This Book Brings A Clear And Insightful Presentation Of The Wisdom Of Hinduism In All Its Fundamental Principles.

articles like Anubhava, Jnana Karma Sammucyavada, Trsna and Viksepa contributed.

Method of controlling soul at the time of death according to Hindu.

This fourth part of the 'Materialien zur Geschichte der Ramanuja-Schule' is an attempt to trace in philological and historical terms the theologoumenon's development of the doctrine of the 'Inner Ruler' following the texts handed down to us and to prevent an expose of its theological substance. The doctrine is followed up in the work of Sankara (ca. 800 A.D.), in the Subalopanisad, in Bhaskara's Bhedabhedavada (about 900 A.D.) up to the adoption of Antaryami in the Brahma-doctrine of Ramanuja. Finally, after (...) the exposition of the influence of tantric thought, the doctrine of Antaryami is treated with regard to the late period of the Ramanuja-school. This investigation is of importance not only because of the collection of the relevant texts regarding this doctrine, but also in view of the necessity of examining the emergence and development of this school not only from the standpoint of the Vedantic Brahmadoctrine, but to evaluate this school as what it has become in the sense of 'Sitz im Leben', i.e. one of the significant 'religious traditions' of Vaisnavism, whose Brahma-doctrine has developped into a fully-fledged theological world view. (shrink)

Hinduism is considered one of the most ancient religions in the world. Although the technological innovation of modernization has undermined the reliance on their traditions, Hindus may still rely on Hindu Scripture when making decisions. From their standpoint, contrary to Western medicine, human lives cannot be reduced to statistical and empirical facts. They focus more on preserving the spirit, rather than considering survival as one of the goals of medicine. Consequently, when a preterm infant is born, Hindu parents might (...) struggle to understand the goals of Western neonatologists. This divergence may create misunderstandings when discussing end-of-life decisions. Since they value relational aspects to be of utmost importance, they may accept treatments only in the likelihood of good neurological outcomes. Being able to interact allows Hindus to act virtuously with the aim of purifying their soul toward moksa. When it comes to end-of-life decisions on behalf of newborns, Hindu parents may opt to forgo treatments and let the baby peacefully die, while praying for their soul to have a better rebirth. This paper aims to evaluate quality-of-life assessment in the Hindu tradition in comparison with the Catholic tradition. It draws parallelisms between these two different religions to investigate whether an inter-religious dialogue is possible. This work will help Catholic, and more broadly Western, doctors to have a better understanding of the Hindu end-of-life views. (shrink)

The Tattvasaṃgraha, or Encyclopedia of Metaphysics, is the most influential and most frequently studied philosophical text from the late period of Indian Buddhism. This edition includes verses by Śāntarakṣita (c. 725-788 CE), which are clarified and expounded in the commentary of his student Kamalaśīla (c. 740-795 CE); both of these authors played crucial roles in founding the Buddhist tradition of Tibet. In the Tattvasaṃgraha, they explain, discuss and critique a vast range of views and arguments from across the whole South (...) Asian philosophical and religious spectrum. The work deals at length with ideas drawn from Buddhism, Jainism, and a variety of traditions now incorporated within Hinduism, including Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya-vaiśeṣika, and Sāṃkhya; it also includes the earliest discussion of Advaita Vedānta in any Buddhist text. The chapters selected for translation from Sanskrit and Tibetan deal with such fundamental philosophical issues as the existence or nonexistence of God and the soul; the nature of matter and of causal relationships; the connection between words and their referents; the rules of logic; the sources of our knowledge; and the compatibility of beliefs about karma with Buddhism's fundamental claim that there is no self. Introductory chapters discuss translation choices and explain the forms of argument and methods of reasoning employed by Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla. (shrink)

The Tattvasaṃgraha, or Encyclopedia of Metaphysics, is the most influential and most frequently studied philosophical text from the late period of Indian Buddhism. This edition includes verses by Śāntarakṣita (c. 725-788 CE), which are clarified and expounded in the commentary of his student Kamalaśīla (c. 740-795 CE); both of these authors played crucial roles in founding the Buddhist tradition of Tibet. In the Tattvasaṃgraha, they explain, discuss and critique a vast range of views and arguments from across the whole South (...) Asian philosophical and religious spectrum. The work deals at length with ideas drawn from Buddhism, Jainism, and a variety of traditions now incorporated within Hinduism, including Mīmāṃsā, Nyāya-vaiśeṣika, and Sāṃkhya; it also includes the earliest discussion of Advaita Vedānta in any Buddhist text. The chapters selected for translation from Sanskrit and Tibetan deal with such fundamental philosophical issues as the existence or nonexistence of God and the soul; the nature of matter and of causal relationships; the connection between words and their referents; the rules of logic; the sources of our knowledge; and the compatibility of beliefs about karma with Buddhism's fundamental claim that there is no self. Introductory chapters discuss translation choices and explain the forms of argument and methods of reasoning employed by Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla. (shrink)

Schopenhauer did not believe in the existence of God or the soul, yet he thought Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism to contain some of the profoundest of all truths, in symbolic form. He is the only major Western philosopher to take account of the Hindu and Buddhist religions and he shares a number of fundamental doctrines with them. Perhaps surprisingly, some of these have been confirmed by modern science. So there are three‐way comparisons to be made between Schopenhauerism, Buddhism, (...) and modern science. (shrink)

