Embodying the Vedas

Embodying the Vedas PDF Author: Borayin Larios
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110517329
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Popularly Hinduism is believed to be the world’s oldest living religion. This claim is based on a continuous reverence to the oldest strata of religious authority within the Hindu traditions, the Vedic corpus, which began to be composed more than three thousand years ago, around 1750–1200 BCE. The Vedas have been considered by many as the philosophical cornerstone of the Brahmanical traditions (āstika); even previous to the colonial construction of the concept of “Hinduism.” However, what can be pieced together from the Vedic texts is very different from contemporary Hindu religious practices, beliefs, social norms and political realities. This book presents the results of a study of the traditional education and training of Brahmins through the traditional system of education called gurukula as observed in 25 contemporary Vedic schools across the state of Maharasthra. This system of education aims to teach Brahmin males how to properly recite, memorize and ultimately embody the Veda. This book combines insights from ethnographic and textual analysis to unravel how the recitation of the Vedic texts and the Vedic traditions, as well as the identity of the traditional Brahmin in general, are transmitted from one generation to the next in contemporary India.

Embodying the Vedas

Embodying the Vedas PDF Author: Borayin Larios
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110517329
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Popularly Hinduism is believed to be the world’s oldest living religion. This claim is based on a continuous reverence to the oldest strata of religious authority within the Hindu traditions, the Vedic corpus, which began to be composed more than three thousand years ago, around 1750–1200 BCE. The Vedas have been considered by many as the philosophical cornerstone of the Brahmanical traditions (āstika); even previous to the colonial construction of the concept of “Hinduism.” However, what can be pieced together from the Vedic texts is very different from contemporary Hindu religious practices, beliefs, social norms and political realities. This book presents the results of a study of the traditional education and training of Brahmins through the traditional system of education called gurukula as observed in 25 contemporary Vedic schools across the state of Maharasthra. This system of education aims to teach Brahmin males how to properly recite, memorize and ultimately embody the Veda. This book combines insights from ethnographic and textual analysis to unravel how the recitation of the Vedic texts and the Vedic traditions, as well as the identity of the traditional Brahmin in general, are transmitted from one generation to the next in contemporary India.

Vedic Voices

Vedic Voices PDF Author: David M. Knipe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199397686
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
For countless generations families have lived in isolated communities in the Godavari Delta of coastal Andhra Pradesh, learning and reciting their legacy of Vedas, performing daily offerings and occasional sacrifices. They are the virtually unrecognized survivors of a 3,700-year-old heritage, the last in India who perform the ancient animal and soma sacrifices according to Vedic tradition. In Vedic Voices, David M. Knipe offers for the first time, an opportunity for them to speak about their lives, ancestral lineages, personal choices as pandits, wives, children, and ways of coping with an avalanche of changes in modern India. He presents a study of four generations of ten families, from those born at the outset of the twentieth century down to their great-grandsons who are just beginning, at the age of seven, the task of memorizing their Veda, the Taittiriya Samhita, a feat that will require eight to twelve years of daily recitations. After successful examinations these young men will reside with the Veda family girls they married as children years before, take their places in the oral transmission of a three-thousand-year Vedic heritage, teach the Taittiriya collection of texts to their own sons, and undertake with their wives the major and minor sacrifices performed by their ancestors for some three millennia. Coastal Andhra, famed for bountiful rice and coconut plantations, has received scant attention from historians of religion and anthropologists despite a wealth of cultural traditions. Vedic Voices describes in captivating prose the geography, cultural history, pilgrimage traditions, and celebrated persons of the region. Here unfolds a remarkable story of Vedic pandits and their wives, one scarcely known in India and not at all to the outside world.

The Destiny of the Veda in India

The Destiny of the Veda in India PDF Author: Louis Renou
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Vedas
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description


Vedic India as Embodied Principally in the Rig-Veda

Vedic India as Embodied Principally in the Rig-Veda PDF Author: Zénaïde Alexeïevna Ragozin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hindu mythology
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description


Rites of the God-King

Rites of the God-King PDF Author: Marko Geslani
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190862882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Rites of the God-King offers a critical revision of mainstream Hinduism from the perspective of the life of a single ritual from medieval India. Drawing theoretical connections to modern ethnographies, it raises questions about the nature of kingship and priesthood, image-worship, and ritual change.

Vedic India as Embodied Principally in the Rig-Veda

Vedic India as Embodied Principally in the Rig-Veda PDF Author: Zénaïde A. Ragozin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hindu mythology
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description


The Story of Vedic India as Embodied Principally in the Rig-Veda

The Story of Vedic India as Embodied Principally in the Rig-Veda PDF Author: Zénaïde Alexeïevna Ragozin
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's sons. 1895.
ISBN:
Category : Aryans
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description


Ardor

Ardor PDF Author: Roberto Calasso
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141971819
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
In this revelatory volume, Roberto Calasso, whom the Paris Review has called 'a literary institution', explores the ancient texts known as the Vedas. Little is known about the Vedic people who lived more than three thousand years ago in northern India: they left behind almost no objects, images, ruins. They created no empires. Even the hallucinogenic plant, the soma, which appears at the centre of some of their rituals, has not been identified with any certainty. Only a 'Parthenon of words' remains: verses and formulations suggesting a daring understanding of life. 'If the Vedic people had been asked why they did not build cities,' writes Calasso, 'they could have replied: we did not seek power, but rapture.' This is the ardor of the Vedic world, a burning intensity that is always present, both in the mind and in the cosmos. With his signature erudition and profound sense of the past, Calasso explores the enigmatic web of ritual and myth that define the Vedas. Often at odds with modern thought, he shows how these texts illuminate the nature of consciousness more than neuroscientists have been able to offer us up to now. Following the 'hundred paths' of the Satapatha Brahmana, an impressive exegesis of Vedic ritual, Ardor indicates that it may be possible to reach what is closest by passing through that which is most remote, as 'the whole of Vedic India was an attempt to think further'.

All about Hinduism

All about Hinduism PDF Author: Swami Sivananda
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hinduism
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description


Vedas Lost

Vedas Lost PDF Author: Vishwa Nath Sahay
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hinduism
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
On the loss of Vedic knowledge at the time of the Mahabharata war, by a member of the Arya Samaj.