India

Author: Diana L Eck
Publisher: Harmony
ISBN: 0385531915
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Book Description
In India: A Sacred Geography, renowned Harvard scholar Diana Eck offers an extraordinary spiritual journey through the pilgrimage places of the world's most religiously vibrant culture and reveals that it is, in fact, through these sacred pilgrimages that India’s very sense of nation has emerged. No matter where one goes in India, one will find a landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests, and villages are elaborately linked to the stories of the gods and heroes of Indian culture. Every place in this vast landscape has its story, and conversely, every story of Hindu myth and legend has its place. Likewise, these places are inextricably tied to one another—not simply in the past, but in the present—through the local, regional, and transregional practices of pilgrimage. India: A Sacred Geography tells the story of the pilgrim’s India. In these pages, Diana Eck takes the reader on an extraordinary spiritual journey through the living landscape of this fascinating country –its mountains, rivers, and seacoasts, its ancient and powerful temples and shrines. Seeking to fully understand the sacred places of pilgrimage from the ground up, with their stories, connections and layers of meaning, she acutely examines Hindu religious ideas and narratives and shows how they have been deeply inscribed in the land itself. Ultimately, Eck shows us that from these networks of pilgrimage places, India’s very sense of region and nation has emerged. This is the astonishing and fascinating picture of a land linked for centuries not by the power of kings and governments, but by the footsteps of pilgrims. India: A Sacred Geography offers a unique perspective on India, both as a complex religious culture and as a nation. Based on her extensive knowledge and her many decades of wide-ranging travel and research, Eck's piercing insights and a sweeping grasp of history ensure that this work will be in demand for many years to come.

Sacred Geography: Deciphering Hidden Codes in the Landscape

Author: Paul Devereux
Publisher: Gaia
ISBN: 9781856753227
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The land shimmers with sacred power. From prehistoric times on, our ancestors were aware of this. They sought healing, wisdom, and shamanic access to the spirit realm through interaction with the powerful forms of the natural world, and they built their ritual sites in intimate harmony with its contours. In this book, you'll join writer Paul Devereux as he travels the globe-from the Scottish Isles to the mountains of Tibet, from the Australian Outback to the deserts of South America-in a quest to unlock the potent spiritual meaning of hills, caves, and standing stones. Attending closely to the archaeological evidence and making use of the latest research technologies, Devereux shows us how to look at our surroundings through our ancestors' eyes-once again perceiving the sacred geography that is everywhere embedded in the landscape.

Land of Pure Vision

Author: David Zurick
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813145597
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 137

Book Description
Wars have played a momentous role in shaping the course of human history. The ever-present specter of conflict has made it an enduring topic of interest in popular culture, and many movies, from Hollywood blockbusters to independent films, have sought to show the complexities and horrors of war on-screen. In The Philosophy of War Films, David LaRocca compiles a series of essays by prominent scholars that examine the impact of representing war in film and the influence that cinematic images of battle have on human consciousness, belief, and action. The contributors explore a variety of topics, including the aesthetics of war as portrayed on-screen, the effect war has on personal identity, and the ethical problems presented by war. Drawing upon analyses of iconic and critically acclaimed war films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), Rescue Dawn (2006), Restrepo (2010), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), this volume's examination of the genre creates new ways of thinking about the philosophy of war. A fascinating look at the manner in which combat and its aftermath are depicted cinematically, The Philosophy of War Films is a timely and engaging read for any philosopher, filmmaker, reader, or viewer who desires a deeper understanding of war and its representation in popular culture.

Japanese Mandalas

Author: Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824820817
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
The first broad study of Japanese mandalas to appear in a Western language, this volume interprets mandalas as sanctified realms where identification between the human and the sacred occurs. The author investigates eighth- to seventeenth-century paintings from three traditions: Esoteric Buddhism, Pure Land Buddhism, and the kami-worshipping (Shinto) tradition. It is generally recognized that many of these mandalas are connected with texts and images from India and the Himalayas. A pioneering theme of this study is that, in addition to the South Asian connections, certain paradigmatic Japanese mandalas reflect pre-Buddhist Chinese concepts, including geographical concepts. In convincing and lucid prose, ten Grotenhuis chronicles an intermingling of visual, doctrinal, ritual, and literary elements in these mandalas that has come to be seen as characteristic of the Japanese religious tradition as a whole. This beautifully illustrated work begins in the first millennium B.C.E. in China with an introduction to the Book of Documents and ends in present-day Japan at the sacred site of Kumano. Ten Grotenhuis focuses on the Diamond and Womb World mandalas of Esoteric Buddhist tradition, on the Taima mandala and other related mandalas from the Pure Land Buddhist tradition, and on mandalas associated with the kami-worshipping sites of Kasuga and Kumano. She identifies specific sacred places in Japan with sacred places in India and with Buddhist cosmic diagrams. Through these identifications, the realm of the buddhas is identified with the realms of the kami and of human beings, and Japanese geographical areas are identified with Buddhist sacred geography. Explaining why certain fundamental Japanese mandalas look the way they do and how certain visual forms came to embody the sacred, ten Grotenhuis presents works that show a complex mixture of Indian Buddhist elements, pre-Buddhist Chinese elements, Chinese Buddhist elements, and indigenous Japanese elements.