Human embryonic moral status in the embryo debate in the Indian religious school of thoughts is a challenging issue. The paper tries to figure out whether ontological status implies moral status of embryo. Consciousness is an important determinant of animation of human embryo. In this paper an attempt had been made to understand the concept of man and soul in the Hindu philosophical thought. In the process we would also make a critical review of embryology in the Hindu philosophical (...) thought. The study would adopt a conceptual elucidation of morality. The paper made an elaborative study of Puruṣa as found in the Saṃkhya Philosophy and the study of consciousness and animation would try to resolve the related question, when does life begin to have that value? Embryo-protectionist regards embryos as a potential person. The Gita says the human person is individual self-called āttmā, whose nature is of pure consciousness, Brahman/Puruṣa. Consciousness constitutes the essentiality of individual Self. Human embryo developments are elaborately studied in the Yajñavalkya Smṛti, Garbha Upaniṣad, and Suśruta Saṃhitā. The self that remain latent in the embryo gets impetus with the association of consciousness until then it cannot be a human personality. In Hinduism sanctity of life gets combined with autonomy and self-determination. The sanctity of life applies both to the fetus as well as to the overall welfare of the society. The embryo being in an interim stage and the soul not being destroyed upon body annihilation, it may be claimed that since destruction or annihilation of the physical form does not destroy the soul, beneficial embryo research should thus not be abhorrent. The Hindu ethics as examined here precludes the consideration of the situation at hand, and causing the least harm and work according to one’s dharma. (shrink)

A delightfully straightforward and lyrical retelling of the ancient Indian epic of loyalty, betrayal, redemption, and insight into the true nature of life -- one of history's most sacred ethical works, rendered with completeness and sterling accuracy for the modern reader. Here is one of the world's most hallowed works of sacred literature, the grand, sweeping epic of the divine bowman and warrior Rama and his struggles with evil, power, duplicity, and avarice. The Ramayana is one of the foundations of (...) world literature and one of humanity's most ancient and treasured ethical and spiritual works. 'This new version is so simply and beautifully written -- it will stir the soul!' --David Lynch. (shrink)

While acknowledging a certain affinity between his own thought and the Vedanta concept of a world-soul or universal spirit, Josiah Royce nevertheless locates this concept primarily in what he terms the Second Conception of Being—Mysticism. In his early magnum opus, The World and the Individual, Royce utilizes aspects of the Upanishads in order to flesh out his picture of the mystical understanding of and relationship to being. My primary concern in the present investigation is to introduce some nuance into (...) Royce’s conception of Indian thought, which may then serve to suggest similar possibilities for nuance for Royce’s conception of the Absolute. I will attempt to do in two primary ways: first, I will consider Royce’s use of Indian thought via the Upanishads in explicating his second historical conception of Being. I will then turn briefly to Emerson’s poem ‘Brahma’ and the Bhagavad Gita to see if a certain reversal that occurs in both places problematizes Royce’s depiction of the universal spirit in Indian thought as well as opens up new possibilities for Royce’s own Absolute. (shrink)

The doctrine of reincarnation is usually associated with Buddhism, Hinduism and other Eastern religions. But it has also been developed in Druzism and Judaism. The doctrine has been used by these traditions to explain the existence of evil within a moral order. Traversing the boundaries between East and West, we explore how Jewish mysticism has employed the doctrine to help answer the problem of evil. We explore the doctrine particularly as we respond to objections against employing it in a (...) theodicy. We show how it supplements traditional punishment, free will and soul-building theodicies, and helps these theodicies avoid various objections. (shrink)

Samatavilasa, The Radiant Sameness, shows the way of finding our fallen condition itself as redemptive. We are not merely to accept our pain and our mortal condition but to live these and become these. In becoming that pain lies our bliss, in living our mortality immortality. That alone is the highest bliss and absolute, that alone is salvation the final, this our becoming one with our mortal and absolutely tragic lot. That is what the state of samata, sameness, is. Only (...) that man is a mukta, a liberated soul, who can look alike on Maya and Brahman, on reality and appearance, on bondage and liberation, on life and death, on misery and joy. Not that there is an actual state called the state of liberation, an actual bliss that is absolute and highest, for terms like absolute and highest turn out to be relative, and, therefore, mis-leading. Hypostati-zation of samata would not work, for all hypo-statization is rooted in our narcissistic passion. Yet Samatavilasa would not, in actual fact does not, encourage us to look alike on these opposites constitutive of our mortal being as long as we fight a desperate fight against our inevitable and destined fate, fate the mortal; a stern discipline we have to undergo before we can even think of samata, sameness, not to speak of living it. For, not before dying unto himself can a man look alike on these dualities, the stuff our mortal life and being are made of. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek RebirthA. L. HermanImagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. By Gananath Obeyesekere. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 448 pp.Gananath Obeyesekere, professor emeritus of anthropology at Princeton University, is probably one of the world's greatest living anthropologists. The proof of that assertion lies in this his latest work on comparative anthropology, a study of the concept (...) and practice of rebirth—"reincarnation" as he calls it—from ancient Greece and India to modern West Africa, Melanesia, and North America. In what follows let me briefly set forth what I understand his central thesis to be, the evidence for it, and the conclusions to be drawn from it. I will end with two very modest problems connected with this altogether intriguing and brilliant investigation into the doctrine of rebirth.As a modified structural anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere rejects the rationalist model structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. He follows instead the lead of two of his empiricist predecessors, Max Weber and Fernand Braudel, pointing out that structures, types, or models "are constructions of scholars, not universals waiting to be discovered" (p. 351). Consequently, as this book aptly proves, Obeyesekere's own "imagined" models are based on parole data following the actual language of the cultures being studied.Obeyesekere thus begins his book with an elementary rebirth structure based on such parole. He refers to this primitive, first structure as "rebirth eschatology," which entails the rebirth of a deceased's soul into the body of a newborn relative of the deceased but without any determining ethical component as found in the more sophisticated and complex "karmic eschatologies." Such ethically neutral kin group rebirths are found among certain small-scale societies in West Africa, the Trobriand Islands, the Northwest American coast tribes, and the Inuits (Eskimos). Obeyesekere [End Page 303] draws extensively on field studies of these groups to bolster his conclusions about them. This simple rebirth eschatology is non-Indic in origin, Obeyesekere claims, since no evidence of influences have been found between these practitioners of rebirth eschatology and work relating to the Indic religions (Hinduism and Buddhism). The entry of the soul into postdeath life, either in this world or the world of the ancestors, depends not at all, consequently, on one's this-worldly behavior such that "morality does not affect the fate of the soul after death" (p. 74).Obeyesekere turns next to the "transformation" of this rebirth eschatology. It occurs with the introduction of the concept of ethicization, "the processes whereby morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously right or wrong action that in turn affects a person's destiny after death" (p. 75). It is Obeyesekere's contention that when ethicization is systematically introduced into any rebirth eschatology the latter must logically transform itself into a so-called "karmic eschatology." In other words, this second topological model or conceptual structure, karmic eschatology, the new ethicized rebirth eschatology, says that the otherworld for the dead is not simply a way station for departed souls waiting to be reborn, but rather that otherworld is now a place of retribution and punishment. Kinship affiliation alone no longer determines who goes where after death but moral action does. My own guess is that rebirth eschatology was introduced to answer the question of why the grandchild resembles the deceased grandparent. Karmic eschatology, on the other hand, was probably introduced to solve a more complex and sophisticated puzzle: Why is it, if there really is justice in the universe, that the wicked never get appropriately punished and the good never get sufficiently rewarded? At this stage of transformation, the law of karma, or some other principle of universal justice, now says that everyone gets what's coming to them, either in this life or the next, and that rebirth is necessary to make that principle of justice workable.1 In arguing that "rebirth cannot be divorced from ethics; it looks as if it is generated from ethics" (p. 82), Obeyesekere would seem to concur that karmic eschatology was introduced to answer the question: Why do the wicked seem to prosper and the good appear to suffer?Following... (shrink)

