Tara in Vajrayana Buddhism: A Critical Content Analysis

Tara is both a Buddhist and Hindu deity. She is widely worshipped in the esoteric branch of Buddhism: Vajrayana. Even in the exile, Tibetan refugees follow the practice and rituals associated with Tara. Lamentably, she has been given an auxiliary and secondary role in comparison to male deities. Various feminist scholars have begun to look at aspects of society through the lens of gender. They have been at the forefront of studying gender roles and its psychological consequences for those who try to abide by them. In religious studies, especially in Asian context, many of these discourses are difficult to perceive because they were unconsciously appropriated as truth by the people of the society in which they circulated as an inviolable aspect of the worlds or as nature. This study is an attempt to examine the representation of Goddess in various ancient texts as essential to the study of the divine feminine. This hybrid study merges traditional Indology with feminist studies, and is intended for specialists in the field, for readers with interest in Buddhist, and for scholars of Gender studies, cultural historians, and sociologists.

The Breathing Body, Whistling Flute, and Sonic Divine: Oneness and Distinction in Bengal Vaishnavism’s Devotional Aesthetics

This paper studies complex narratives connecting the Hindu deity Krishna, his melodious flute, and the porous, sonic human body in the popular devotional sect, Bengal Vaishnavism. From the devotee–lover responding to Krishna’s flute call outside, envying the flute’s privileged position on Krishna’s lips, to becoming the deity’s flute through yogic breath–sound fusions—texts abound with nuanced relations of equivalence and differentiation among the devotee–flute–god. Based primarily on readings of Hindu religious texts, and fieldwork in Bengal among makers/players of the bamboo flute, the paper analyses theological constructions correlating body–flute–divinity. Lying at the confluence of yogic, tantric, and devotional thought, the striking conceptual problem about the flute in Bengal Vaishnavism is: are the body, flute and divinity distinct or the same? I argue that the flute’s descriptions in both classical Sanskrit texts and popular oral lore and performances draw together ostensibly opposed religious paradigms of Yoga (oneness with divinity) and passionate devotion/bhakti (difference): its fine, airy feeling fusing with the body’s inner breathing self, and sweet melody producing a subservient temperament towards the lover–god outside. Flute sounds embody the peculiar dialectic of difference-and-identity among devotee–flute–god, much like the flute–lip-lock itself, bringing to affective life the Bengal Vaishnava philosophical foundation of achintya-bhed-abhed (inconceivability between principles of separation and indistinction).

Spiral Notebooks

Shaligrams are both fossils and living deities, born of the sacred landscape of Mustang. For pilgrims, Mustang is home to multiple sacred sites belonging to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Bon. The land is also conceptualized as a body, wherein the Kali Gandaki River Valley is simultaneously the location where the Hindu deity Vishnu manifests himself as a sacred stone as well as the place where the corpse of a great Buddhist/Bon demoness (sinmo) is continuously subdued through ritual and sacred architecture. Any ethnography of Shaligrams must therefore account for intersections of mobility, time, place, and access. This is because the consolidation of movement and ritual is what enlivens Shaligrams and begins the process wherein they become living members of a community.

Introduction

The Introduction provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the conceptions and worship of Mount Govardhan and its many stones. Mount Govardhan is a well-known sacred hill located in northern India and one of the most prominent features of Braj, a cultural region associated with the popular and playful Hindu deity Krishna. While describing and examining some of the principal characteristics of the worship of Mount Govardhan, this book aims to reflect on the gap that exists between the sense of reality one experiences every day while living near the sacred hill and the dominant reality experienced in everyday life in the United States, which fosters a portrayal of such worship as absurd, or even worse. The radical difference that exists between these two views creates a fruitful space for thinking about larger, more general issues encountered in the academic study of religion.

Where Is Hanuman?

The chapter presents the interpretative strategies used by designers of an immersive environment on Hindu mythology and Hampi, an archaeological site in India, and their own knowledge of Hindu deities and their attributes. The process of animating an Indian Hindu deity for a potentially international audience means not only mastering 3D computer graphics and producing high-quality panorama of the sacred and historical place, but also working carefully on the interpretation and representation. The chapter uses concepts and theories from different disciplines (iconology, hermeutics, design research, museums studies, etc.) with the aim to describe, deconstruct, and understand the design choices. The study uses as main method the grounded theory: data are interviews and observations and the patterns emerging from qualitative data are compared with previous theories, during the process of theoretical comparison.

