This engaging volume of memoirs recounts the unique experiences of an English Buddhist monk working in the mid-1950s to revive Buddhism in the land of its birth. Sangharakshita's lyrical descriptions evoke the kaleidoscope of the Indian landscape in delightful detail. With candour he relates his grittier encounters with royalty and religion, poverty and politics, corruption and ignorance.
The book attends to a historical question — how to account for the high numbers of renouncers (sadhvis) mentioned in medieval and ancient texts — which has been acknowledged and raised, but left unaddressed within Jain studies. It does so through ethnographic data gathered through extensive fieldwork among the sadhvis in Delhi and Jaipur. The volume foregrounds the primacy of ‘choice’ and ‘agency’— upheld by the nuns themselves, who associate asceticism with autonomy, freedom, joy, spiritual well-being, self-worth and peace, and grihastha (household) with loss of independence, fettered existence, degradation, burdensome familial obligations and social responsibilities. It also examines whether it may be apt to term Jain nuns as practitioners of an ‘indigenous mode of feminism’. The book challenges the existing sociological theories of renunciation and tests the feminist concepts of agency and autonomy by investigating the culturally coded roles ascribed to women in Jainism, which are variegated, and examines how a fractured discourse and reality is resolved in the subjectivities and identities of female ascetics. The very legitimacy of the institution of female asceticism, and the way in which the society (samaj) upholds and sustains it, renders female asceticism into a socially approved alternative institution — albeit one that allows Jain nuns to create spaces of relative and autonomy and even prestige for themselves.
This book presents multi-faceted images of religious experience in the Marathi-speaking region of India. In addition to Irawati Karve's classic, "On the Road," about her pilgrimage to Pandharpur, there are three essays by Karve that appear in English for the first time. Here is possession by gods and ghosts, an actual sermon by an inspired saint in the traditional bhajan style, and an autobiographical account of the religious nationalism of the militant R.S.S. These are engaging, true-to-life accounts of the lives of individual Hindus. Essays and imaginative literature, a poem, and a short story interplay the ideas, concepts, personalities, practices, rituals, and deities of Hinduism in a surprisingly coherent manner.
In the Sign of the Golden Wheel tells the story of the 'middle period' of the fourteen years Sangharakshita was based in the Indian hill station, Kalimpong. It is a crucial time for Buddhism as the whole Asian world is preparing to celebrate 2,500 years of Buddhism, and Sangharakshita's abundant energies are brought into play in diverse ways.Precious Teachers covers the last period of Sangharakshita's time in Kalimpong.
The Present work is devoted to the philosophical teachings of Jnanadeva the well-known 13h century saint and genius of Maharashtra in whom we find a rare combination of poetry, philosophy and deep religious experience. The author has based his work mainly on Jnanadeva`s Amrtanabhava, but he has also taken into consideration other works of Jnanadeva. He gives a clear and lucid exposition of Jnanadeva's theory of Chidvilasa, which is approached by him through an acute criticism of the theory of Avidya. He also shows how Jnanadeva's philosophy culminates in his conception of natural devotion and forms a firm foundation of the Bhakti-cult in Maharashtra. The views of Jnanadeva are also compared with those of Eastern and Western thinkers. This is the first attempt to present in English the Philosophy of Jnanadeva in a systematic form and to convey a clear vision of his lofty and integral idealism.
The essays investigate the images of women and femininity found in the traditions of the Marathi language region of India, Maharashtra, and how these images contradict the actualities of women's lives.
