“An assemblage of twenty-six scholarly essays: in honour of Dr Kapila Vatsyayan, the book attempts to conjure up the integral vision of art — exploring, as it does, the underlying unity of different disciplines. Written by distinguished Indian and foreign scholars: artists, art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, scientists, philosophers and litterateurs, who have shared or subscribed to Dr Vatsyayan’s holistic vision of arts, these essays look for the linkages that have existed within the arts, between the arts, and across the cultures — focusing, contextually, on the form, the content, and the vision of art in terms of time and space. With at once stimulating alternative viewpoints available to humankind today, the authors consider space, time and consciousness as they are related to, and expressed in, metaphor, symbol and creative process. Together with cross-cultural comparisons of art, the book also explores the future of man as an artist. Art: The Integral Vision, besides the Editors’ Introduction giving an overview on the presentations, is blessed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s personal message. A foremost authority on Indian art and culture, Dr Kapila Vatsyayan is well-known to all serious scholars of art history, religion, philosophy and cosmology. A prolific author and recipient of several honours, including the prestigious Padma Shree (1990) and Padma Vibhushan (2011), she has convincingly spelt out the unifying principles of cultural plurality and the interdependence and interrelatedness of creative arts. This holistic vision — unmistakably manifest in her writings — has come to finest fruition in her setting up (in 1985) the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi. This is a fascinating book for wide-ranging specialists and students interested in the mathematical, geometrical, metaphysical, astrophysical, cosmological, philosophical, psychological, historical, mythological and metaphorical understanding of art, especially the Indian art.”
The volume presents views on life from the traditional as well as modern perspectives to come up with many interpretations. Indologists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and physical and social scientists profess that traditional thought and modern science offer two different world-views on life: the first encompassing a wholeness of life, and the other explaining the universe and life with ideas of the realm of matter alone. Referring to various ancient texts as well as thoughts of social scientists based on empirical studies, the contributors delve into the Upanishadic and Vedic concepts of life, and the Hindu astrological and ayurvedic perception of life. They examine the Christian perspective of life as well. Discussing the theme from the viewpoint of physical law, the book surveys evolution of life and extinction theories, focusing on development of life over 600 million years from simple to complex. It ponders over questions like radical difference between living and non-living matter though both consist of molecules. Connecting science to societal development, it deals with ancient community theories on life and nature taking specific ethnic communities like the Mesoamericans and the Santals in India as examples. The book is an all-inclusive and extensive study of traditional and scientific perspectives on the life origin, urges and responses, meaning and essence of life, and its development.
This volume is devoted to a thorough understanding of the concept of senses as it has been interpreted in the ancient Asian traditions with particular reference to Indian religious and philosophical thought. It examines the functions of the sense-organs and the perception of them adopting a sociological and scientific approach. The first part of the presentation comments on the recurring cycle of Five Senses in Chinese, Tibetan and Indian philosophy. It takes up ancient knowledge on the senses as can be gained from the Vedas and the Upanishads, the Buddhist Abhidharma text and Jainism, as also from Islamic and Christian philosophies. They relate functioning of the sense-organs to aesthetic perception. Articles in the second part examine ethnic-cultural communities’ responses to senses and attribution of functions to them, as, for instance, the importance attached to the senses by the traditional snake-charmers. They study responses by plant and animal life to their environment and inquire into the biological processes involved in sense perceptions. Modern technology is discussed as imitating the Five Senses. These articles should be of benefit to scholars interested in learning about the different aspects of Indian religious and philosophical perceptions.
If life is a reality, the death is an eternal truth. Does immortality mean clinging to body? If so, it cannot be the life artificially alive as in modern hospitals. Is extinction of species important? The recent developments in the field of molecular biology to clone the extinct animals may raise another dimension: do the species ever die? Death is not the extinction of life, it rather opens a horizon for new journey on this planet or the other. If a person elevates himself and immensely contributes to the society, he gets perpetuated and becomes immortal. Every culture has its own eschatology bearing with death, rituals, customs, beliefs and values. While the Hindus and the Buddhists adhere to the theory of reincarnation, the Muslims and the Christians hold the concept of eternal after life. In the present book, originally the proceedings of the seminar organized by the N.K. Bose Memorial Foundation, Varanasi, various distinguished scholars have richly contributed in presenting an in-depth study of the concept of death from the distinct viewpoint of all religions and cultures and at the same time taking into account their common concept of continuity of life after death in contrary to the biological science that adheres to the mechanism of cell-death. Through the social, philosophical, medical, and ayurvedic approaches to death, the existence of soul based on the ideas of immortality and ancestor-worship has been further validated. The book has demonstrated as to how this hard-headed research can illuminate a certain theory that would serve as a bridge between the physical science and social science, the purpose being to reveal the most overall general character of Nature and the nature of Man. This book would definitely appeal to all general readers and more particularly to those of philosophical temperament keen to know more about Death and also the world beyond it.