Symbols of Political Participation: Jayalalitha’s Fan Imagery in Tamil Nadu

Contributing to the growing literature on fandom, this study investigates the political fan imagery in Tamil Nadu of the past AIADMK chief-minister J. Jayalalitha (1948–2016) that arouse popular devotion in her followers as if she was a Hindu deity (Hills 2002; Porter 2009; Duffett 2013). During Jayalalitha’s reign, her AIADMK followers, often called bhaktas, pursued her favour by making divine-like icons of her as well as by performing extreme physical acts for her attention that may be reproduced as visual narratives in the local press. The Tamil karate star Shihan Hussaini crucified himself on a cross wearing a t-shirt with Jayalalitha’s political nickname on it, the MLA representative M.V. Karuppaiah floated in a swimming pool holding an AIADMK flag in his mouth for forty-eight hours, and minister Sellur Raju organized huge ritual processions derived from local traditions, repurposed for Jayalalitha’s praise. These bhakti images involve a transactional visuality between iconic depictions of Jayalalitha and supportive narratives featuring her devotees’ unusual actions that serve as defining symbols of their political participation.

Kṣētrayya: The making of a Telugu poet

Kṣētrayya is the attributed author of Telugu padams (short lyrical poems) dedicated to Muvva Gōpāla, a form of the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa. Kṣētrayya is commonly described as a peripatetic poet from the village of Muvva in Telugu-speaking South India who wandered south to the Nāyaka courts of Tanjavur in the seventeenth century. Contrary to popular and scholarly assumptions about this poet, this article argues that Kṣētrayya was not a historical figure, but rather, a literary persona constructed into a Telugu bhakti poet-saint through the course of three centuries of literary reform. A close reading of selected padams attributed to Kṣētrayya reveals the uniquely tangible world of female sexuality painted by the speakers of these poems. However, these padams became sanitized through the course of colonial and post-colonial anti-nautch and Telugu literary reform. In line with this transformation, the hagiography of the poet Kṣētrayya was carefully molded to fit a prefabricated typology of a Telugu bhakti poet-saint. Countering the longstanding narrative of solo male authorship, the article raises the possibility that these padams were composed by multiple authors, including vēśyas (courtesans).

The Body–Mind Challenge: Theology and phenomenology in Bengal-Vaishnavisms

Recent studies of Asian religious traditions have critiqued Western philosophical understandings of mind–body dualism and furthered the productive notion of mind–body continuum. Based on intensive fieldwork among two kinds of devotional groups of Bengal—claimants to an orthodox Vaishnavism, who focus on participating in the erotic sports of the Hindu deity-consort Radha-Krishna in imagination and a quasi-tantric group, which claims to physically apprehend Radha-Krishna's erotic pleasures through direct sexual experience—I demonstrate that, although these devotional groups stress on combating theologies, with emphases respectively on the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’, in their narrations of religious experiences, however, both groups allude to rarefied phenomenological states of cognition and embodiment. So, while influenced by ideas of (mental) ‘purity’ and (bodily) ‘actuality’, respectively, practices of both groups rely on similar states of mind–body continuum. So I argue that the mind–body complex has intensely nuanced articulations in the discursive and experiential domains of these non-Western religious contexts. Through my analyses of the texts and embodiments of these opposed devotional groups, I show that theology gets both organically entangled with as well as challenged by phenomenological experiences. I further argue that explorations in the tenor of religious studies sharply enrich the anthropology of religiosities. Also, such engagements between theology and anthropology have been relatively lacking and need more emphasis in studies of contemporary South Asian religions.

Introduction

This chapter begins with the caste conflicts leading up to the possession and healing of a Dalit woman in rural Sivagangai District. It offers a general background for readers on the various forms of non-Brahmanical Hindu deity and spirit possession practices prevalent in Tamil Nadu, a brief history of Christianity in India; and the evolution of Mary through history and doctrine. It presents the problematic categories of “universal” versus “local” religious practices. It argues that Marian possession both challenges and colludes with three sorts of hegemony: Brahmanical Hinduism, orthodox Roman Catholicism, and patriarchy. However, such practices allow women to cultivate a form of agency that helps them not only to survive economic, caste, and gender oppression but also to lead themselves and others out of suffering and toward embodied wholeness—“this-worldly redemption.”

Relations between Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Devotional Practices and Implicit and Explicit Anthropomorphic Reasoning about Kṛṣṇa

Employing a narrative comprehension task procedure, this study tests the hypothesis that engagement in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava religious practices, which are aimed at cultivating a personal relationship with the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa, predict increased implicit attribution of anthropomorphic properties to him. Contrary to our hypothesis, multiple regression analyses of data from 184 native Krishna devotees in West Bengal, India, indicated that increased engagement in these practices loaded as a tertiary predictor after education and age, such that increased practice predicted a decrease in implicit anthropomorphic reasoning about Kṛṣṇa (ß = 0.16, p < 0.03). Based on these and additional analyses of the data, we theorize that these results may be due to the tradition’s emphasis on presenting Kṛṣṇa’s non-anthropomorphic dimensions to neophyte practitioners and the non-Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava public. One implication of these results is that religious cultures and engagement in religious practices have the potential to significantly affect a human cognitive tendency to implicitly attribute anthropomorphic properties to divine beings. This may result from developing alternative knowledge from which to reason about a deity by engaging in religious practices and beliefs shaped by particular theological, historical, and cultural factors.