These lectures will examine conceptions of liberation and paths leading to liberation in the history of ‘Hindu’ traditions. After an introductory lecture that raises some of the theological questions about the relation of path to goal and the importance of ritual and asceticism in the history of Indian religions, we will begin with an examination of Samkhya, the philosophical backdrop of Yoga, and move on to the opening Yoga-sutras, their ideal of liberation as isolation (kaivalya), and the means of achieving that goal. We will trace the development of devotion (bhakti) and examine bhakti and yoga in the Bhagavad Gita before moving into the medieval period. Here the lectures will describe some developments of bhakti in vernacular literatures, focusing on both texts that advocate devotion to iconic forms and the later texts that advocate devotion to an absolute without qualities. Here we will also examine the importance of ritual texts and the relation between ritual, devotion and yoga. Lastly we will trace the themes of liberation and path with examples from selected tantric traditions within Vaisnavism and Saivism.
While the lectures will place texts in their historical contexts, the course will not examine texts in a strictly chronological sequence, the stress being on theme. Throughout we will raise critical theological questions through engaging with texts in translation and raise the question about the extent to which liberation is a rhetoric that overlays other cultural forces. By the end of the course the student should have an understanding of soteriology in Hindu traditions, an understanding of some the main literatures associated with this, and an awareness of the philosophical and theological problems entailed. These lectures are aimed at students of theology and religious studies.
This series of lectures continues the series started in Michaelmas Term 2008.
23 January, Religion and spirituality
30 January, Religion and literature
6 February, Religion and music
Using the metaphor of restoring the ‘soul’ of religious studies, these lectures examine the ways in which private religious experience has been problematised in recent scholarship, with worrying implications; now in our study of religiously ‘Other’ people there is a danger of dealing only with persons as cultural artefacts, with no subject or ‘soul’, no ghost in the machine.
These lectures look at how Psychology, Anthropology and Sociology approach the inner experience of religious persons. It revives hidden models of religious experience in the work of classic theorists such as Freud, Jung, Otto, Frazer, Levi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard, Durkheim, and Weber, relative to the thought of more recent scholars such as Geertz, Boyer, Stoller, etc), and to contemporary theories of subjectivity. The goal is ultimately to lay the grounds for a renewed vision of religiosity and of the study of religion itself.
Many of the canonical names in anthropology have been criticised for their literary style and their tendency towards evocative narrative. Here we argue that this is not a methodological weakness, but the autonomous development of a conception of understanding in terms of imaginative empathy and inter-subjectivity, which parallels hermeneutic philosophy. Religious experiences are literally recreated in the reader, forming an intimate bond between the scholar and his or her subject.
Psychologists of religion from Jung to Freud, and Boyer and Laing, have produced speculative models of religious subjectivity, according to which the human mind appears variously as an ocean of symbols, a volcanic core wracked by powerful forces, a computational machine, or a shell through transcendence may occasionally break. Just as science posits its own models, so psychologists of religion use metaphors of spatial relations and fluid dynamics to provide a mapping of the self. We examine this mechanistic model, and also look at the way in which thinkers such as Jung and Boyer incorporate un-mappable territories as a crucial concession to the claims of religion itself.
The necessity of analysing religious influences on society has meant that key sociologists from Marx to Durkheim and Weber insisted on the significance of mood, motivation, and individual agency as the heart of any idea of society change. Religious feeling is thus one of the cornerstones enabling their theorisation of social dynamics. Here we look at sociological models for studying subjectivity as an autonomous ‘centre’ of dynamism and force, the beating heart of grand-scale movements of history
We find the idea of God in different religions and it is theologically interesting that semantic analogues of the category appear across the boundaries of traditions. This series of lectures explores Hindu ideas of God and raises questions about the meaning of God in human traditions and the idea of comparative theology.
This paper examines the series of events that took place in July 2007 leading to the slaughter of Shambo, a ‘temple’ bull belonging to a community of monks at Skanda Vale in rural West Wales. The main focus in this paper is the transformation of Skanda Vale from a quiet ‘multi-faith’ devotional community in a remote part of the country, to a politically engaged ‘Hindu’ organisation at the centre of an international media storm surrounding the killing of Shambo. By examining the meanings and symbols brought into play by the contesting groups, as well as the different levels of conflict, this paper will examine the constructions of Hindu identity that emerged in media representations as a result of this controversy.
Maya Warrier is lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Wales, Lampeter. Her publications include Hindu Selves in the Modern World: Guru Faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission and Theology and Religious Studies: An Exploration of Disciplinary Boundaries, as well as book chapters and journal articles. She researches transnational Hinduism with a focus on transnational guru movements, Yoga and Ayurveda in the West, and the Hindu diaspora in Britain. She is currently working on a research project funded by the Wellcome Trust which explores the development of Ayurveda in Britain.
