Here is a book with poses, breathing exercises and meditations for the pregnant woman. Photos enhance clear and easy instructions for the poses. Attention to safety, mental, physical and emotional benefits of the poses, and variations are discussed very thoroughly. It is in clear and simple language. A safe and natural way to prepare for a wonderful birth experience. The book could also serve as a reference for midwives. The authors follow-up with their detailed three part course of yogic and (...) breathing exercises for women- before, during and after pregnancy. It is a complete self help book for parents, especially mothers to be and covers both the practical as well as the emotional aspects of conception, pregnancy and childbirth. (shrink)

Sri Aurobindo: the future -- Sri Aurobindo's contribution to humanity -- Sri Aurobindo's realisations -- Spirit & significance of Indian culture -- Sri Aurobindo's revelations.

Ananda Abeysekara contends that democracy, along with its cherished secular norms, is founded on the idea of a promise deferred to the future. Rooted in democracy's messianic promise is the belief that religious—political identity-such as Buddhist, Hindu, Sinhalese, Christian, Muslim, or Tamil—can be critiqued, neutralized, improved, and changed, even while remaining inseparable from the genocide of the past. This facile belief, he argues, is precisely what distracts us from challenging the violence inherent in postcolonial political sovereignty. At the same (...) time, we cannot simply dismiss the democratic concept, since it permeates so deeply through our modernist, capitalist, and humanist selves. In _The Politics of Postsecular Religion_, Abeysekara invites us to reconsider our ethical-political legacies, to look at them not as _problems_, but as _aporias_, in the Derridean sense-that is, as contradictions or impasses incapable of resolution. Disciplinary theorizing in religion and politics, he argues, is unable to identify the aporias of our postcolonial modernity. The aporetic legacies, which are like specters that cannot be wished away, demand a new kind of thinking. It is this thinking that Abeysekara calls mourning and un-inheriting. Un-inheriting is a way of meditating on history that both avoids the simple binary of remembering and forgetting and provides an original perspective on heritage, memory, and time. Abeysekara situates aporias in the settings and cultures of the United States, France, England, Sri Lanka, India, and Tibet. In presenting concrete examples of religion in public life, he questions the task of refashioning the aporetic premises of liberalism and secularism. Through close readings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, Butler, and Agamben, as well as Foucault, Asad, Chakrabarty, Balibar, and Zizek, he offers readers a way to think about the futures of postsecular politics that is both dynamic and creative. (shrink)

In the book, the author has confronteed mainly three types of such recent thinking that has boomed large, of late, on the horizon. Perhaps such thinking are evident enough of our academic terrorism and destructive intellectural chaos. The first layer dealing with the Micro materialistic approach of a Marxism historian, Prof. Sumit Sarkar where he was very scathing about the religious movements, specially about Sri Ramakrishna and the advent of the Ramakrishna Movement.

SUFISM AND VEDANTA may not be the same in many aspects, but at the same time these two have lot of similarities too. VEDANTA-specially ADVAITA VADANTA-is not that much theological perhapps. Howwever this is something which is very comparative in nature. Bhakti Schools: neither Vedanta is completely free of it. Even Sri Shankaracharya's Advaita is not that dry philosophy as it is made out to be by us. Advaita in the ultimate may be more a philosophy than a religion. But (...) it is never without religion, sp these Sufi/Advaita have some interesting common emphasis and features. Historically there are many points that could be very well traced and compared, no doubt in both the cases. (shrink)

