The Thousand-armed Avalokiteśvara

The Thousand-armed Avalokiteśvara PDF Author: Lokesh Chandra
Publisher: Abhinav Publications
ISBN: 9788170172475
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
A Fundamental Work Based On Original Sanskrit, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, The Lost Iranian Language Sogdian And Tibetan Works-On The Origin Of Avalokitesvara. It Indentifies The Several Prevalent Folk-Deities Which Were Assimilated Into The Iconographical Form. The Worship Of Avalokitesvara Was Accompanied By A Dharani (Recited Hymn). This Work Describes Five Versions Of Thedharani. The Dharani Is An Essential Part Of The Zen Repertoire Of Sutras. It Was Transliterated Into Chinese Eight Times Over A Span Of Eight Enturies: From The 7 Th To The 14 Th Century. The Present Edition Is Not Only A Reconstruction Of The Original Sanskrit Text Of The Hymn, But A Detailed Study With The Texts Of Bhagavad-Dharma Amoghavajra, Vajrabodhi And Chih-T Ung In Chinese Characters. The Korean, Sogdian, And Tibetan Texts Are Also Given In Their Indigenous Scripts. Siddham Manuscripts From Korea And Japan Have Been Done In Facsimile. Popular Iconic Vocabulary Becomes The Essence Of Ever-Renewing Theogony. From An Attendant Acolyte Of Amitabha In The Sukhavativyuha, Avalokita Gained Independence As A Separate Deity In His Own Right. The System Of Iconographic Classification Of 33 Types, With Their Symbols, Bijas And Mudras Presents A New Model For Buddhist Iconographic Studies. The Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Tibetan And Sogdian Transliterations Of Sanskrit Hymns To The Thousand-Eyed, Thousand-Armed Avalokitesvara Have The Attributes Of Hari And Hara And Have The Faces Of Narasimha And Varaha. In Reconstructing These Versions It Became Imperative That Sanskrit Texts Bearing On Harihara Be Consulted And The Iconography Of Harihara Be Analysed With Precision. The 36 Orphological Types Of Harihara Have Been Defined In A Succinct Manner On The Principles Of Icono-Taxonomy. A Novel Departure In The Study Of The History Of Art. Comparison Has Resulted In The Discovery Of The Mythogenesis Of Primal Arya Avalokitesvara, As Well As His Form With A Thousand Arms, With A Thousand Eyes On Each Of The Thousand Palms. The Emergence Of The Thousand Armed Avalokitesvara Is Linked With The Interiorisation Of Isvara-Siva Into Avalokita As Visvarupa. Amoghavajra S Version Indicates The Connection Of The Thousand-Armed Thousand-Eyed Avalokitesvara With The Security Of The State. New New Readings Of The Dharant That Emerge Out Of Comparative Exegesis Are Refreshing Like The Ozone-Laden Morning Air, With A Distinct Character, With Poetic Profundity And Devotional Fervour. While This Volume Resurrects The Dharani, It Traces The Very Origins Of The First Avalokita-Svara, And The Continuous And Perplexing Processes Of Assimilation That Travel Into A Phantasmagoria Of Universes. Avalokita Becomes A Wave Of Many Waves.

