The Socially Involved Renunciate

The Socially Involved Renunciate PDF Author: Kamala Elizabeth Nayar
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791479501
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The Socially Involved Renunciate is an in-depth analysis and an original English translation of the Siddh Goṣṭ, a fundamental philosophical text of the Sikh tradition. The work reflects the distinctive worldview of Sikhism, the only major Indian religion that does not regard asceticism as a legitimate path to liberation. Composed by Guru Nānak, a medieval, north Indian saint-poet and venerated founder of the Sikh tradition, the Siddh Goṣṭ is a dialogue between Guru Nānak and several Nāth yogis who had been pursuing a rigorous path of hath-yoga as renunciates of the material world. Through their dialogue, Guru Nānak teaches the Nāth yogis a spiritual path that also includes involvement in the social world and offers a practical way to achieve liberation. In The Socially Involved Renunciate, Kamala Elizabeth Nayar and Jaswinder Singh Sandhu provide background on Sikhism, highlight the ethical teachings expounded in the Siddh Goṣṭ, and demonstrate how Guru Nānak reconciles the polarities of the ascetic and householder ideals.

The Socially Involved Renunciate

The Socially Involved Renunciate PDF Author: Kamala Elizabeth Nayar
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791479501
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Socially Involved Renunciate is an in-depth analysis and an original English translation of the Siddh Goṣṭ, a fundamental philosophical text of the Sikh tradition. The work reflects the distinctive worldview of Sikhism, the only major Indian religion that does not regard asceticism as a legitimate path to liberation. Composed by Guru Nānak, a medieval, north Indian saint-poet and venerated founder of the Sikh tradition, the Siddh Goṣṭ is a dialogue between Guru Nānak and several Nāth yogis who had been pursuing a rigorous path of hath-yoga as renunciates of the material world. Through their dialogue, Guru Nānak teaches the Nāth yogis a spiritual path that also includes involvement in the social world and offers a practical way to achieve liberation. In The Socially Involved Renunciate, Kamala Elizabeth Nayar and Jaswinder Singh Sandhu provide background on Sikhism, highlight the ethical teachings expounded in the Siddh Goṣṭ, and demonstrate how Guru Nānak reconciles the polarities of the ascetic and householder ideals.

Tracing Gandhi

Tracing Gandhi PDF Author: Samir Banerjee
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000084752
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This book traces the journey of Mahatma Gandhi, from being a simple and truth-seeking human being, a satyarthi, to a committed, conscious and social human being, a satyagrahi. It specifically looks at this critical transformation during the time Gandhi was in South Africa. The central argument of the book is that Gandhi evolved from being a satyarthi to a satyagrahi in South Africa. Subsequently in India, he consolidated his orientation with an emphasis on praxis, by developing his ideas as instruments for social and individual struggles. Marked by a series of events, this period was an intense quest of self-realization and understanding, and shows his journey from being Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to being Mahatma Gandhi. The book discusses various elements of Gandhian thought and praxis – morality, wisdom, non-violence, truth, social justice, dharma, trusteeship, education, sarvodaya, Hind Swaraj, swadeshi, and social service – and interprets the relevance of Gandhi’s thought in the modern world by highlighting its unique significance for social transformation and change. Lucid and accessible, the book will be useful to scholars and researchers of Gandhi studies, Indian political thought, modern Indian history, and political studies.

Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in Punjab

Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in Punjab PDF Author: Yogesh Snehi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429515634
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This book explores the organic lives of popular Sufi shrines in contemporary Northwest India. It traverses the worldview of shrine spaces, rituals and their complex narratives, and provides an insight into their urban and rural landscapes in the post-Partition (Indian) Punjab. What happened to these shrines when attempts were made to dissuade Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus from their veneration of popular saints in the early twentieth century? What was the fate of popular shrines that persisted even when the Muslim population was virtually wiped off as a result of migration during Partition? How did these shrines manifest in the context of the threat posed by militants in the 1980s? How did such popular practices reconfigure themselves when some important centres of Sufism were left behind in the West Punjab (now Pakistan)? This book examines several of these questions and utilizes a combination of analytical tools, new theoretical tropes and an ethnographic approach to understand and situate popular Sufi shrines so that they are both historicized and spatialized. As such, it lays out some crucial contours of the method and practice of understanding popular sacred spaces (within India and elsewhere), bridging the everyday and the metanarratives of power structures and state formation. This book will be useful to scholars, researchers and those engaged in interdisciplinary work in history, social anthropology, historical sociology, cultural studies, historical geography, religion and art history, as well as those interested in Sufism and its shrines in South Asia.