Ananda Metteyya (Charles Henry Allan Bennett 1872–1923), according to some representations of Buddhism's transmission to the West, was a respectable member of an elite group of converts to Buddhism at the beginning of the twentieth century, who, in effect, stole recognition from a non-elite group. Whilst not contesting this basic premise, I first suggest in this paper that Ananda Metteyya was neither elite nor always, at least in the eyes of the Buddhist Society of Great Britain and Ireland, (...) ‘respectable’. In fact, he came to pose a threat to the identity that the Society sought to create for itself. I then turn to three contexts within which Ananda Metteyya placed himself: international networks for the spread of Buddhism; anti-missionary networks within Sri Lanka and Burma; antiimperialist networks. His main vehicle within the first was the Buddhasāsana Samāgama, the international Buddhist organisation he founded in 1902 and the journal that accompanied it, which was sent to between 500 and 600 libraries throughout the world. Also significant was Ananda Metteyya's call for five men from four countries to come to Burma to be trained for higher ordination. Ananda Metteyya's anti-missionary agenda was realized through the promotion of Buddhist education in Burma and through a ruthless written critique of Christianity and Christian proselytisation. An anti-imperialist agenda was implicit within this and is extended in his writing. This paper argues, therefore, that Ananda Metteyya was a central figure in the global networking of a substantial number of those interested in Buddhism in the early years of the twentieth century. He was also an early Engaged Buddhist, a critic of the West and a robust promoter of the East. (shrink)

Bhagavadacharya was the central figure in the Renaissance of Ramanandi tradition in the 20th century. He dedicated his life to gaining independence for his school from Ramanuja Sampradaya, whose leaders regarded Ramanandis as “third-class” members of the movement mostly because of the lack of shastric scholarship and inter-caste commensalities among the latter. To achieve this goal, Bhagavadacharya wrote commentaries on most of the Prasthāna-traya as well as many other works popularizing the Ramanandi version of Vishishtadvaita. He widely used his knowledge (...) of philosophy in shastric debates with his opponents among whom were not only followers of Ramanuja but also a famous Advaitin guru and political activist Swami Karpatri whom he allegedly defeated in a dispute which concerned the rights of Harijans initiated into Vaishnava tradition to enter temples and share communalities with the so-called “pure Hindus”. In my paper, I will present key philosophical and practical ideas of Bhagavadacharya based on my research conducted in the library of Bhagavadacharya Smarak Bhavan in August 2021. It will include basic details related to the acharya’s background and activities as well as analysis of his teachings within the frames of his main scope of Vishishtadvaita’s propagation among Hindus in general and Ramanandis in particular. (shrink)

"Life and philosophy of Manạvāḷa Māmun̲i, 1370-1444, and Veṅkatạnātha, 1268-1369, exponents of Śrī Vaisṇạvism"--PL-480 record.

About the Book: This sacred book deals with the life and teachings of the greatest Acharya of Hinduisim - Sri Sankara Bhagavadpada. This is not a historical biography of the Acharya, but a magnificient independent Vedantic epic. While unravelling the life of the great Master, sparks of profound spiritual insights flash forth. The Majesty of the teachings and the glory of the teacher open the sluice gates of deep peace and give the glimpse of our true nature. In (...) the course of narration, the doubts that a seeker may have, regarding Vedanta and spiritual practices, are clarified. A devout reader of this text is sure to have the experience of the sacred piligrimage along with the enlightened Sage, from Kerala to Kedar. Bhakti, Jnana and Vairgaya seep in to one's heart while absorbing the divine life. In this, the divine story of the Acharya is freely rendered. More than facts, the highest goal, Self-realisation is always kept in the background of the subject matter. This indeed is the story of spiritual India, the story of Sanatana Dharma. About the Author:Sri. Venkataraman is an Acharya of Vedanta. He resides in the holy Arunachala (Tiruvannamalai). He was born in Nochur in Palakkad (Kerala). Brought up in an orthodox Vedic tradition, he had profound exposure to vedanta jnana at the tender age of fourteen itself. His talks and writings on jnana and bhakti have already made him a legend. (shrink)

This paper contends that Ananda Abeysekara’s notion of un-inheritance, developed via a Derridean analysis of contemporary Sri Lankan politics and society, can act as a helpful supplement to the concept of justice. What one finds in Abeysekara’s analysis is an interpretation of justice as ultimately aporetic: justice both opens up to the possibility of its ever greater concrete realization and continually defers its completion. This paper begins by examining the aporetic character of justice as articulated by Derrida. It then (...) proceeds to Abeysekara’s account, situated as it is within a largely political consideration of Sri Lanka’s multicultural heritage and the recent conflicts that have arisen there. Abeysekara offers the notion of un-heritance as a way of thinking the possibility of justice precisely when political—and also religious—traditions come to an impasse, thus recognizing the inescapably aporetic structure of justice itself. (shrink)

