Rethinking 'Classical Yoga' and Buddhism
Rethinking 'Classical Yoga' and Buddhism

Author: Karen O'Brien-Kop

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-09-09

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1350230014

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This book revisits the early systemic formation of meditation practices called 'yoga' in South Asia by employing metaphor theory. Karen O'Brien-Kop also develops an alternative way of analysing the reception history of yoga that aims to decentre the Eurocentric and imperialist enterprises of the nineteenth-century to reframe the cultural period of the 1st – 5th centuries CE using categorical markers from South Asian intellectual history. Buddhist traditions were just as concerned as Hindu traditions with meditative disciplines of yoga. By exploring the intertextuality of the Patanjalayogasastra with texts such as Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosabhasya and Asanga's Yogacarabhumisastra, this book highlights and clarifies many ideologically Buddhist concepts and practices in Patanjala yoga. Karen O'Brien-Kop demonstrates that 'classical yoga' was co-constructed systemically by both Hindu and Buddhist thinkers who were drawing on the same conceptual metaphors of the period. This analysis demystifies early yoga-meditation as a timeless 'classical' practice and locates it in a specific material context of agrarian and urban economies.

Rethinking 'Classical' Yoga and Buddhism
Rethinking 'Classical' Yoga and Buddhism

Author: Karen O'Brien-Kop

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781350230026

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"This book revisits the early systemic formation of what we now call yoga in South Asia. Karen O'Brien-Kop develops an alternative way of describing and analysing the history of yoga in South Asia that decentres the Eurocentric and imperialist enterprises of the nineteenth-century to reframe the cultural period of the 1st - 5th centuries CE using categorical markers from Indic intellectual history. Buddhist traditions were just as concerned as Hindu traditions with meditative disciplines of yoga. By exploring the intertextuality of the Pata jalayogasastra with texts such as Vasubandhu s Abhidharmakosa-bhaya and Asaga s Yogacarabhumisastra, this book highlights and clarifies the ideologically Buddhist concepts and practices in Pata jala yoga. Karen O'Brien-Kop demonstrates that classical yoga was co-constructed systemically by both Hindu and Buddhist thinkers who were drawing on the same conceptual metaphors of the period. This analysis demystifies early yoga-meditation as a timeless classical practice and locates it in a specific material context of agrarian and urban economies."--

The Philosophy of the Yogasutra
The Philosophy of the Yogasutra

Author: Karen O'Brien-Kop

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-04-20

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1350286176

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Karen O'Brien-Kop's introduction to the Yogasutra highlights its status as a significant work of philosophy. Approaching the Yogasutra as living philosophy, this book elucidates philosophical conceptions of yoga, recognises the logical structure the sutras follow and explains the rules and principles that have sustained Patañjali's system of thought for centuries. Moving beyond standard interpretations of Patañjali's text and commentary as an aphoristic practice manual, O'Brien-Kop uses branches of philosophy to read the Yogasutra. Covering reality, self, ethics, language and knowledge, Patañjali's philosophies come to the fore. The book introduces his reasoned positions on dual and nondual metaphysics, the relationship between mind and body, the qualities of consciousness, the nature of freedom, and how to live ethically. Carefully-selected extracts from the primary text are translated for those unfamiliar with Sanskrit and commentaries run throughout. A glossary provides definitions of key concepts with useful translations. Accessible and up-to-date, this introduction broadens our understanding of Indian philosophical thought and explains why the Yogasutra deserves to be read alongside Parmenides' 'On Nature' and Plato's Phaedo as a classic of world philosophy.

The Books Sānk and Pātanğal
The Books Sānk and Pātanğal

Author: Noémie Verdon

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-01-08

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 9004680306

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The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Al-Bīrūnī (ca. 973-1050) was an innovative encyclopaedist thinker. He is particularly known to have investigated into India of his time. Yet, his life and the circumstances of his encounter with Indian languages, culture and sciences are still shrouded in mystery and legends. This research brings to light elements of his intellectual journey based on well-grounded analysis so as to contextualise al-Bīrūnī’s work of transmission of Indian philosophies into Arabic. Thanks to a theoretical framework rooted in a multidisciplinary approach, including Translation Studies, it enables to comprehend the full scope of his work and to analyse deeply his motives and choices of interpretation.

Flexible India
Flexible India

Author: Shameem Black

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2023-12-19

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 0231556284

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Yoga has offered the Indian state unprecedented opportunities for global, media-savvy political performance. Under Modi, it has promoted yoga tourism and staged mass yoga sessions, 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, its cultural meanings have spiraled far and wide. In Flexible India, Shameem Black travels into unexpected realms of popular culture in English from India, its diaspora, and the West to explore and critique yoga as an exercise in cultural power. Drawing on her own experience and her readings of political spectacles, yoga murder mysteries, court cases, art installations, and digital media, Black shows how yoga’s imaginative power supports diverse political and cultural ends. Although many cultural practices in today’s India exemplify “culture wars” between liberal and conservative agendas, Flexible India argues that visions of yoga offer a “culture peace” that conceals, without resolving, such tensions. This flexibility allows states, corporations, and individuals to think of themselves as welcoming and tolerant while still, in many cases, supporting practices that make minority populations increasingly vulnerable. However, as Black shows, yoga can also be imagined in ways that offer new tools for critiquing hierarchical structures of power and race, Hindu nationalism, cultural appropriation, and self-help capitalism.