The Thousand-armed Avalokiteśvara

The Thousand-armed Avalokiteśvara PDF Author: Lokesh Chandra
Publisher: Abhinav Publications
ISBN: 9788170172475
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Fundamental Work Based On Original Sanskrit, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, The Lost Iranian Language Sogdian And Tibetan Works-On The Origin Of Avalokitesvara. It Indentifies The Several Prevalent Folk-Deities Which Were Assimilated Into The Iconographical Form. The Worship Of Avalokitesvara Was Accompanied By A Dharani (Recited Hymn). This Work Describes Five Versions Of Thedharani. The Dharani Is An Essential Part Of The Zen Repertoire Of Sutras. It Was Transliterated Into Chinese Eight Times Over A Span Of Eight Enturies: From The 7 Th To The 14 Th Century. The Present Edition Is Not Only A Reconstruction Of The Original Sanskrit Text Of The Hymn, But A Detailed Study With The Texts Of Bhagavad-Dharma Amoghavajra, Vajrabodhi And Chih-T Ung In Chinese Characters. The Korean, Sogdian, And Tibetan Texts Are Also Given In Their Indigenous Scripts. Siddham Manuscripts From Korea And Japan Have Been Done In Facsimile. Popular Iconic Vocabulary Becomes The Essence Of Ever-Renewing Theogony. From An Attendant Acolyte Of Amitabha In The Sukhavativyuha, Avalokita Gained Independence As A Separate Deity In His Own Right. The System Of Iconographic Classification Of 33 Types, With Their Symbols, Bijas And Mudras Presents A New Model For Buddhist Iconographic Studies. The Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Tibetan And Sogdian Transliterations Of Sanskrit Hymns To The Thousand-Eyed, Thousand-Armed Avalokitesvara Have The Attributes Of Hari And Hara And Have The Faces Of Narasimha And Varaha. In Reconstructing These Versions It Became Imperative That Sanskrit Texts Bearing On Harihara Be Consulted And The Iconography Of Harihara Be Analysed With Precision. The 36 Orphological Types Of Harihara Have Been Defined In A Succinct Manner On The Principles Of Icono-Taxonomy. A Novel Departure In The Study Of The History Of Art. Comparison Has Resulted In The Discovery Of The Mythogenesis Of Primal Arya Avalokitesvara, As Well As His Form With A Thousand Arms, With A Thousand Eyes On Each Of The Thousand Palms. The Emergence Of The Thousand Armed Avalokitesvara Is Linked With The Interiorisation Of Isvara-Siva Into Avalokita As Visvarupa. Amoghavajra S Version Indicates The Connection Of The Thousand-Armed Thousand-Eyed Avalokitesvara With The Security Of The State. New New Readings Of The Dharant That Emerge Out Of Comparative Exegesis Are Refreshing Like The Ozone-Laden Morning Air, With A Distinct Character, With Poetic Profundity And Devotional Fervour. While This Volume Resurrects The Dharani, It Traces The Very Origins Of The First Avalokita-Svara, And The Continuous And Perplexing Processes Of Assimilation That Travel Into A Phantasmagoria Of Universes. Avalokita Becomes A Wave Of Many Waves.

Thousand-Armed Avalokitesvara

Thousand-Armed Avalokitesvara PDF Author: Lokesh Chandra
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780070166301
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description


The Indian Buddhist Iconography Mainly Based on the Sādhanamālā and Other Cognate Tāntric Texts of Rituals

The Indian Buddhist Iconography Mainly Based on the Sādhanamālā and Other Cognate Tāntric Texts of Rituals PDF Author: Benoytosh Bhattacharyya
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description


A Thousand Hands

A Thousand Hands PDF Author: Nathan Jishin Michon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781896559315
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
A Thousand Hands is an anthology of 50 articles by Buddhist chaplains, teachers, therapists, and social workers, presenting Buddhist approaches and resources designed to help community leaders respond to the many challenges brought to them by their communities. As a Buddhist community leader--or even a concerned community member--we may have read many sutras, practiced thousands of hours of meditation, or become well versed in Buddhist philosophy, but that does not prepare us for every situation we will face. It is very natural that people turn to a spiritual or religious community in times of trouble, and when such a person comes our hearts may fill with compassion and want to do whatever we can to ease their suffering. However, conversations with Buddhists in the West show that both training and resources in these areas are often lacking. This book is divided into three sections. The first deals primarily with ways to help one's self--ways to help develop one's capacity to be present in an effective way to help others in need, whether that is through listening more effectively or better organizing a group's money in order to keep a temple or organization stable. The second section is more about helping individuals with particular issues, such as cancer, divorce, anger, financial troubles, and depression. The third section contains chapters with broader community themes like group facilitation, leading projects, creating family programs, and volunteering. In each chapter, further resources, recommended reading, and relevant organizations are listed. "The voices contributing to this volume demonstrate that North American Buddhism is awakening from its predominantly inward and private focus and realizing that our strength for the future lies in healthy, whole, and peaceful communities. Yet the forms of suffering that manifest in communities boggle the imagination in their diversity. The essays collected here show that the necessary concern has been aroused and the helping hands of compassion are reaching out, each hand, like that of the bodhisattva Guan Yin, emblazoned with the eye of intelligence that looks into the underlying causes and the prospects for a solution." Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi "A Thousand Hands provides a remarkably broad set of resources aimed at helping people navigate suffering with greater clarity and ease. The editors have done a wonderful job gathering together many wise voices to share on a host of important topics." Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness "Buddhist communities struggle with the reality that we bring the world with us--that walking into the doors of the sangha does not instantly liberate us from our mental illness, addictions, trauma, and emotional woundedness. Even more jarring is confronting the truth that our sanghas are organized to privilege the mental, physical, and fi nancial elite. The Buddha taught a Dharma for all ages, and at its heart is the call for radical loving integrated with truth. This book helps us to hold love and truth together as we move into the profound, beautiful, and very uncomfortable space of meeting people where they are and asking: How can I care for you?" Lama Rod Owens, co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation

The Weaving of Mantra

The Weaving of Mantra PDF Author: Ryûichi Abé
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231528870
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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Book Description
The great Buddhist priest Kûkai (774-835) is credited with the introduction and establishment of tantric -or esoteric -Buddhism in early ninth-century Japan. In Ryûichi Abé examines this important religious figure -neglected in modern academic literatu

Buddha in the Crown

Buddha in the Crown PDF Author: John Clifford Holt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195362462
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Historical, anthropological, and philosophical in approach, Buddha in the Crown is a case study in religious and cultural change. It examines the various ways in which Avalokitesvara, the most well known and proliferated bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism throughout south, southeast, and east Asia, was assimilated into the transforming religious culture of Sri Lanka, one of the most pluralistic in Asia. Exploring the expressions of the bodhisattva's cult in Sanskrit and Sinhala literature, in iconography, epigraphy, ritual, symbol, and myth, the author develops a provocative thesis regarding the dynamics of religious change. Interdisciplinary in scope, addressing a wide variety of issues relating to Buddhist thought and practice, and providing new and original information on the rich cultural history of Sri Lanka, this book will interest students of Buddhism and South Asia.

Where the Heart Beats

Where the Heart Beats PDF Author: Kay Larson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101572485
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
A “heroic” and “fascinating” biography of John Cage showing how his work, and that of countless American artists, was transformed by Zen Buddhism (The New York Times) Where the Heart Beats is the story of the tremendous changes sweeping through American culture following the Second World War, a time when the arts in America broke away from centuries of tradition and reinvented themselves. Painters converted their canvases into arenas for action and gesture, dancers embraced pure movement over narrative, performance artists staged “happenings” in which anything could happen, poets wrote words determined by chance. In this tumultuous period, a composer of experimental music began a spiritual quest to know himself better. His earnest inquiry touched thousands of lives and created controversies that are ongoing. He devised unique concerts—consisting of notes chosen by chance, randomly tuned radios, and silence—in the service of his absolute conviction that art and life are one inseparable truth, a seamless web of creation divided only by illusory thoughts. What empowered John Cage to compose his incredible music—and what allowed him to inspire tremendous transformations in the lives of his fellow artists—was Cage’s improbable conversion to Zen Buddhism. This is the story of how Zen saved Cage from himself. Where the Heart Beats is the first book to address the phenomenal importance of Zen Buddhism to John Cage’s life and to the artistic avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s. Zen’s power to transform Cage’s troubled mind—by showing him his own enlightened nature—liberated Cage from an acute personal crisis that threatened everything he most deeply cared abouthis life, his music, and his relationship with his life partner, Merce Cunningham. Caught in a society that rejected his art, his politics, and his sexual orientation, Cage was transformed by Zen from an overlooked and marginal musician into the absolute epicenter of the avant-garde. Using Cage’s life as a starting point, Where the Heart Beats looks beyond to the individuals Cage influenced and the art he inspired. His creative genius touched Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Alan Kaprow, Morton Feldman, and Leo Castelli, who all went on to revolutionize their respective disciplines. As Cage’s story progresses, as his collaborators’ trajectories unfurl, Where the Heart Beats shows the blossoming of Zen in the very heart of American culture.