This paper aims at an analytical explanation of the distinctive nature of music, as it has been formulated in perhaps one of the world's very first works on the subject, namely the ‘Sangeet Ratnakar’ of Pandit Sarangadeva, a 13th century musicologist of India. He, in the first chapter of the work defines music ('sangeet' in Sanskrit and Hindi) as a composite of singing or 'Gita', instrumental music or 'vadan' and dancing or ‘nrittam’. In addition, he also holds singing to be (...) the most important component of music. These two ideas are not only unquestionably acceptable , as the analysis in the paper will show, but give to Indian music , in its difference from western music, its distinctively spiritual character, making it a path to liberation or Moksha (Muktidayakam na tu ranjakam). Sarangadeva's reason, here, is not rational but empirico-inductive. It is that mainly by virtue of its 'gitam’ (singing component), which, like the Yoga system of exercise, needing only one's body as its instrument, music too needing only one’s voice is as self-sufficient and autonomous as the ultimate Reality itself (Swayamev Rajate). In the hierarchy (a distinctively ancient Indian insistence) of arts, singing is the highest and unique because in spite of being heard by the auditory sense, it affects our 'reflective sensibility' and transports us to the virtual world of melodic and rhythmic forms. Forms, as against their particular illustrations, are abstract universals. Ultimate Reality is also a Form-all comprehensive and internally harmonious. However, pure Form, whether melodic or religious or even rational like that of triangularity, is almost impossible to concentrate on. Realizing this practical difficulty, Indian scriptures and the world's first Grammarian-linguist, Acharya Panini, framed a composite sound as the manifestation of the ultimate musical Form. This purely formal-because devoid of all meaning, sound is that of 'om', spelt, in Sanskrit as a conjunction (sandhi) of 'a'+'u'+'m'. For Indian musicologists and musicians, ‘om’ is the perfect manifestation of the Sound-God or ‘Nada-Brahman’ because, 1. Its composite nature resembles God, as a harmony of 'sat', 'chit', and 'ananda'; and 2. The composite sound is self-existent as its all three components-two vowels, i.e. ‘a’, ‘u’, and one consonant i.e. ‘m’, can be and are pronounced just as they originally are, -un-elongated and un-vitiated and therefore pure. This is the reason why every recital of Indian classical vocal music is begun with an elaborate rendering of 'om' as an invocation to Sound-God or ‘Nada-Brahman’. Scholarly and authentic, this ancient Indian approach to music, is undoubtedly the earliest and original. My observation is that its main contentions like Sharang Dev’s insistence that of the three components of music, ‘gitam’ or singing is the highest, have only been translated and never argued for. In this presentation my good intention is to provide much needed rational support for making these key statements in this unparalleled Indian text, indubitable and unquestionable. (shrink)

This book presents an alternative view of cosmopolitanism, citizenship and modernity in early 20th-century India through the multiple lenses of mysticism, travel, friendship, art, and politics.It makes a key intervention in the understanding of cosmopolitan modernity based on the lives and experiences of Rabindranath Tagore, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Sri Aurobindo, Mirra Alfassa, James Cousins, Paul Richard, Dilip Kumar Roy, and Taraknath Das. Using archival texts and photographs, Mohanty interrogates the ideas of tradition and modernity, the local and the global, and (...) Self and the world as integral to the conception of a cosmopolitan world order. The volume will interest scholars and students of modern Indian history, comparative literature, cultural studies, Indian philosophy, and South Asian studies and the general reader. (shrink)

