Imagining Karma

Imagining Karma PDF Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520232208
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
With 'Imagining Karma', Gananath Obeyesekere embarks on the comparison of rebirth concepts across a wide range of cultures. The book makes a case for disciplined comparison, a humane view of human nature, and a theoretical understanding of 'family resemblances' and differences across great cultural divides.

Imagining Karma

Imagining Karma PDF Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520232208
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Get Book Here

Book Description
With 'Imagining Karma', Gananath Obeyesekere embarks on the comparison of rebirth concepts across a wide range of cultures. The book makes a case for disciplined comparison, a humane view of human nature, and a theoretical understanding of 'family resemblances' and differences across great cultural divides.

Imagining Karma

Imagining Karma PDF Author: Gananath Obeyesekere
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520232437
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
With 'Imagining Karma', Gananath Obeyesekere embarks on the comparison of rebirth concepts across a wide range of cultures. The book makes a case for disciplined comparison, a humane view of human nature, and a theoretical understanding of 'family resemblances' and differences across great cultural divides.

Imagining the Course of Life

Imagining the Course of Life PDF Author: Nancy Eberhardt
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824829193
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Imagining the Course of Life offers a rich portrait of rural life in contemporary Southeast Asia and an accessible introduction to the complexities of Theravada Buddhism as it is actually lived and experienced. It is both an ethnography of indigenous views of human development and a theoretical consideration of how any ethnopsychology is embedded in society and culture. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a Shan village in northern Thailand, Nancy Eberhardt illustrates how indigenous theories of the life course are connected to local constructions of self and personhood. In the process, she draws our attention to contrasting models in the Euro-American tradition and invites us to reconsider how we think about the trajectory of a human life. Moving beyond the entrenched categories that can hamper our understanding of other views, Imagining the Course of Life demonstrates the real-life connections between the "religious" and the "psychological." Eberhardt shows how such beliefs and practices are used, sometimes strategically, in people's constructions of themselves, in their interpretations of others' behavior, and in their attempts at social positioning. Individual chapters explore Shan ideas about the overall course of human development, from infancy to old age and beyond, and show how these ideas inform people's understanding of personhood and maturity, gender and social inequality, illness and well-being, emotions and mental health.

Imagining Tibet

Imagining Tibet PDF Author: Thierry Dodin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0861711912
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
In the past century, the Western view of Tibet has evolved from an exotic Shangri-la filled with golden idols and the promise of immortality, to a peaceful land with an enlightened society now ravaged by outside aggression. How and why did our perception change? How accurate are our modern conceptions of Tibet? Imagining Tibet is a collection of essays that reveal these Western conceptions. Providing an historical background to the West's ever-changing relationship with Tibet, Donald Lopez, Jeffrey Hopkins, Jamyang Norbu, and other noted scholars explore a variety of topics - from Western perceptions of Tibetan approaches to violence, monastic life, and life as a nation in exile, to representations of Tibet in Western literature, art, environmentalism, and the New Age movement.

The Politics of Imagining Asia

The Politics of Imagining Asia PDF Author: Hui Wang
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674061357
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
In this bold, provocative collection, Wang Hui confronts some of the major issues concerning modern China and the status quo of contemporary Chinese thought. The book’s overarching theme is the possibility of an alternative modernity that does not rely on imported conceptions of Chinese history and its legacy. Wang Hui argues that current models, based largely on Western notions of empire and the nation-state, fail to account for the richness and diversity of pre-modern Chinese historical practice. At the same time, he refrains from offering an exclusively Chinese perspective and placing China in an intellectual ghetto. Navigating terrain on regional language and politics, he draws on China’s unique past to expose the inadequacies of European-born standards for assessing modern China’s evolution. He takes issue particularly with the way in which nation-state logic has dominated politically charged concerns like Chinese language standardization and “The Tibetan Question.” His stance is critical—and often controversial—but he locates hope in the kinds of complex, multifaceted arrangements that defined China and much of Asia for centuries. The Politics of Imagining Asia challenges us not only to re-examine our theories of “Asia” but to reconsider what “Europe” means as well. As Theodore Huters writes in his introduction, “Wang Hui’s concerns extend beyond China and Asia to an ambition to rethink world history as a whole.”

This-Worldly Nibbāna

This-Worldly Nibbāna PDF Author: Hsiao-Lan Hu
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438439342
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Offering a feminist analysis of foundational Buddhist texts, along with a Buddhist approach to social issues in a globalized world, Hsiao-Lan Hu revitalizes Buddhist social ethics for contemporary times. Hu's feminist exegesis references the Nikāya-s from the "Discourse Basket" of the Pāli Canon. These texts, among the earliest in the Buddhist canon, are considered to contain the sayings of the Buddha and his disciples and are recognized by all Buddhist schools. At the heart of the ethics that emerges is the Buddhist notion of interdependent co-arising, which addresses the sexism, classism, and frequent overemphasis on individual liberation, as opposed to communal well-being, for which Buddhism has been criticized. Hu notes the Buddha's challenge to social hierarchies during his life and compares the notion of "non-Self" to the poststructuralist feminist rejection of the autonomous subject, maintaining that neither dissolves moral responsibility or agency. Notions of kamma, nibbāna, and dukkha (suffering) are discussed within the communal context offered by insights from interdependent co-arising and the Noble Eightfold Path. This work uniquely bridges the worlds of Buddhism, feminism, social ethics, and activism and will be of interest to scholars, students, and readers in all of these areas.

Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth

Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth PDF Author: Stephen Phillips
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231144857
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
For serious yoga practitioners curious to know the ancient origins of the art, Phillips lays out the philosophy of action, knowledge, and devotion, as well as the processes of meditation, reasoning, and self-analysis, that formed the basis of yoga in ancient and classical India.

The Cheater's Guide to Love

The Cheater's Guide to Love PDF Author: Junot Diaz
Publisher: Faber Stories
ISBN: 9780571355990
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description


Against Race

Against Race PDF Author: Paul Gilroy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674000964
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
He argues that the triumph of the image spells death to politics and reduces people to mere symbols."--BOOK JACKET.

Purpose in the Universe

Purpose in the Universe PDF Author: Tim Mulgan
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191066575
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Two familiar worldviews dominate Western philosophy: materialist atheism and the benevolent God of the Abrahamic faiths. Tim Mulgan explores a third way. Ananthropocentric Purposivism claims that there is a cosmic purpose, but human beings are irrelevant to it. Purpose in the Universe develops a philosophical case for Ananthropocentric Purposivism that it is at least as strong as the case for either theism or atheism. The book borrows traditional theist arguments to defend a cosmic purpose. These include cosmological, teleological, ontological, meta-ethical, and mystical arguments. It then borrows traditional atheist arguments to reject a human-centred purpose. These include arguments based on evil, diversity, and the scale of the universe. Mulgan also highlights connections between morality and metaphysics, arguing that evaluative premises play a crucial and underappreciated role in metaphysical debates about the existence of God, and Ananthropocentric Purposivism mutually supports an austere consequentialist morality based on objective values. He concludes that, by drawing on a range of secular and religious ethical traditions, a non-human-centred cosmic purpose can ground a distinctive human morality. Our moral practices, our view of the moral universe, and our moral theory are all transformed if we shift from the familiar choice between a universe without meaning and a universe where humans matter to the less self-aggrandising thought that, while it is about something, the universe is not about us.