1,500 miles across the widest part of the Indian subcontinent. One of the Ganga’s main and equally sacred tributaries, the Yamuna, flows through Delhi. Delhi, a city of more than fifteen million, owes its existence to this river, which is now dead at its doorstep. Industrial effluents pour in upriver, then Delhi adds its sewage. During my first trip to Delhi in January 2007, I went down to the edge of the Yamuna. I wanted to see just how bad the river’s reputed pollution might be. First I saw the barren ground along the riverside, strewn with rubble from the construction of a nearby bridge. There was little to tell me that this area was also the site of regular religious practice where people come to do puja, take a little of the water to splash on their heads, throw some flowers into the river. Bunching up in the eddies under the bridge pylons were stray bits of colored plastic and plastic shopping bags bloated with garbage, floating like sagging baloons half filled with air. They mingled with broken yellow marigolds scattered in the water and bright red flowers set afloat in little cups by those who had come to worship by the river.

U.S. Ideological Linkages with Indians and Pakistanis, 1950s–Mid-1960s

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-84
Author(s):  
Uzma Quraishi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Policy Initiatives ◽  
Migration Networks ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 1 is an examination of the major public diplomacy programs of the USIA and foreign policy initiatives of the State Department in the 1950s and 1960s. In the early years of the Cold War, the United States implemented a wide range of programs in India and Pakistan, as well as other Third World countries. It inadvertently laid the foundation for migration networks between South Asia and the United States.

Behind the Veil of the Old

2021 ◽  
pp. 144-170
Author(s):  
Yigal Bronner
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
The Will ◽  
Comparative Case Studies ◽  
The Veil

This chapter begins by surveying the petering out of the debate over sequence in interpretation in seventeenth-century India and speculating about the reasons for its decline. At this point, the chapter returns to the broad question of innovation with which this book began, and places the story in the context of the “New Intellectuals” in South Asia and that of a few comparative case studies in order to present a broader survey of modes of novelty in scholastic traditions. The rhetorical stance of traditionalism that masks substantive innovation in the book's main case study has significant parallels in other intellectual traditions, suggesting a larger pattern that may merit further investigation. The “oldness of the will” discussed in chapter 1 may be only a pretense, after all, and a new one at that.

Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Walters
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Ritual Practice ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Remote Region ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Social Environmental ◽  
Alternative Community ◽  
Buddhist Ritual

For roughly two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called Shaligrams, has been an important part of Hindu and Buddhist ritual practice throughout South Asia and among the global Diaspora. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal, called Mustang, Shaligrams are all at once fossils, divine beings, and intimate kin with families and worshippers. Through their lives, movements, and materiality, Shaligrams then reveal fascinating new dimensions of religious practice, pilgrimage, and politics. But as social, environmental, and national conflicts in the politically-contentious region of Mustang continue to escalate, the geologic, mythic, and religious movements of Shaligrams have come to act as parallels to the mobility of people through both space and time. Shaligram mobility therefore traverses through multiple social worlds, multiple religions, and multiple nations revealing Shaligram practitioners as a distinct, alternative, community struggling for a place in a world on the edge.

Quick Reference: Chapter 1: The Musculoskeletal System: The Hand and Upper Extremity

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 4-5
Keyword(s):  
Dorsal Column ◽  
Persistent Pain ◽  
Illness Behavior ◽  
Abnormal Illness Behavior ◽  
Organ Systems ◽  
Spinal Cord Dorsal ◽  
Objective Basis ◽  
Dorsal Column Stimulation ◽  
Underlying Pathology

Abstract Spinal cord (dorsal column) stimulation (SCS) and intraspinal opioids (ISO) are treatments for patients in whom abnormal illness behavior is absent but who have an objective basis for severe, persistent pain that has not been adequately relieved by other interventions. Usually, physicians prescribe these treatments in cancer pain or noncancer-related neuropathic pain settings. A survey of academic centers showed that 87% of responding centers use SCS and 84% use ISO. These treatments are performed frequently in nonacademic settings, so evaluators likely will encounter patients who were treated with SCS and ISO. Does SCS or ISO change the impairment associated with the underlying conditions for which these treatments are performed? Although the AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment (AMA Guides) does not specifically address this question, the answer follows directly from the principles on which the AMA Guides impairment rating methodology is based. Specifically, “the impairment percents shown in the chapters that consider the various organ systems make allowance for the pain that may accompany the impairing condition.” Thus, impairment is neither increased due to persistent pain nor is it decreased in the absence of pain. In summary, in the absence of complications, the evaluator should rate the underlying pathology or injury without making an adjustment in the impairment for SCS or ISO.

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