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Author: Gary J. Hausman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Alchemy
Languages : en
Pages : 972
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Book Description
Author: Gary J. Hausman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Alchemy
Languages : en
Pages : 972
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: David Gordon White
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022614934X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 616
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Book Description
“[A] brilliant disquisition on . . . mostly unpublished texts for three allied systems of tantric thought and praxis (sexual, alchemical, and hatha yogic).” —The Journal of Asian Studies The Alchemical Body excavates and centers within its Indian context the lost tradition of the medieval Siddhas. Working from previously unexplored alchemical sources, David Gordon White demonstrates for the first time that the medieval disciplines of Hindu alchemy and hatha yoga were practiced by one and the same people, and that they can be understood only when viewed together. White opens the way to a new and more comprehensive understanding of medieval Indian mysticism, within the broader context of south Asian Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Islam. “White proves a skillful guide in disentangling historical and theoretical complexities that have thus far bedeviled the study of these influential aspects of medieval Indian culture.” —Yoga World “Anyone seriously interested in finding out more about authentic tantra, original hatha yoga, embodied liberation . . . sacred sexuality, paranormal abilities, healing, and of course alchemy will find White’s extraordinary book as fascinating as any Tom Clancy thriller.” —Georg Feuerstein, Yoga Journal “Remarkable . . . a study of the language of mystic experience and expression—the multitudinous symbols, rituals, and doctrines of the medieval siddhis, yogis, and alchemists.” —Skeptic Meditations
Author: Projit Bihari
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638182X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387
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Book Description
Like many of the traditional medicines of South Asia, Ayurvedic practice transformed dramatically in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With Doctoring Tradition, Projit Bihari Mukharji offers a close look at that recasting, upending the widely held yet little-examined belief that it was the result of the introduction of Western anatomical knowledge and cadaveric dissection. Rather, Mukharji reveals, what instigated those changes were a number of small technologies that were introduced in the period by Ayurvedic physicians, men who were simultaneously Victorian gentlemen and members of a particular Bengali caste. The introduction of these devices, including thermometers, watches, and microscopes, Mukharji shows, ultimately led to a dramatic reimagining of the body. By the 1930s, there emerged a new Ayurvedic body that was marked as distinct from a biomedical body. Despite the protestations of difference, this new Ayurvedic body was largely compatible with it. The more irreconcilable elements of the old Ayurvedic body were then rendered therapeutically indefensible and impossible to imagine in practice. The new Ayurvedic medicine was the product not of an embrace of Western approaches, but of a creative attempt to develop a viable alternative to the Western tradition by braiding together elements drawn from internally diverse traditions of the West and the East.
Author: Richard S Weiss
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199715009
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Despite the global spread of Western medical practice, traditional doctors still thrive in the modern world. In Recipes for Immortality, Richard Weiss illuminates their continued success by examining the ways in which siddha medical practitioners in Tamil South India win the trust and patronage of patients. While biomedicine might alleviate a patient's physical distress, siddha doctors offer their clientele much more: affiliation to a timeless and pure community, the fantasy of a Tamil utopia, and even the prospect of immortality. They speak of a golden age of Tamil civilization and of traditional medicine, drawing on broader revivalist formulations of a pure and ancient Tamil community. Weiss analyzes the success of siddha doctors, focusing on how they have successfully garnered authority and credibility. While shedding light on their lives, vocations, and aspirations, Weiss also documents the challenges that siddha doctors face in the modern world, both from a biomedical system that claims universal efficacy, and also from the rival traditional medicine, ayurveda, which is promoted as the national medicine of an autonomous Indian state. Drawing on ethnographic data; premodern Tamil texts on medicine, alchemy, and yoga; government archival resources; college textbooks; and popular literature on siddha medicine and on the siddhar yogis, he presents an in-depth study of this traditional system of knowledge, which serves the medical needs of millions of Indians. Weiss concludes with a look at traditional medicine at large, and demonstrates that siddha doctors, despite resent trends toward globalization and biomedicine, reflect the wider political and religious dimensions of medical discourse in our modern world. Recipes for Immortality proves that medical authority is based not only on physical effectiveness, but also on imaginative processes that relate to personal and social identities, conceptions of history, secrecy, loss, and utopian promise.