Discovering Indian Philosophy
Discovering Indian Philosophy

Author: Jeffery D. Long

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-01-25

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1350324825

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Indian Philosophy: An Introduction helps readers discover how the many and varied schools of Indian thought can answer some of the great questions of life: Who are we? How can we live well? How do we tell truth from lies? Accessibly written for readers new to Indian philosophy, the book takes you through the main traditions of thought, including Buddhist, Hindu and Jain perspectives on major philosophical topics from ancient times to the present day. Bringing insights from the latest research to bear on the key primary sources from these traditions and setting them in their full spiritual, historical and philosophical contexts, Indian Philosophy: An Introduction covers such topics as: · Philosophies of action and knowledge · Materialism and scepticism · Consciousness and duality · Religious and cultural expressions The book includes a pronunciation guide to Sanskrit and Indic language terms and a comprehensive guide to further reading for those wishing to take their study further.

Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies
Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies

Author: Suzanne Newcombe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-10-28

Total Pages: 718

ISBN-13: 1351050737

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The Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies is a comprehensive and interdisciplinary resource, which frames and contextualises the rapidly expanding fields that explore yoga and meditative techniques. The book analyses yoga and meditation studies in a variety of religious, historical and geographical settings. The chapters, authored by an international set of experts, are laid out across five sections: Introduction to yoga and meditation studies History of yoga and meditation in South Asia Doctrinal perspectives: technique and praxis Global and regional transmissions Disciplinary framings In addition to up-to-date explorations of the history of yoga and meditation in the Indian subcontinent, new contexts include a case study of yoga and meditation in the contemporary Tibetan diaspora, and unique summaries of historical developments in Japan and Latin America as well as an introduction to the growing academic study of yoga in Korea. Underpinned by critical and theoretical engagement, the volume provides an in-depth guide to the history of yoga and meditation studies and combines the best of established research with attention to emerging directions for future investigation. This handbook will be of interest to multidisciplinary academic audiences from across the humanities, social sciences and sciences. Chapters 1, 4, 9, 12, and 27 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Tibetan Magic
Tibetan Magic

Author: Cameron Bailey

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-03-07

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1350354961

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This book focuses on the theme of magic in Tibetan contexts, encompassing both pre-modern and modern text-cultures as well as contemporary practices. It offers a new understanding of the identity and role of magical specialists in both historical and contemporary contexts. Combining the theoretical approaches of anthropology, ethnography, religious and textual studies, the book aims to shed light on experiences, practices and practitioners that have been frequently marginalized by the normative mainstream monastic Buddhist traditions and Western Buddhist scholarship, which focuses primarily on meditation and philosophy. The book explores the intersection between magic/folk practices and Tantra, a complex, socio-religious phenomenon associated not only with the religious and political elites who sponsored it, but also with 'marginal' ethnic groups and social milieus, as well as with lay communities at large, who resorted to ritual agents to fulfil their worldly needs.

Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan
Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan

Author: Ioannis Gaitanidis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-10-20

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1350262625

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This book critically analyses the creation and effects of spirituality as both discourse and practice in Japan. It shows how the value of spirituality has been sustained by scholars who have wished for a more civic role for religion; by the publishing industry whose exponential growth in the 1980s fashioned those who later identified as the representatives of this “new spirituality culture”; by “spiritual therapists” who have sought to eke out a livelihood in an increasingly professionalized and regulated therapeutic field; and by the cruel optimism of an increasingly precarious workforce placing its hopes in the imagined alternative that the supirichuaru represents. Ioannis Gaitanidis offers a new transdisciplinary conceptualisation of 'alternativity' that can be applied across and beyond the disciplines of religious studies, media studies, popular culture studies and the anthropology/sociology of medicine.

Charismatic Healers in Contemporary Africa
Charismatic Healers in Contemporary Africa

Author: Sandra Fancello

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1350295450

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Based on ethnographic studies conducted in several African countries, this volume analyses the phenomenon of deliverance – which is promoted both in charismatic churches and in Islam as a weapon against witchcraft – in order to clarify the political dimensions of spiritual warfare in contemporary African societies. Deliverance from evil is part and parcel of the contemporary discourse on the struggle against witchcraft in most African contexts. However, contributors show how its importance extends beyond this, highlighting a pluralism of approaches to deliverance in geographically distant religious movements, which coexist in Africa. Against this background, the book reflects on the responsibilities of Pentecostal deliverance politics within the condition of 'epistemic anxiety' of contemporary African societies – to shed light on complex relational dimensions in which individual deliverance is part of a wider social and spiritual struggle. Spanning across the study of religion, healing and politics, this book contributes to ongoing debates about witchcraft and deliverance in Africa.