Deities of Tibetan Buddhism

Deities of Tibetan Buddhism PDF Author: Martin Willson
Publisher: Wisdom Publications
ISBN: 9780861710980
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An extraordinary encyclopedia of Buddhist icons. Illustrating the Rin 'byung brgya rtsa, the Nar thang brgya rtsa, and the Vajravali, the book is based on a collection of over five hundred images of Tibetan deities. The images, presented in the book at full scale, were originally created by a master artist in the early nineteenth century to serve as initiation cards (tsakli). The original tsakli were woodblock prints, hand colored at the request of a Ch'ing Dynasty nobleman who had received the initiations. Such cards are used in ceremonies to introduce the practitioner to the deity and his or her practice. The paintings are housed in the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich. Deities of Tibetan Buddhism is also an indispensable reference tool for Tibetologists, students of Mahayana Buddhism, and museum curators. Its extensive supplementary materials include English translations of the basic invocation texts; the associated visualization with descriptions of the deities' postures, attributes, and colors; and the dharanis and mantras used in their invocation. Co-editor Martin Willson spent more than a decade translating and documenting this work. He has provided detailed explanations of technical terms, enlightening explanatory notes, and glossaries documenting the discrepancies in the depictions. The extensive pictorial index, featuring drawings and text by Robert Beer, explains the symbolic meaning behind the deities' implements and adornments. The cross-referenced indices for Tibetan, Sanskrit, Mongolian, and English names and terms provide quick access to vast amounts of information. Co-editor Martin Brauen and the technical staff of the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich have documented the relationship between this and other sets of initiation cards that exist elsewhere, as well as detailing the construction materials and methods involved in producing this set. Deities of Tibetan Buddhism is a reference book without peer, essential for any serious student of Tibetan and East Asian art and religion.

Dunhuang Manuscript Culture

Dunhuang Manuscript Culture PDF Author: Imre Galambos
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110727102
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
“Dunhuang Manuscript Culture” explores the world of Chinese manuscripts from ninth-tenth century Dunhuang, an oasis city along the network of pre-modern routes known today collectively as the Silk Roads. The manuscripts have been discovered in 1900 in a sealed-off side-chamber of a Buddhist cave temple, where they had lain undisturbed for for almost nine hundred years. The discovery comprised tens of thousands of texts, written in over twenty different languages and scripts, including Chinese, Tibetan, Old Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian and Sanskrit. This study centres around four groups of manuscripts from the mid-ninth to the late tenth centuries, a period when the region was an independent kingdom ruled by local families. The central argument is that the manuscripts attest to the unique cultural diversity of the region during this period, exhibiting—alongside obvious Chinese elements—the heavy influence of Central Asian cultures. As a result, it was much less ‘Chinese’ than commonly portrayed in modern scholarship. The book makes a contribution to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads.

Eleven-headed Avalokiteśvara

Eleven-headed Avalokiteśvara PDF Author: Tove E. Neville
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Illustrations: Numerous B/w Illustrations Description: The Eleven-Headed Avalokitesvara is a study of the many origins that may have played a part in arriving at this number of heads, based on forms and powers male and female forms, origins based on name, in scriptural evidence and images, as well as Hindu deities, and finally origin seen in Rock-cut litanies in caves of India. Manifold as the sources are, they led to consideration of this Bodhisattva as the highest form of compassion in the widest sense of the word, the savior for humanity of eight to ten dreads, which assail and defeat humankind, especially for exposed travelers, be they pilgrims going to visit and pray at Buddhist shrines, or monks seeking new temples or to find new masters to teach them. This essay weaves together a panorama in South Asia, moving up to Central Asia and Chinese cultures who contributed their own examples from caves in China (Tun Huang) that also held depositories of paintings brought back to modern cultures for study in Paris and London, long scrolls such as the Yunan Tali Kingdom's treasure from the late Sung period, all told tales of Buddhist iconography and styles that most often harked back to earlier Indian models. Korea found influence from China and Japan had the Eleven Headed in Metal and also of lacquer and wood in splendid examples from seventh and eight centuries on. Still, most astounding is a theory weaving the thread back to the Indian cave litanies, showing how the Bodhisattva as savior caused in practice of art to furnish the model for how the ten scenes of dreads plus the great Avalokitesvara's own face led to an eleven-headed giants seen in Indian Gupta styles.