Ray Billington explores the spirituality of Eastern thought and its differences from and relationships with the Western religious tradition by presenting the main principles of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism and Confucianism. Billington discusses the central themes of religious philosophy, comparing Eastern and Western views of belief of God, the soul, moral decision-making, nature, faith and authority. He then challenges theism, particularly Christianity, with its belief in a personal God bestowing a certain version of "truth". He concludes that the (...) universal mysticism characteristic of Eastern thought provides a more realistic and rewarding path. (shrink)

The Christian acceptance of linear time and history was challenged by contemporary Greek philosophers who held to the cyclical view. The problem that this view of history held for the Church was simply that if time and history were cyclical, the concept of free will was destroyed. For more than a thousand years, Dr. Konvitz explains, the linear view of time and history was subordinated to the influence of the Platonic and Aristotelian concepts of timeless reality. Only with the coming (...) of the modern age was there a return to the linear concept of time and history as the basis for secular thought in the West. Buddhism and Hinduism traditionally hold to the cyclical view of time and history. Indian philosophy and religious thought, like that of the ancient Hebrews, could not reconcile itself to the universal suffering of mankind and hit upon the concept of karma. Karma is a universal causality in which individuals are rewarded or punished for their deeds when the soul transmigrates and becomes reincarnated. This view of time and history, Dr. Konvitz suggests, resulted in a traditional acceptance of life as it is and in a lack of historical consciousness. In contrast Judaism, Christianity, and Islam accepted the linear view. Time motion and change were real, and man had only one chance to do good in the world. (shrink)

The most of Tagore’s ideas expressed in his books and usual writings that draw attention by the Tagore’s scholars, a layman/woman cannot connect easily. The letters focused in this article are written in a simple language, though personal, rooted in daily experiences of Tagore himself—he shares in a very simple and lucid language. Often, the charges against Tagore’s philosophy are made that he is too idealistic and beyond realization. The paper attempts to argue based on these letters that his ideas (...) are not that idealistic and are deeply rooted in the daily life of human beings and can be realized. Tagore’s concern is to find out the basis of the religion that unites human beings, and he is searching for it in the truth of man’s nature. Tagore realizes that teaching of religion can never be imparted in the form of lessons, but he finds it in the living personality of man. This article is trying to concentrate on the letters Tagore had written to Indira Devi and Hemantabala Devi, expressing his religious thinking. The eagerness to realize the unity of the soul of man and universe with the Universal Man expressed the letters to Indira Devi. The criticism towards the blind faiths of Hinduism and image worship focuses on the letters to Hemantabala Devi. Many essential documents are expressing the religious thinking of Tagore, but these letters are the purest expressions of him and reflect a live image of Tagore’s mind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 234-236 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Dreaming Me: An African American Woman's Spiritual Journey Dreaming Me: An African American Woman's Spiritual Journey. By Jan Willis. New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. 321 pp. This book invites comparison with Diana Eck's Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras(Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). Both are by prominent women scholars, both have "spiritual journey" in the subtitle, (...) and both are about Christians who come to terms with a non-Christian religion—Hinduism in Eck's case, Buddhism in Willis's case. But as soon as one gets past the titles, it is the differences that strike one. Where Eck maintains an Olympian poise, hobnobbing with Hindus but remaining a Christian and an objective scholar, interpreting and analyzing as she goes, Willis plunges into Buddhism without rejecting her family's Baptist tradition, becoming a fully participant observer so as to ask how her own history and the history of her fellow African Americans can be healed by an intensely personal internal dialogue. Eck gives us theology. Willis gives us herself. Recognized as "one of the first American scholar-practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism" (294), her students ask her if she practices meditation as well as teaching it. She gives a carefully crafted answer that unifies the practice of Buddhism with the practice of academic teaching as an authentically human activity within the Humanities.The book has the form of a Hindu epic, incidents from Willis's life interrupting the frame story, the dreaming of the title. This dream (whether actual or metaphorical, we are not told) moves with considerable dramatic power from the terror of being pursued by lions to the dreamer's transformation into a lioness who roars the Dharma like Queen Shrimala. Its five parts are called Birth, Odyssey, Choices, Becoming, and Return, taking us from her childhood as a Baptist in Docena, Alabama, to Cornell University, to India and Nepal, and back to Docena, as a self-described Baptist-Buddhist (310).Willis's journey is intimately bound up with her search for self-acceptance as a "white gal"—a noticeably light-complexioned black woman in the Jim Crow South —and for the nobility of African Americans as fully human beings. Her early experiences [End Page 234] were not encouraging. Blacks were not only physically segregated in Docena, they were electronically expunged from television shows by spurious technical difficulties ("trouble along the cable"), and she endured an attack by the Ku Klux Klan on her family's home. The customary but thoroughly illegal suffrage examination administered to her father included such questions as "How many words are there in the U.S. Constitution?" (58, italics in original). He had been specially prepared for such absurdities, and he passed. Midway in her pilgrimage Willis searches for her roots (or "kin," as she says, using the Southern word) in county and federal records, and her initial excitement turns to humiliation as the white historian tells her, with disdainful triumph, that her intelligence must have come from the white slave owner who "everybody says" was her "granddaddy's daddy" (251). A black woman was presumed to be lacking in native intelligence, and Willis's intellectual powers suffered insult not only from whites but from her own mother, who, perhaps having internalized the white folks' contempt, regarded being smart as somehow evil (25). As a student at Cornell, Willis discovered black power and participated in Black Student Alliance (BSA) demonstrations, sometimes involving guns, but she came to believe that direct political action was not for her. She was, she decided, a teacher at heart, and after much soul searching she opted for the "peaceful transformation" (129) that she hoped would come from the study and practice of Buddhism.Although her skin color was a puzzlement to some Indians, who wondered about her caste, her Tibetan teachers in Nepal accepted her as a student who was at least the equal of the white students, and even, perhaps, superior to them. A spot of blonde in her hair was interpreted as the... (shrink)