The Sikh View on Happiness

The Sikh View on Happiness PDF Author: Kamala Elizabeth Nayar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350139882
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Sukhmani (The Pearl of Happiness) is a popular Sikh text by Guru Arjan, which inculcates the Sikh religious ethos and philosophical perspective on wellbeing and happiness. The book features a new translation of this celebrated Sikh text and provides the first in-depth analysis of it. The Sikh View on Happiness begins with an overview of the nature of suffering and the attainment of happiness in Indian religions. This provides the foundation for the examination of the historical, social, and religious context of the Sukhmani and its contribution to the development of the Sikh tradition. In addition to exploring the spiritual teachings of the Sukhmani, Nayar and Sandhu draw upon the Sikh understanding of the mind, illness, and wellbeing to both introduce key Sikh psychological concepts and illustrate the practical application of traditional healing practices in the contemporary context. In doing so, they highlight the overlap of the teachings in the Sukhmani with concepts and themes found in Western psychotherapy, such as mindfulness, meaningful living, and resilience.

Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism PDF Author: Torkel Brekke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139504290
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This book investigates the origins of fundamentalism, outlining its characteristics and the history of key fundamentalist movements around the world, considering examples from Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. The book argues that fundamentalism develops when modern lay religious leaders challenge the authority of secular states and traditional religious establishments. These new leaders and their followers seek to infuse religious values and practices into all spheres, especially law, politics, education and science. The patterns of religious authority and leadership that characterize fundamentalism have their roots in a Christian context but were globalized through intense intercultural contacts after the mid-nineteenth century. Fundamentalism is a thoroughly modern and global phenomenon because it presupposes the globalization of ideas and practices concerning religious leadership and organization, as well as universal changes in the relationship of religion to modern societies and states.

Poems from the Sikh Sacred Tradition

Poems from the Sikh Sacred Tradition PDF Author: Guru Nanak
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067429324X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
“A landmark volume, filled with beautiful renderings of writings from the Guru Granth Sahib.” —Simran Jeet Singh, author of The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life An exquisite new translation of Guru Nanak’s verses, illuminating the sacred tenets cherished by millions of Sikhs worldwide. Guru Nanak (1469–1539), a native of Panjab, founded the Sikh religion. His vast corpus of nearly a thousand hymns forms the core of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikhs’ sacred book of ethics, philosophy, and theology. The scripture was expanded and enriched by his nine successors, and Sikhs continue to revere it today as the embodiment of their tradition. This beautiful new translation by Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, a foremost authority on Sikhism, offers a selection of spiritual lyrics composed by Guru Nanak. Here the reader will find the range and depth of his pluralistic vision of the singular divine and discover his central values of equality, inclusivity, and civic action—values that continue to shape the lives of Sikhs worldwide.

Sayings of Gorakhnath

Sayings of Gorakhnath PDF Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190935103
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Sayings of Gorakhnath presents a translation of late-medieval texts in Old Hindi, traditionally attributed to one of the founders of the Order of Nath Yogis. The Naths are associated with the creation and development of hatha yoga, with important historical and ideological links to Hindu tantra and alchemy. The texts gathered in this collection on the one hand provide a criticism of religious authority based on external knowledge lacking personal experience, while on the other hand they celebrate the path of yoga and its methods of engagement with the subtle body and its centres of occult energy and miraculous powers. The ultimate goal of the style of yoga described in the Sayings of Gorakhnath concerns the attainment of immortality and divinization of its adepts. This is achieved by redirecting the trajectory of the seminal fluid, which in the process transforms into the elixir, the amrt. In order to accomplish that goal, a regime of yogic practices is suggested, consisting of the assumption of a steady posture, breathing exercises, mantra chanting, and meditation. Djudjevic and Singh's translations are preceded by an introduction and accompanied by notes, which contextualize and elucidate the subject matter.