Sacred Ground

Author: Ngawang Zangpo
Publisher: Snow Lion
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
Describes two journeys: a journey outward to specific pilgrimage places in Eastern Tibet and a journey inward, to the sacred world of tantra, accessible through contemplation and meditation.

Maya Sacred Geography and the Creator Deities

Author: Karen Bassie-Sweet
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806185198
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

Book Description
The K’iche’ Maya creation story preserved in the sixteenth-century manuscript Popol Vuh describes the origin of the world and its people in a setting long assumed to be the Guatemalan central highlands. Now a scholar with a deep knowledge of Maya history shows that all of these mythological events occurred at specific locations and that this landscape was the template for the Maya worldview. Examining the primary Maya deities, Karen Bassie-Sweet links geographic features to gods and beliefs. She reconstructs key elements of the Popol Vuh to argue that the three volcanoes around Lake Atitlan were the three thunderbolt gods and that the lake was the center of the world. She also shows that the Maya view of the creation of humans is centered on corn and examines core beliefs about the corn cycle to propose that the creation myth was established much earlier in Maya history than previously supposed. Generously illustrated, Maya Sacred Geography and the Creator Deities is a detailed ethnohistorical analysis of Maya religion, cosmology, and ritual practice that convincingly links mythology to the land. A comprehensive treatment of Maya religion, it provides an essential resource for scholars and will fascinate any reader captivated by these ancient beliefs.

Landscapes of the Sacred

Author: Belden C. Lane
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801868382
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
This substantially expanded edition of Belden C. Lane's Landscapes of the Sacred includes a new introductory chapter that offers three new interpretive models for understanding American sacred space. Lane maintains his approach of interspersing shorter and more personal pieces among full-length essays that explore how Native American, early French and Spanish, Puritan New England, and Catholic Worker traditions has each expressed the connection between spirituality and place. A new section at the end of the book includes three chapters that address methodological issues in the study of spirituality, the symbol-making process of religious experience, and the tension between place and placelessness in Christian spirituality.

Sacred Words and Worlds

Author: Zur Shalev
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004209387
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
This book examines the scholarly genre of 'geographia sacra' in early modern Europe, tracing its contours, the outlooks and concerns of its practitioners, as well as the intersections of religion and geography in an age that saw dramatic revolutions in both fields.

Banaras

Author: Diana L. Eck
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307832953
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
The sacred city of Banāras on the River Ganges is one of the oldest living cities in the world—as old as Jerusalem, Athens, and Peking. It is the place where Shiva, the Lord of All, is said to have made his permanent home since the dawn of creation. There are few cities in India as traditionally Hindu and as symbolic of the whole of Hindu culture as Banāras. In this eloquent, finely observed study, Diana Eck shows how the city over the centuries has become a lens through which the Hindu vision of the world is precisely focused. She reveals the spiritual and historical resonance of this holy place where great sages such as the Buddha and Shankara were taught, where ashrams, palaces, and universities were built, where God has been imagined and imagined in a thousand ways. She describes the rites of its temples, the busy life of its riverfront, and the exuberance of its festivals. She tells how people travel from all over India to Banāras for the privilege of dying a good death here, for they believe that on the banks of the River Ganges where “the atmosphere of devotion is improbable in its strength,” it is possible to be released from the earthly round forever. In her account of the sacred history, geography, and art of the city, its elaborate and thriving rituals, its myths and literature, and its importance to pilgrims and seekers, Diana Eck uses her wealth of scholarship to make the Hindu tradition come powerfully alive so that we come to understand the meaning of this sacred city to the millions of believers who have been coming here for over 2,500 years.

Sacred Geography of the Ancient Greeks

Author: Jean Richer
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
This book provides proof of the existence and explains the significance of planned alignments between classical temples and oracle sites over a wide range of territory, pointing to an astrological system of planning in the ancient world. This system of symbolism may be used predictively and is supported by all relevant artifacts. Here is a unifying approach to the study of geomancy in the ancient world as a whole. Richer has found a network of significant geographic alignments, associated with the pathways of various legendary figures and gods, that are geomantic keys to many legends and texts. One of these texts is Plato’s Laws in which Plato describes the layout of the ideal city. Richer found Plato’s ideal city repeated around the most important oracular centers on ancient Greece. He shows how Plato’s description was a later codification of a much earlier practice of dividing geography into twelve regions under the patronage of the gods of the zodiac. Several such twelve-part divisions of the Greek Territories are presented here.