Vedanta is one of the world's most ancient religious philosophies and one of its broadest. Based on the Vedas, the sacred scriptures of India, Vedanta affirms the oneness of existence, the divinity of the soul, and the harmony of religions. Vedanta is the philosophical foundation of Hinduism; but while Hinduism includes aspects of Indian culture, Vedanta is universal in its application and is equally relevant to all countries, all cultures, and all religious backgrounds. The unity of existence (...) is one of the great themes of Vedanta and an essential pillar of its philosophy. Unity is the song of life; it is the grand theme underlying the rich variations that exist throughout the cosmos. Whatever we see, whatever we experience, is only a manifestation of this eternal oneness. The divinity at the core of our being is the same divinity that illumines the sun, the moon, and the stars. There is no place where we, infinite in nature, do not exist. (shrink)

An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “History,” “The Over-Soul,” and “Fate.” Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an “existentialist” ethics of self-improvement. He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John (...) Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity. (shrink)

Grasping. Avarice. Covetousness. Miserliness. Insatiable cupidity. Overreaching ambition. Desire spun out of control. The deadly sin of Greed goes by many names, appears in many guises, and wreaks havoc on individuals and nations alike. In this lively and generous book, Phyllis A. Tickle argues that Greed is "the Matriarch of the Deadly Clan," the ultimate source of Pride, Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, Lust, and Anger. She shows that the major faiths, from Hinduism and Taoism to Buddhism and Christianity regard Greed (...) as the greatest calamity humans can indulge in, engendering further sins and eviscerating all virtues. As the Sikh holy book Adi Granth asks: "Where there is greed, what love can there be?" Tickle takes a long view of Greed, from St. Paul to the present, focusing particularly on changing imaginative representations of Greed in Western literature and art. Looking at such works as the Psychomachia, or "Soul Battle" of the fifth-century poet Aurelius Clemens Prudentius, the paintings of Peter Bruegel and Hieronymous Bosch, the 1987 film Wall Street, and the contemporary Italian artist Mario Donizetti, Tickle shows how our perceptions have evolved from the medieval understanding of Greed as a spiritual enemy to a nineteenth-century sociological construct to an early twentieth-century psychological deficiency, and finally to a new view, powerfully articulated in Donizetti's mystical paintings, of Greed as both tragic and beautiful. Engaging, witty, brilliantly insightful, Greed explores the full range of this deadly sin's subtle, chameleon-like qualities, and the enormous destructive power it wields, evidenced all too clearly in the world today. (shrink)