This paper identifies the field of work as an adventure of consciousness and uses a new phrase to describe it—WORKSHIP, work as worship. Based primarily on the classical psycho-philosophy of India, laid down in the vedantic literature, this model of workship attempts a shift in paradigm from the Greek concept of work as 'ponos' or pain to a liberating dimension of work, the ultimate aims of which are ananda and mukti. Examining the various elements that constitute workship, the author (...) comes up with the fourfold paths of workship: discipline, righteousness, sacrifice and transcendence, and analyses them in detail. Finally, the paper argues that workship has the potential to unfold man's latent spirituality for a sustainable world order. 1. Rene Fonere; 'Krishnamurti and Modern Thought', in The Mind of J. Krishnamurti, p. 170. 2. Willis Harman and John Hormann; Creative Work: The Constructive Role of Business in a Transform ing Society, p. 13. 3. S.K. Chakraborty Management by Values, p. 166. 4. Sri Aurobindo; 'Right Attitude in Work', quoted in All India Magazine, p. 5. 5. Ibid., p. 32 6. 'The Meaning of Work', in Man, Work and Society, ed. William Nosow and William H. Form, p. 18. 7. Wayne W. Dyer; You Will See It When You Believe It, p. 41. 8. 'The Meaning of Work', p. 4. 9. Ibid., p. 35. 10. Swami Gambhirananda; 'Taitiriya Upanishad', in Eight Upanishads, Vol. 1, p. 392. 11. Jyoti Sobel and Prem; The Hierarchy of Minds—A Compilation from the Works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, p. 55. 12. Ibid., p. 69. 13. Ibid., p. 76. 14. Ibid., Introduction, p. XIII. 15. World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts, ed. Andrew Wilson. 16. Chakraborty, Management by Values, p. 164. 17. Swami Vivekananda; Pearls of Wisdom, p. 202. 18. The Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, ed. Shri man Narayan, Vol. 4, Chapter 3. 19. Sri Aurobindo; The Message of the Gita, p. 80. 20. World Scripture, p. 638. 21. Ibid., p. 620. 22. Ibid. 23. Ronald Robertson; Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, p. 93. (shrink)

Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity and Difference, Ananda Abeysekara, pp. xvi+271. ISBN 1-57003-467-2.

This book offers reflections on a daunting and controversial ethical question: How should we treat the strangers who enter this country illegally? To understand the experience of those directly confronted by this problem, Ananda Rose traveled to the Sonoran desert at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. There she gathered opinions from Minutemen, Border Patrol agents, Catholic nuns, humanitarian air workers, left-wing protestors, ranchers, and other ordinary citizens in southern Arizona. She depicts the results of these interviews as (...) two starkly opposed ideological perspectives: that of religious activists who embrace a biblically-inspired model of hospitality that stresses love of strangers and a "borderless" compassion; and that of law enforcement, which is concerned with safety, security, and strict respect for international borders. (shrink)

The Pāli word mettā is a multi-significant term meaning loving kindness, friendliness, goodwill, benevolence, fellowship, amity, concord, inoffensiveness and non-violence. The Pāli commentators define mettā as the strong wish for the welfare and happiness of others (parahita-parasukha-karana). Essentially mettā is an altruistic attitude of love and friendliness as distinguished from mere amiability based on self-interest. Through mettā one refuses to be offensive and renounces bitterness, resentment and animosity of every kind, developing instead a mind of friendliness, accommodativeness and benevolence which (...) seeks the well-being and happiness of others. True mettā is devoid of self-interest. It evokes within a warm-hearted feeling of fellowship, sympathy and love, which grows boundless with practice and overcomes all social, religious, racial, political and economic barriers. Mettā is indeed a universal, unselfish and all-embracing love. Mettā makes one a pure font of well-being and safety for others. Just as a mother gives her own life to protect her child, so mettā only gives and never wants anything in return. To promote one's own interest is a primordial motivation of human nature. When this urge is transformed into the desire to promote the interest and happiness of others, not only is the basic urge of self-happiness of others, not only is the basic urge of self-seeking overcome, but the mind becomes universal by identifying its own interest with the interest of all. By making this change one also promotes one's own well-being in the best possible manner. Mettā is the protective and immensely patient attitude of a mother who forbears all difficulties for the sake of her child and ever protects it despite its misbehaviour. Metta is also the attitude of a friend who wants to give one the best to further one's well-being. If these qualities of mettā are sufficiently cultivated through mettā-bhāvanā-the meditation on universal love-the result is the acquisition of a tremendous inner power which preserves, protects and heals both oneself and others.Apart from its higher implications, today mettā is a pragmatic necessity. In a world menaced by all kinds of destructiveness, mettā in deed, word and thought is the only constructive means to bring concord, peace and mutual understanding. Indeed, mettā is the supreme means, for it forms the fundamental tenet of all the higher religions as well as the basis for all benevolent activities intended to promote human well-being.The present booklet aims at exploring various facets of mettā both in theory and in practice. The examination of the doctrinal and ethical side of mettā will proceed through a study of the popular Karanīya Mettā Sutta, the Buddha's "Hymn of Universal Love". In connection with this theme we will also look at several other short texts dealing with mettā. The explanation of mettā-bhāvanā, the meditation on universal love, will give the practical directions for developing this type of contemplation as set forth in the main meditation texts of the Theravāda Buddhist tradition, the Visuddhimagga, the Vimuttimagga and the Patisambhidamagga. (shrink)