Author: Steven Engler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110901404
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
This collection of essays analyzes ‛tradition’ as a category in the historical and comparative study of religion. The book questions the common assumption that tradition is simply the “passing down” or imitation of prior practices and discourses. It begins from the premise that many traditions are, at least in part, social fabrications, often deliberately serving particular ideological ends. Individual chapters examine a wide variety of historical periods and religions (Congolese, Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, Cree, Esoteric, Hawaiian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, New Religious Movement, and Shinto). Different sections of the book consider tradition's relation to three sets of issues: legitimation and authority; agency and identity; modernity and the West.
Author: Dagmar Wujastyk
Publisher: Barkhuis
ISBN: 9493194477
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 604
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Book Description
The Report of the Committee on Indigenous Systems of Medicine, Madras (1923), commissioned by the Madras government in 1921, was the first major health report to be published in India. It is commonly referred to as the Usman Report, after the committee's chairman Muhammad Usman. Its main purpose was to provide indigenous practitioners with an opportunity to put forward a strong case for state encouragement and financial support. The second volume of the Usman Report, titled "Written and Oral Evidence," mainly consists in written responses to a questionnaire relating to theoretical, practical, economic and institutional dimensions of medical practice. Practitioners' testimonies came from all over India and were submitted in English, Sanskrit, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannaḍa, and Oriya, providing a snapshot of the practices and sociopolitical positionings significant for those practicing traditional medicines in India at the beginning of the twentieth century. This volume provides the first English translation of the vernacular testimonies of this important document.
Author: Waltraud Ernst
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134736010
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 529
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Book Description
Research into 'colonial' or 'imperial' medicine has made considerable progress in recent years, whilst the study of what is usually referred to as 'indigenous' or 'folk' medicine in colonized societies has received much less attention. This book redresses the balance by bringing together current critical research into medical pluralism during the last two centuries. It includes a rich selection of historical, anthropological and sociological case-studies that cover many different parts of the globe, ranging from New Zealand to Africa, China, South Asia, Europe and the USA.
Author: Srilata Raman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131774473X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
This book analyses the religious ideology of a Tamil reformer and saint, Ramalinga Swamigal of the 19th century and his posthumous reception in the Tamil country and sheds light on the transformation of Tamil religion that both his works and the understanding of him brought about. The book traces the hagiographical and biographical process by which Ramalinga Swamigal is shifted from being considered an exemplary poet-saint of the Tamil Śaivite bhakti tradition to a Dravidian nationalist social reformer. Taking as a starting point Ramalinga’s own writing, the book presents him as inhabiting a border zone between early modernity and modernity, between Hinduism and Christianity, between colonialism and regional nationalism, highlighting the influence of his teachings on politics, particularly within Dravidian cultural and political nationalism. Simultaneously, the book considers the implication of such an hagiographical process for the transformation of Tamil religion in the period between the 19th –mid-20th centuries. The author demonstrates that Ramalinga Swamigal’s ideology of compassion, cīvakāruṇyam, had not only a long genealogy in pre-modern Tamil Śaivism but also that it functioned as a potentially emancipatory ethics of salvation and caste critique not just for him but also for other Tamil and Dalit intellectuals of the 19th century. This book is a path-breaking study that also traces the common grounds between the religious visions of two of the most prominent subaltern figures of Tamil modernity – Iyothee Thass and Ramalingar. It argues that these transformations are one meaningful way for a religious tradition to cope with and come to terms with the implications of historicization and the demands of colonial modernity. It is, therefore, a valuable contribution to the field of religion, South Asian history and literature and Subaltern studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315794518 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Author: Sally Shuttleworth
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526133709
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347
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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This collaborative volume explores changing perceptions of health and disease in the context of the burgeoning global modernities of the nineteenth century. With case studies from Britain, America, France, Germany, Finland, Bengal, China and the South Pacific, it demonstrates how popular and medical understandings of the mind and body were reframed by the social, cultural and political structures of ‘modern life’. Essays within the collection examine ways in which cancer, suicide, and social degeneration were seen as products of the stresses and strains of ‘new’ ways of living. Others explore the legal, institutional, and intellectual changes that contributed to modern medical practice. The volume traces ways that physiological and psychological problems were being constituted in relation to each other, and to their social contexts, and offers new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century.
Author: Dagmar Wujastyk
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791478165
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
A comprehensive overview of Ayurveda.