A Genealogy of Devotion

A Genealogy of Devotion PDF Author: Patton E. Burchett
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231548834
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
In this book, Patton E. Burchett offers a path-breaking genealogical study of devotional (bhakti) Hinduism that traces its understudied historical relationships with tantra, yoga, and Sufism. Beginning in India’s early medieval “Tantric Age” and reaching to the present day, Burchett focuses his analysis on the crucial shifts of the early modern period, when the rise of bhakti communities in North India transformed the religious landscape in ways that would profoundly affect the shape of modern-day Hinduism. A Genealogy of Devotion illuminates the complex historical factors at play in the growth of bhakti in Sultanate and Mughal India through its pivotal interactions with Indic and Persianate traditions of asceticism, monasticism, politics, and literature. Shedding new light on the importance of Persian culture and popular Sufism in the history of devotional Hinduism, Burchett’s work explores the cultural encounters that reshaped early modern North Indian communities. Focusing on the Rāmānandī bhakti community and the tantric Nāth yogīs, Burchett describes the emergence of a new and Sufi-inflected devotional sensibility—an ethical, emotional, and aesthetic disposition—that was often critical of tantric and yogic religiosity. Early modern North Indian devotional critiques of tantric religiosity, he shows, prefigured colonial-era Orientalist depictions of bhakti as “religion” and tantra as “magic.” Providing a broad historical view of bhakti, tantra, and yoga while simultaneously challenging dominant scholarly conceptions of them, A Genealogy of Devotion offers a bold new narrative of the history of religion in India.

A dialogue between a christian an a Hindu about religion

A dialogue between a christian an a Hindu about religion PDF Author: David N. Lorenzen
Publisher: El Colegio de Mexico AC
ISBN: 6074627711
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The “Dialogue between and Christian and a Hindu about Religion” (Javābasvāla aika krīstīān aura aika hīṃdu ke bīca mo imāna ke upara) was written in about 1751 by Giuseppe Maria da Gargnano with help from his Capuchin friend and colleague, Cassiano da Macerata, and from an unnamed Brahmin teacher. This teacher apparently taught Giuseppe Maria to read Hindustani and some Sanskrit, instructed him in the basics of Hindu religion, and corrected the Hindustani text of the “Dialogue”. A copy of the Hindustani text was first presented to the raja of Bettiah in 1751. Subsequently, an undetermined number of hand-made copies were distributed among persons in the Bettiah area. A copy of the Hindustani text in an Indian script related to nagari, dated in 1751, together with an Italian version was sent to Rome and is now in the Vatican Library (Borg. ind. 11). Another copy of the text, dated in 1787, is also found in the same Library (Borg. ind. 16). In the context of the still limited progress of European studies of Indian languages and culture in Giuseppe Maria’s historical period, and despite the shortcomings of his own cultural upbringing and intellectual training, the Hindu-Christian dialogu remains a pioneering linguistic and religious experiment.

The Poesis of Peace

The Poesis of Peace PDF Author: Klaus-Gerd Giesen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317021150
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Exploring the relations between the concepts of peace and violence with aesthetics, nature, the body, and environmental issues, The Poesis of Peace applies a multidisciplinary approach to case studies in both Western and non-Western contexts including Islam, Chinese philosophy, Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Established and renowned theologians and philosophers, such as Kevin Hart, Eduardo Mendieta, and Clemens Sedmak, as well as upcoming and talented young academics look at peace and non-violence through the lens of recent scholarly advances on the subject achieved in the fields of theology, philosophy, political theory, and environmentalism.