Human development can be seen as the process of giving more effective expression to human values. Modern business philosophy has a certain viewpoint or perspective on human potential based on the secular humanistic values of the west and the scientific theories on the nature of man and his evolution. We are bound to welcome the New Paradigm in Business because it opens the path for a decisive step forward in evolution from an authoritarian, mechanistic, Taylorian era to a freer and (...) a more humanistic ethos in business. (shrink)

No relato de experiência será apresentada uma reflexão sobre prática pedagógica realizada em uma instituição de Educação Infantil da zona norte do município do Rio de Janeiro. A ação pedagógica se inspirou na biografia da bailarina Mercedes Baptista que dialogou de forma interdisciplinar e lúdica com a cultura e história afro-brasileira, buscando promover uma educação antirracista na primeira infância colocando em prática Lei n. 10.639/03. Palavras-chave: Educação Infantil, Lei n. 10.639/03, Mercedes Baptista.

Correspondence with a disciple revealing an altogether unknown facet of Sri Aurobindo's personality: his great sense of humour.

The late Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, curator of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, uniquely combined art historian, philosopher, orientalist, linguist, and expositor in his person. His knowledge of the arts and handcrafts of the Orient was unexcelled and his numerous monographs on Oriental art either established or revolutionized entire fields. He was also a great Orientalist, with an almost unmatched understanding of traditional culture. He covered the philosophic and religious experience of the entire premodern world, east (...) and west, and for him primitive, medieval European, and classical Indian experiences of truth and art were only different dialects in a common language. Finally, Coomaraswamy was a provocative writer, whose erudition was expressed in a delightful, aphoristic style. The nine essays in this book are among his most stimulating. They discuss such matters as the true function of aesthetics in art, the importance of symbolism, and the importance of intellectual and philosophical background to the artists; they demonstrate that abstract art and primitive art, despite superficial resemblances, are completely divergent; and they deal with the common philosophy which pervades all great art, the nature of medieval art, folklore, and modern art, the beauty inherent in mathematics, and the union of traditional symbolism and individual portraiture in premodern cultures. (shrink)

The increasing availability and popularity of ways to capture personal memories using technologies such as digital cameras is beginning to alter the way in which personal memory images are produced, retained and circulated. Unlike the analog technologies, it is now possible to create an immediately available presence on the Internet. When examined from the perspective of voice, this phenomenon expands the potential of creating personal history narratives that could be collated together to produce a non‐institutional history of an era. This (...) paper explores the ways in which the digital technologies can facilitate the production of such histories and what the technologies could do the sense of presence of an individual in the realm of the virtual. (shrink)

The East has been for centuries the holy, the sacred, the source of life. Not only does the sun rise in the East, so does a Gautam Buddha. This book offers a compilation of Osho's discourses on some of the enlightened Masters who were born in the East: Atisha, Baul mystics, Boddhidharma, the Buddha, Chuang Tze, Kabir, and others. The East has been for centuries, or perhaps forever, the holy, the sacred, the source of life. Not only does the sun (...) rise in the East, so does a Gautam Buddha. The East has produced thousands of mystics. Just as the West has produced great. (shrink)

