Suchergebnisse

" A theme of abiding interest in religious studies is the sharp contrast between cultures with a monotheistic paternal deity and cultures with pluralistic maternal deities. These two principles for organizing religious life are vast; attempts to understand their implications lead to an overwhelmingly diverse set of facts and their meanings. In Freud's India, Alf Hiltebeitel takes up this enormously engaging question, focusing on the thinking of two spokespeople for the inner life of their culture-- Sigmund Freud and Girindrasekhar Bose. Alf Hiltebeitel considers the attempts of these two men to communicate with and understand each other and these issues, in the heated context of emotionally divisive allegiances. The book is elegant in its nuanced attention to these two thinkers, and its tightly controlled exploration of what their interactions indicate about their contributions and limitations as representatives of the psychology and religion of their respective cultures. Anxieties about mothers separate Eastern from Western imaginations. They separate Freud from Bose, and they separate Hindu foundational texts from the Hebrew foundational texts. "--

The Mahabharata royal patriline is tracked and contextualized here in relation to two prominent themes: its concept of a divine plan (somewhat paralleled in the Ramayana) and its chief genre term itihasa or 'history'. It is found that these two themes intersect in the Mahabharata at the point where the goddess Ganga 'descends' into the royal line as the wife of King Samtanu. Ganga's intervention then provides new means to interpret the part played by Samtanu's second wife, Kali Satyavati. Attention is given to etymological clues to the ways these two mothers, and their sons Bhisma and Vyasa respectively, supply continuity to the dynastic line.

This article takes up passages that allow for comparison of Buddhist and Brahmanical 'law' in dharmasastra (including the early dharmasutras) and Vinaya. The discussion of Vinaya draws on Steven Collins's demonstration of Vinaya allusions in the Aggañña Sutta. The article revisits the advocacy for a pre-Mauryan dating of this sutta, arguing that it is unlikely. It proposes that we redirect discussions of the Aggañña Sutta's satiric and humorous allusions to Brahmanical law and practices to focus on the moment that involves the building of houses. And, taking this sutta to refer to written 'books', it challenges scholarly insistence on its orality.