_Understanding Eastern Philosophy_ provides an accessible critical introduction to how some of the key philosophies of the East compare with those in the West. Starting from a discussion of the problems of distinguishing between religions and philosophies, Ray Billington presents a clear picture of the key tenets behind Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism and Confucianism. Moving on to compare the key themes of religious philosophy that cut across East and West, such as a belief in God, the soul, moral (...) decision-making, nature and authority, _Understanding Eastern Philosophy_ presents a fascinating and controversial picture of the contribution theistic religions have to make. With its belief in a personal God bestowing a particular version of 'truth', Ray Billington concludes that the universal mysticism characteristic of Eastern thought provides a more realistic and rewarding path than is commonly supposed in the West. _Understanding Eastern Philosophy_ assumes no prior knowledge of religion or philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Explaining Away the Greek Gods in IslamJohn WalbridgeOf the angels newly fallen from heaven, Milton tells us:Nor had they yet among the Sons of Eve Got them new Names...Men took... Devils to adore for Deities: Then were they known to men by various Names, And various Idols through the Heathen World.Among the devils worshipped as gods among the ancients were the Olympians:Th’ Ionian Gods, of Javans Issue held Gods, (...) yet confest later then Heav’n and Earth Thir boasted parents; Titan Heavn’s first born With his enormous brood, and birthright seis’d By younger Saturn, he from mightier Jove His own and Rhea’s Son like measure found; So Jove usurping reign’d: these first in Creet And Ida known, thence on the Snowy top Of cold Olympus rul’d the middle Air Thir highest Heav’n; or on the Delphian Cliff, Or in Dodona, and through all the bounds Of Doric Land....Paradise Lost, I: 364–65, 372–75, 508–19 [End Page 389]Milton’s assertion that the Greek gods were demons goes back to the centuries in which those ancient gods slowly yielded to the new and jealous triune God of the Christians. Augustine in The City of God does not deny the reality of the old gods but identifies them as dead heroes or as demons. The power of the old gods was still manifest to the Christians of antiquity; it was their moral worth, not their existence, that was to be challenged.Such an interpretation is not found in Muslim accounts of the Greek gods. For all practical purposes Greek polytheism was entirely dead by the time Islam came onto the scene. Indeed, even Arabian polytheism, though still vigorous when Muhammad began his prophetic career, died out within three decades of the proclamation of Islam. Pious Muslims might be offended by the icons in Christian churches, but the temples of the Greek gods were gone these three centuries or more, their statues broken up and their stones stolen to build churches. The other forms of polytheism with which Islam came into contact—Zoroastrianism (the most important), Buddhism, Hinduism, and gnostic religions like Manichaeism and Harranian Sabianism—could rightly be understood as forms of monotheism (or dualism). Only the occasional idol temple in some out-of-the-way place—the shrine of the god Zun or Zur in Zamindawar in Afghanistan, 1 for example—might illustrate pure idol worship, but such institutions were soon destroyed and posed little intellectual challenge. Thus, by the time highly intellectual forms of Islam came into being in the eighth and ninth centuries, there was no real idol-worshipping paganism to oppose. Despite the uncompromising monotheism of Islam, polytheism aroused little emotion for the generations of Muslims born after the passing of the Prophet’s companions. Shirk, polytheism, went on to have a rich history in Islamic thought, but it was idols of the soul, not idols carved from stone and wood, that stirred the imaginations and fears of serious Muslims.The Muslim contact with Greek polytheism was thus not with living pagans but with literary allusions in Greek philosophical and scientific texts. In late antiquity philosophy had been the last bastion of paganism, a fortress whose outworks may have been stormed perhaps but whose citadel still held out, manned by doughty and commited fighters like Proclus and Simplicius. But the fortress had at last fallen, and even the ancient philosophers had finally been brought to the baptismal font.The fact that they knew little more than the names of Greek gods was another factor preventing Muslim scholars from taking alarm at Greek polytheism. The obvious first question to ask when we examine what Muslims thought of the Greek gods is what they might have known about them. How indeed do we know about Greek religion? Mostly we know mythology from literature: Hesiod, Homer, Greek drama, and manuals of literature and rhetoric. None of [End Page 390] these sources were available to Muslims. The translators were not interested in literature, which they knew resisted translation, so even Homer appears in Arabic sources as a sage, one of a number of authors of wise sayings... (shrink)

This article argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson employs metempsychosis (reincarnation or the transmigration of the soul into successive bodies) as a figurative template for human consciousness. Mapping various traditions from Hinduism, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism onto the vastness of the geological and biological records, Emerson translates metaphysics for modernity: he depicts the soul's journey through the chronological sequence of history as a poetic process that culminates in a tenuous form of self-knowledge.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comparing Eckhartian and Zen1 Mysticism2Jijimon Alakkalam JosephMeister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1328?), often referred to as “the man from whom God hid nothing,” is one of the great Christian theologians and philosophers of all time. But it is as a mystic that Eckhart is generally known. So any serious study of mysticism, in our times, cannot overlook this Dominican whose birth, childhood, and death remain obscure to this day.3 About the (...) age of eighteen, he probably entered the Dominican order. He was trained at the universities of Cologne and Paris. After completing his higher studies in theology at Paris, twice he was appointed as Paris magister (i.e., lesemeister or master)—in 1302 and in 1311—a rare honor, until then given only to Thomas Aquinas, whose teaching influenced him.After completing his second term as Paris magister, in 1313, he was called to function as the special vicar for the Dominican master general. From 1314 to 1326 Eckhart lived and worked first in Strasburg and then in Cologne, where he served as a spiritual guide for many Dominican nuns, also for Beguines. It was there Eckhart plunged into a life of a preacher and spiritual guide (lebemeister). His academic accomplishments, the positions he held, and the sermons he preached bear witness to his influence on Christian theology, philosophy, and mysticism.During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the Occident came in contact with Oriental religious traditions, Eckhart’s theology and mysticism were suddenly seen in a new light. His daring insistence on the transcendence of the Godhead, his central theme of the union of God and the soul, his genius for apophatic theology, and so on were considered as the European parallel to the metaphysics of Asian religious traditions, especially Vedanta and Mahāyāna Buddhism.Of all the Christian mystics, Eckhart perhaps comes closest to Asian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, especially the Mahāyāna tradition. Scholars like the late Ananda K. Coomaraswamy saw Eckhart as a bridge between Hinduism and Christianity, and called Eckhart’s sermons the “Upanishad of Europe.”4 Eminent Japanese Zen Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki considered Eckhart to be an “extraordinary” Christian, saying that Eckhartian mystical thoughts “closely approached Buddhist [End Page 91] thoughts, so closely indeed, that one could stamp them almost definitely as coming out of Buddhist speculations.”5A plethora of writings have compared Eckhartian mysticism with Zen, which has its basis on the Mahāyāna tradition. In this paper I will highlight some of those already discussed comparisons and explore a few more areas that could serve as a jumping-off point for the dialogue between these two mysticisms, especially in the Asian context. My point is not that these two mystical traditions are totally identical. Differences do exist. But I will only make a very brief mention of them because as a novice researcher of comparative religion my interest is to delve deeper into religious traditions of the world to discover those teachings that unite them.godhead and buddha-natureIn Eckhartian mysticism, ultimate reality is called Godhead, which he distinguished from God. “The Godhead is for Eckhart, … an expression for the character of the Highest Being.”6 Godhead “includes both existence and the existing subject.”7 Godhead is being itself. Godhead is “pure Being,” “completely ‘fashionless,’ without … mode of being,” “above all conceptions and conceptual differentiations, and so beyond all comprehending and apprehending.”8 “It is not only beyond being, beyond goodness, but the ‘supra-Being’ and the ‘supra-Good.’”9 “It is neither conscious nor self-conscious … It is beyond the contrast of subject and object, knower and known, yet it is above and not below this contrast.”10 For Eckhart, “this highest Godhead is … the absolute ‘One.’”11 “Is-ness”12 is another term used by Eckhart for Godhead. He uses “is-ness” as “an abstract noun to draw our attention to the primordial existence that every existent thing and every predication about existent things presupposes.”13For Eckhart, “Intellect” is the privileged term for Godhead. God is the “pure intellect.”14 “The One, being, and intellect, the three most important concepts in Eckhart’s understanding of God... (shrink)