Translation of a work, originally written in Pali, on Buddhist ethics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sikhism between Tradition and "Assemblage":Reflections on Arvind Mandair's Sikh PhilosophyAnanda Abeysekara (bio)Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World. By Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.My central concern in this essay is how to think about the relation between genealogy and tradition in Arvind Mandair's Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). I begin with a brief discussion of a lecture titled (...) "A Genealogy of Liberty" delivered by Quentin Skinner at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, which he would give again, with minor changes, in 2015 at the University of Chicago and in 2017 at Stanford University. At the outset of the lecture, joining forces with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, he says, "Here I am a Nietzschean, and it is reflected in my title"—contending that "concepts [like liberty] that have histories cannot have definitions." In giving a concise history of the rival "polemical" claims made by Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Mill, Arendt, Taylor, and others about the concept of liberty, Skinner concludes that, contrary to what Anglo-American philosophy claims, there is not one "coherent way of thinking about liberty" in its contested genealogy. And "while each of these accounts is coherent in its own terms, you cannot combine them. This is genealogy. You can't get this to be the concept of liberty. You are going to have to make some choices, because they don't fit together. So what choice should you make? As to the answer, I leave that up to you" (Skinner 2016).The puzzle of how to think about such a genealogy was palpable in the questions from the audience that followed Skinner's lecture. Noteworthy was one question, about how the thinkers—for example from Hobbes to John Stuart Mill—in the history of the debate about liberty seem to "move around," their views seeming to "bleed into one another" (Skinner 2015). That is, isn't John Stuart Mill's view of liberty—as something that one can voluntarily renounce by internalizing the external views or customs—more or less the same as Hobbes' view of liberty as something free from external interference? And hence don't these competing views after all "fit together" within a single narrative? Ultimately, the concern here boils down to a question about the definition of liberty. [End Page 333]But what the presupposition in the question misses is that each of these positions—as Skinner carefully argues—is "ideological," "polemical," and "contested"; that is, these positions—even though Skinner does not say this explicitly—are marked by distinct forms of historical sensibility. That each of the historical positions, again as Skinner rightly argues, is "coherent" already grants that the sensibilities that define them within their specific conditions cannot be reproduced. That is, to extend Skinner's argument, these sensibilities cannot simply be "combined" within a seamless narrative because they presuppose relationships of power in which they have the force of intelligibility that they do in particular historical contexts. But the presumption about the meaning of a concept—for example the concept of "creativity" or "emptiness"—that can be readily and universally identified in a historical narrative is prevalent in other disciplines like Buddhist studies and South Asian studies, where, despite scholars using the term, genealogy remains poorly thought through (Abeysekara 2023; Walser 2018).1Largely absent in Skinner's genealogy is any discussion of the concept of "tradition" itself even though at times he alludes to "the tradition of liberty." This may not be a simple oversight on Skinner's part, but its very absence raises the question of whether liberalism itself is a discursive, embodied tradition in the ways a religious tradition works, as conceptualized by Talal Asad and others. Asad has described liberalism itself as a certain kind of "tradition" constituted by historical disputes (Asad 2009).2 And the broader implication of that argument is that, because it is a tradition animated by the very debates about what constitutes it, those who make claims about it are already situated within that tradition. And so it is unsound to speak of multiple traditions of liberty and, by extension, "multiple modernities... (shrink)

Concept of Knowledge in Indic philopsphy; a study.

The Life Divine explores for the Modern mind the great streams of Indian metaphysical thought, reconciling the truths behind each and from this synthesis ...

We examine whether and when socially oriented shareholder activists use firms’ corporate social performance (CSP) to identify them as attractive targets for their activism. We build on the research in social movements theory and stakeholder theory to theorize how firms’ engagement with primary and secondary stakeholders reflected in their technical and institutional CSP respectively allows socially oriented shareholder activists to identify targets. We develop a theoretical model by identifying corporate targets’ degree of (1) receptivity to and (2) need to comply (...) with activist demands as two key dimensions of their corporate opportunity structure that explains the variance in firms’ attractiveness as targets for activist demands. We show that a firm’s technical and institutional CSP independently affect the likelihood of activists targeting the firm. We also show that our model has greater explanatory power at firms with high resource slack and from activists not identifying as socially responsible investment funds. Analysis of CSP and shareholder proposals data of 992 U.S. public firms over an 8-year window of observation largely supports our theory. (shrink)

An attempt to explain the theory behind medieval European and Asiatic art, especially art in India.