The result of a seminars proceedings, the volume presents an understanding of God in various religions and traditions around the world. It examines the concept of the Brahman in Hindu religious thought, and God as forming the relationship between the unmanifest Brahman and the manifest Universe. It views the approach of the Semitic religions that make absolute difference between God and Man. It discusses the glory associated with God, the nature of the Supreme God and His lesser denominations as well as the modern notion of God as a human creation and residing in the mind of Man. It delves into the core of the Upanishadic thought, God in Tibetan thought, signs of Allah and his attributes in Islam, God in the Zoroastrian faith, Buddhism and Jainism vis-a-vis the notion of divinity and the Christian conception of the divine. It deals with God in the Shamanic cosmogonies of some Adivasi groups of eastern India and the syncretic folk deities of Sundarbans in West Bengal. The scholars interpret the cosmological, teleological and ontological proofs, in various forms, to understand the reality of God.
The volume, with its painstaking studies, will prove invaluable to scholars and readers, mainly those associated with religious studies.
This book, divided into three parts, presents the independent thoughts of distinguished scholars on the satiety of life, its various styles and meanings in reference to religion and scriptures vis-à-vis modern science. The essays in the first part, based on the Shastras, try to explain the conception of life in Hindu, Buddhist, Jaina, Muslim and the Christian religions. The second part aims to understand the subject of Life and also to explain its essence on the basis of the Upanishads, Gita and other Shastric and Puranic teachings. The writings focus on, among other things, the mystery of life and death, the regularity of life, the effect of music on life, and the calculation of life on the basis of astrology. The third part (Modern Science) is a sincere attempt to understand life with a scientific approach. A logical explanation has been crafted on dependence on each other in life analyzing several literary references. This part discusses two aspects of life internal and external, life from a void to infinity, life being always out of bounds of time, life in a continuous flow of thoughts in Indian philosophy, etc. This anthology tries to explain the mysteries of life from various angles and will prove to be benefical to the researchers and students of Indian culture.
Pilgrimage involves movement of people, either as individuals or as members of a group, in search of the sacred. Spontaneous behaviour, miraculous events, and/or ecstatic visions of individual pilgrims have often resulted in complexity in ritual, meaning, and movement. Pilgrimages may start with individual ecstatic visions, unusual strange unworldly experiences, which are the experiences of ordinary people, certainly not of priests or politicians. Often they are uniquely human experiences which embarrass ecclesiastical authorities.
As a pilgrimage tradition evolves, sacred sites may become formalized in organized socio-political systems with economic overtone. Even in these structured situations, individual people may still have powerful individual experiences. Eventually a pilgrimage tradition may be taken over by religious and political authorities, lose spontaneity, and become frozen in time. But even in these situations, in which large numbers of people may gather, there is a tremendous amount of primal energy in which innovations and visions may be evoked.
Using case studies from pilgrimages around the world, the volume explores the ways many of these traditions have started and evolved. A common perspective is that of self-organization of complex structures in space and time.
The variety of pilgrimage described in the book is remarkable. The subcontinent of India is the location of many sites such as the temples to the nine planets in Tamil Nadu, the pilgrimage circuits of Varanasi, early Buddhist pilgrimages in Sanchi and Bodh-Gaya, the great ruined city of Vijayanagara, those associated with the Ramayana, and the death ceremonies at Gaya. Beyond India, the self-organization and stability of pilgrimage systems are analysed for pilgrimages in Nepal (Kathmandu), Japan, Mexico, the Caribbean, Peru, Norway, and the US.
Indian Parampara is a response to secular Western thought on tradition and modernity. Presented here are contributors from a distinguished group of Indian scholars representing a wide spectrum of disciplines. It raises many questions: What is the source of parampara? How is it transmitted? Does it hold in potential the characteristics of all orders of knowledge? Who was the parent of its primal seed? How does the individual sustain the flow of parampara or tradition? Is the individual artist capable of sustaining creativity and initiating change? Does he have to take the path of confrontation with parampara? How does the person transcend the small I to enlarge himself into the We? What is that experience of the Self where duality between the subject and the object is lost? To answer such central questions the authors of this volume reflect on anthropological, philosophical, spiritual, musical, poetical, and experiential dimensions. This book is an important contribution to traditional thought and culture.
Many learned people, from various sects, have written about death and soul. Ceremonies, after death, for honouring the dead, especially in Hindu religion have been dealt chronologically. Also the importance of cloning after death and its resultant impact on society has been discussed.
As one of its significant programmes, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) has, for sometime, focussed on the lifestyle studies addressing the fundamental questions concerning Mans relationship with Cosmic Order, his perceptions of Space and Time through the ages and across cultures, and his experience of Nature and how far he has evolved a symbiotic existential connection with it. The IGNCA has now launched forth a series of Pilot Studies which, through specific community studies, seeks to explore culture-ecology interrelationship in its myriad manifestations. Lifestyles and Ecology is the series first thematic monograph. With meticulous analyses of the lifestyles of the Himalayan pastoral nomads, the Lakshadweep islanders, and Kanyakumaris Mukkuvar fisherfolk, among others, the studies here show how these communities follow the spirit of the natural world: not in imitation, but in continuation of the primal vision. Delineating, thus, variegated cultural paradigms of these communities, with details like, for instance, of their belief systems, myths, rituals, folklore, songs, and their knowledge of cosmology as well as natural phenomena, the authors underscore the inseparability of nature and culture in the lived experience of traditional societies the world over. The book also carries a brilliant overview of ecology vis-a-vis traditional resource management systems. The authors are ecologists, anthropologists and folklorists of wide repute.