The aim of the work is to trace personal various poetic images of Maria Pawlikowska- Jasnorzewska connected with the motive of the garden on the example of selected poems from early to the wartime ones. The article is an attempt to read the lyric sensitivity of the writer in the description of the world of garden plants, to discover her painting, philosophical and religious inclinations. Individual fragments of the work are devoted to the following jjnages: the garden of love and (...) pleasure, the modernistic fantastic garden, the exotic garden, Tatra garden as well as the imagined or reminded places that are the mirror of the poet’s soul. The interpretation of the poems is accompanied by the study on the evolution of the style, imagination as well as the poet’s religious thought. The latter part of the work includes conviction of the appearance of many artistic inspirations in the literary output of M. Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska comprising the romantic and modernistic literature together with influences of symbolism, impressionism, naturalism as well as Hinduism and Japanese painting which apart from Biblical tradition compose a peculiar poetic collage. (shrink)

Book Reviews in this article Baptism and Resurrection: Studies in Pauline Theology against its Graeco‐Roman Background. By A.J.M. Wedderburn. Meaning and Truth in 2 Corinthians. By Frances Young and David Ford. Jesus and God in Paul's Eschatology. By L. Joseph Kreitzer. The Acts of the Apostles : By Hans Conzelmann. The Genesis of Christology: Foundations for a Theology of the New Testament. By Petr Pokorny. The Incarnation of God: An Introduction to Hegel's Theological Thought as Prolegomena to a Future Christology. (...) By Hans Küng, translated by J.R. Stephenson. The Incarnation: Collected Essays in Christology. By Brian Hebblethwaite. Models for God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. By Sallie McFague. Pp. xv, 224, London, SCM Press, 1987, £8.50 Symbol and Sacrament: A Contemporary Sacramental Theology. By Michael G. Lawler. The Sacrifice We Offer: The Tridentine Dogma and its Reinterpretation. By David N. Power. New Eucharistic Prayers: An Ecumenical Study of their Development and Structure. Edited by Frank C. Senn. To Join Together: The Rite of Marriage. By Kenneth W. Stevenson. Company of Voices: Daily Prayer and the People of God. By George Guiver. The Long‐Legged Fly. By Don Cupitt. Approaches to Auschwitz. By Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth. Natural Law and Justice. By Lloyd L. Weinreb. Christian Morality: The Word Becomes Flesh. By Josef Fuchs S.J., translated by Brian McNeil. Medicine in Contemporary Society: King's College Studies 1986–87. Edited by Peter Byrne. Military Ethics: Guidelines for Peace and War. By N. Fotion and G. Elfstrom. Choice: The Essential Element in Human Action. By Alan Donagan. Persons and Personality: A Contemporary Inquiry. Edited by Arthur Peacocke and Grant Gillet. The Rationality of Emotion. By Ronald de Sousa. The Psychology of Personality: An Epistemological Inquiry. By James T. Lamiell. Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. By Anne Sheppard. The Ascetic Element in Culture and Criticism. By Geoffrey Gait Harpham. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. By Michael Heim. Education and Philosophical Anthropology: Toward a New View of Man for the Humanities and English. By David Holbrook. Evolution and the Humanities. By David Holbrook. Further Studies in Philosophical Anthropology. By David Holbrook. Women in Western Political Philosophy. Edited by Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus. The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche and Descartes. By Nicholas Jolley. Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas. By Stephen M. Nadler. Later Medieval Philosophy : An Introduction. By John Marenbon. Either/Or. By Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Howard and Edna Hong, Princeton University Press, 1987: Vol. One, Wittgenstein. By A.C. Grayling. Questions on Wittgenstein. By Rudolf Haller. The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein's Philosophy. By David Pears, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Vol. One, The Later Wittgenstein: The Emergence of a New Philosophical Method. By S. Stephen Hilmy. Knowledge of God: Calvin, Einstein and Polanyi. By Iain Paul. Conceptual Change and Religious Practice with Special Reference to Jews in Britain and Israel. By Janice Williams. The World's Religions. Edited by Stewart Sutherland, Leslie Houlden, Peter Clarke and Friedhelm Hardy. Religions in Conversation: Christian Identity and Religious Pluralism. By Michael Barnes. Theravāda Buddhism, A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modem Colombo. By Richard Gombrich. Mahāyāna Buddhism, The Doctrinal Foundations. By Paul Williams. Hinduism in Great Britain: The Perpetuation of Religion in an Alien Cultural Milieu. Edited by Richard Burghart. The Way of the Black Messiah. By Theo Witvliet. The Meaning of Religious Conversion in Africa. By Cyril C. Okorocha. Common Ground: Christianity, African Religion and Philosophy. By Emmanuel K. Twesigye. Islamic Spirituality I: Foundations. Edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. By Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor. Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine. By J. Neusner. Language and the Worship of the Church. Edited by David Jasper and R.C.D. Jasper. The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development and Meaning of Stational Liturgy. By John E. Baldovin. Leontii Presbyteri Constantinopolitani Homiliae. Edited by Cornells Datema and Pauline Allen. Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. By James A. Brundage. Melchior Hoffman: Social Unrest and Apocalyptic Visions in the Age of Reformation. By Klaus D Alonso de Zorita: RoyalJudge and Christian Humanist, 1512–1585. By Ralph H. Vigil. Pedro Moya de Contreras: Catholic Reform and Royal Power in New Spain, 1571–1591. By Stafford Poole. Archbishop William Laud. By Charles Carlton. The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730. By Callum G. Brown. Pastors and Pluralism in Württemberg, 1918–1933. By David J. Diephouse. The Churches and the Third Reich, Vol. One: Preliminary History and the Time of Illusions, 1918–1934. By Klaus Scholder. Reforming Fundamentalism. Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism. By George M. Marsden. The Hellenistic Philosophers Vol. II: Greek and Latin Texts with Notes and Bibliography. By A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley. Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed. Edited by R.C.D. Jasper and G. J. Cuming. The Way of Paradox: Spiritual Life as Taught by Meister Eckhart. By Cyprian Smith. Meister Eckhart: The Man from whom God Hid Nothing. Edited by Ursula Fleming. The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola: A New Translation. Translated by Elisabeth Meier Tetlow. Courtfield and the Vaughans: An English Catholic Inheritance. By Mary Vaughan. Trinity College, Washington D.C.: The First Eighty Years, 1897–1977. By Columba Mullaly. John Henry Newman on the Idea of Church. By Edward Jeremy Miller. Journey from Paradise: Aft Athos and the Interior Life. By Ralph Harper. (shrink)

Maturity, that is often gained under the hammer of suffering, sooner or later will force us to remove the Eye of intelligence from things that are not (world of duality) and direct it toward the splendor of one's own essential nature. Undoubtedly, this implies an overturning of values, a psychological revolution, tending no longer toward the ineffective and unfruitful horizontal line, but toward the vertical one leading to awakening, to the unveiling of marvellos potentialities, the prerogative of the human (...) class='Hi'>soul. (shrink)

This book takes the view that Christ's answer to Pilate's question would have reflected his inner state of being. As he had previously said that he was the Truth and had declared his oneness with God, his state of being was clearly very different from that of most humans. While we cannot identify with absolute certainty Christ's state of inner consciousness two millennia ago, there have been mystics from many different religious traditions who have spoken similarly, which leads us to (...) think that the vital clues to Christ's state would lie in the realm of mysticism. Indeed, there are many instances of saints and sages of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity itself, speaking in a manner reminiscent of Christ. It is the evidence presented by the well-documented experiences of these mystics-mostly drawn here from Christianity and Hinduism-that is used to investigate what was possibly Christ's state of consciousness. (shrink)

In five articles Swami Nikhilananda shows the eternal nature of the soul, its three states, and the real nature of Being. Lucidly written, the book brings modern motifs to elucidate traditional beliefs. An appendix of quotations from the Bhagavadgita and Upanishads and an index adds to its value.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 545 Congratulations to the publisher must be qualified only with regret that a work so valuable to students should be available only in a hardback edition costing nearly twenty dollars. Wabash College Crawfordsville, Indiana WILLIAM c. PLACHER God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. By MEROLD WESTPHAL. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Pp. xiv+ 305. $27.50. At each stage of its history existential thought has (...) been deeply engaged with the phenomena of religion. However, the appeal to the existence has produced starkly opposed responses to the question of the significance of religion. The original and most obvious contrast is that between Kierkegaard and his near-conternpomry, Nietzsche. Where the first reflects on the existence of the " single one " as a way of defending religious consciousness against Hegelian rationalism; the latter makes a similar turn to existence (as the will to power of life) precisely in order to " unmask " the " lies " that tempt one to the religious life. Or, more recently, one could contrast the efforts of Marcel and Bultmann, who find in existential thinking the key to a deeper appreciation of traditional religiosity, with the resolutely atheistic project of Sartre, for whom "we are in a situation where there are only human beings," where "even if God existed it wouldn't make any difference." In spite of such controversy over the value of religion, the philosophical approach to religion in terms of existence has had the beneficial effect of shifting the locus of questioning from the cognitive status of religious utterances to the problem of the meaning of the religious life. An existentail approach does not exhaust itself in analyzing the evidential structure of propositions about God, the soul, etc., as though religion were simply a mode of cognition, but rather explores the question of "what it is (means) to be religious." In our own time Paul Ricoeur has taken up this issue in a way that seeks to do justice both to the critical moment in existential thought and to its promise of a deepened religious sensibility. Along with a "hermeneutics of suspicion" (grounded in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) Ricoeur calls for a "hermeneutics of recovery " which would reinvest the " symbolism of the sacred " with a depth drawn from consciousness of our existential situation. It is in the horizon of this latter project that we may locate Merold Westphal's sig- 546 BOOK REVIEWS nificant contribution, God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. This book, addressed to a general audience of believer and unbeliever alike, has many virtues. While it draws judiciously from the central works of existentialism and phenomenology, as well as from a wide variety of literature on the world's religions. it is written in clear and engaging prose, entirely free from tedious jargon. And while vYestphal's sympathies are clearly with those who find a continued vitality in religious eonsciousness today, his book is written in the spirit of inquiry; it gracefully avoids the twin dangers of polemics and devotionality. He is sensitive to objections without allowing them to paralyze his arguments, and he offers some bold, important generalizations without being blind to the limits of his evidence. Finally, the book contains original phenomenological investigations, striving after eidetic insight through study of personal experience, world literature, and (mostly standard) works on other cultures and their religious life (including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, various forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Amerindian religions). Because Westphal draws on such a diversity of materials, there are likely to be many points with which the specialist will take issue. But an ad.equate phenomenology of religion must tackle this diversity, and Westphal has certainly given us one of the most accessible examples of such an enterprise. Westphal's approach to the existential question-What does it mean to be religious ~-is phenomenolog'ical. This means, first, that we are interested in the significance of religion from the descriptive first person perspective of the believing soul. The believing soul (a term borrowed from Ricoeur) is not simply "one who believes or affirms this or that proposition," but one. "who sees things in a certain way" (257). vYe are concerned here with a form... (shrink)

This book contains 82 questions and answers on the inner life, talks on reincarnation and the soul's evolution, sin, science, individuality, morality, inner peace, God's plan, and the universality of religion.

Study of the Indic philosophy and mysticism.

I review John Hick's "Death and Eternal life," in which he explores philosophical anthropologies invoked by believers in life after death, provides a critical survey of various Christian and Eastern approaches to life after death, and develops various pareschatologies and eschatologies.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:570 BOOK REVIEWS like reasonable rule for economic life. This effort is worthy of more attention than is possible here, but let it be noted that it must inevitably suffer the same fate as any ethical calculus: someone must decide for others what is their due and what is not. How much wealth, for example, makes for a concentration [of wealth] that would be " demonstrably detrimental to some (...) people's exercise of their generic rights "? His is ultimately an entitlement or rights ethic, rather than an aitial ethic of goal-purposive fulfillment for the individual, projected outwards for a common good scenario. While his rejection of goal ethics's inability to detail principles for distribution of goods is noteworthy, it does not appear that a tightened version of generic rights theory will come closer to either of Phillips's desiderata: a justification of moral reasoning apart from any theory of nature or a calculus for its application. Desan and Phillips wish to think against the limits of the human situation. For Desan, rising above limitation is a moral task and obligation facing us each, if there is to be a common future. His call is to be World Citizen in a Polis of Nations. Phillips's vision is more concrete, a distribution of benefits to benefit all with well-being and freedom. But this mundane task is no less difficult than Desan's transcendent one. Indeed, according to Augustine, even the Divine Mind must utilize an artifice in dealing with human creation: "He loves each of us as though there were only one of us." Both ethicists have striven to show us how we might think this vision for ourselves, i.e., for each other of us. ]OIIN B. DAVIS, O.P. ' Detroit, Michigan Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays. By HUGH TREVOR-ROPER. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 317. $27.50 (hardbound). Even to list the changes and events which occurred in seventeenth century England is a difficult task: the century spans the period from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the Glorious Revolution and beyond, through the Civil War, the accession and exile (twice) of the Stuarts, the rise of science, the transformation of the theological and religious issues of the English Reformation, to name only the most obvious. To conceive a book, in the form of occasional essays, which not only addresses these changes and events but does so by establishing the connections which were present with European currents at the same time surely tempts fate, even when it does not tempt reviewers. BOOK REVIEWS 571 But Hugh Trevor-Roper is a master, both of the period under survey and of the form of the essay. With one exception, each of these essays began as a lecture or seminar paper, and the pleasantly legible style in which they are written must bear some trace of that origin. The occasional flashes of wit, mixed with rthe fairly non-technical style, make the book a joy to read and a welcome escape from the usually constipated style of scholarly prose. In his Introduction, the essayist clearly sets forth his thesis that English intellectual history does not exist apart from the currents of European intellectual history (a thesis for which Trevor-Roper has already staked a claim). That leads to what may very well be the major problem with these essays: its end is in its beginning. The list of names cited in these essays only partially coincides with the list of names in the index; the former is much longer than the latter. And while the style of the essay welcomes the reader to the period, it also throws up more names and places and events than can be explained or even annotated adequately. This occurs both on a large and on a small scale. The first essay, on "Nicholas Hill, the English Atomist" contains such a vast array of names that at times it becomes the prosopo· graphical equivalent of a telephone book. On a large scale, there is the problem with a definition of Arminianism. No definition, at least no formal definition, is attempted-and this is probably wise. But, particularly in... (shrink)

This article explains and criticizes several of Hume's arguments regarding British economic policy. I focus on Hume's methodology, which is essentially utilitarian but also depends heavily on his philosophical account of human psychology. I claim that the arguments examined prevail over competing 18th century approaches to economic policy. And I explain the relevance of this methodology for present day public policy debates.

This paper explores the moral responsibility a manager has toward a worker. The primary focus is upon those relationships whereworkers have been led to trust their managers. I argue that in such circumstances, models of the employment relationship based on rational self-interest fail to adequately describe the behavior of the actors. Rather, I show through case studies how trust operates in these environments to supercede pure, self-interested behavior. I then explore the moral implications of this finding relative to those managers (...) who lead their workers to trust them. I make the claim that these managers cannot adequately discharge their moral obligations unless they take on positive moral obligations. I cast this responsibility as one of positive care for some portion of worker welfare and briefly discuss what this might mean in practice. (shrink)