This course offers a thematic and historical introduction to Hinduism for students of theology and religious studies. Focusing on the brahmanical tradition we will explore the textual sources, categories, practices and social institutions that formed that tradition. Primary texts in translation will provide the basis for reflection on issues such as dharma, renunciation, caste, and concepts of deity. We then move on to some of the major philosophical developments of the tradition, with particular emphasis on the Vedānta. The course will raise theological and cultural questions about the relation between reason and practice, person and world, and society and gender. We will conclude with a consideration of Hinduism and modernity.
Week 1 (15 October) Introduction: What is Hinduism?
Week 2 (22 October) The Veda and vedic traditions
Week 3 (29 October) Dharma, society and gender
Week 4 (5 November) Ascetic traditions
Week 5 (12 November) Indian theism
Week 6 (19 November) Philosophical traditions 1
Week 7 (26 November) Philosophical traditions 2
Week 8 (3 December) Hinduism and modernity
That religion is of fundamental public concern cannot be doubted as we move into the twenty first century, central to global politics, cultural or identity politics, ethics and the socio-economic processes of late modernity, as well as to the contested claims made in its name. Yet never has religion been so misunderstood. Never has there been a time when the critical understanding of religions (of the kind that can be done within Religious Studies) has been more important and never has there been a greater need for such knowledge and critical understanding to inform public debate which so often lacks informed perspectives. Some disparage religion as irrational, making claims about the world that simply cannot be substantiated in the light of modern scientific knowledge. On this view religion is a series of propositions about the world akin to scientific theories. Apologists for religion react to this critique defending it on rational grounds, that its claims are indeed compatible with modern knowledge and scientific thinking. We only need to look around bookshops to see the proliferation of these kinds of works. Yet both critique and apologetic have fundamentally misunderstood the nature and importance of religion in people’s lives. These lectures attempt to understand religions as ways of life, ways of acting, ways of responding to the strange world in which we find ourselves, ways of being in the world which make claims upon people and which primarily function to address questions of ultimate meaning at a bodily and temporal level in which human beings make sense of their experience.
Lecture 1 (20 October) Religion and reductionism
Lecture 2 (27 October) Towards a theory of religious action
Lecture 3 (3 November) Religion, text, and subjectivity
Lecture 4 (10 November) Religion and politics
Lecture 5 (17 November) Religion and art
Two tendencies in recent years have sought to provide explanations of religion in terms of a naturalist or eliminative reductionism, the realm of science, on the one hand, and a cultural reductionism, the realm of politics, on the other. Eliminative reductionism primarily refers to theories of cognition and evolutionary psychology along with their philosophical justification. By cultural reductionism I mean accounts that see religion only in terms of a politics of representation and structures of power. On this view, religion is a disempowering hegemony caused by a ‘false consciousness’ that has served the interests of the rich and powerful. Both kinds of reductionism share an incredulity to religious truth claims and offer explanation and critique that are rigorously externalist in their explanation of religion and thoroughly materialist in their ontological and ethical pre-commitments. On reductionist accounts, to explain religion is to locate a cause (in cognition, genetics, socio-political structures) and to explain religion is to present an external account of it, often antithetical to the internal claims of traditions. This understanding of explanation has been the predominant model in the natural sciences from Bacon through to the social sciences of our own time. Even Theology traditionally understood claimed to explain religion in this way, locating the cause of religion in God. Scientific explanations have generally been antithetical to Theology in locating causes of religion in nature and claiming superiority to theological accounts because, unlike such accounts, they are falsifiable and have predictive power. Both eliminative and cultural reductionisms offer external accounts of religion through the location of cause, the former in nature the latter in the genealogy of cultural politics, and so do not engage seriously with traditions’ claims and concerns.
But there is a different sense of explanation that is not the location of a cause. This is to draw on, or return to, the verstehen tradition in the history of social science where explanation is ‘understanding’ and to claim that the explanation of religion is the exposition of a meaning rather than the location of a cause: to explain religion is not to seek a causal account in the first instance but to show how something is connected to a broader sphere or context and to demonstrate or translate a tradition’s semantic density into a language which is implicitly comparative. This kind of account is both descriptive and interpretative in drawing out the implications of description in theory-informed, semiotically sophisticated ways, and reasoning within the horizon of the western academy. This account is akin to phenomenology in wishing to offer thick description yet like hermeneutics in wishing to inquire beyond description. Unlike eliminative reductionism it must recognise the autonomy of higher level processes in any hierarchy or multiple levels of organised systems and unlike postmodern, cultural constructivists and genealogists it must recognise the legitimacy of tradition and tradition internal concerns. In the context of this debate, the lecture will discuss the two kinds of reductionism and the idea of ‘explanation’.
On the one hand there is a critique of religion that sees religion in terms of propositions about the nature of the world. On the other there is a reaction to such claims by the rational defence of religion. But both positions fail to understand the true nature and function of religions as action and responses to life, as ways of life and kinds of action that provide frameworks for living and dying, especially in the context of late modernity and what Richard Roberts has called ‘the reconfiguring of the religious field.’ This lecture develops the idea of religion as action which is also an orientation towards meaning and transcendence; an orientation to understanding life as a journey for both individuals and communities, a journey that can have an end in a ‘liberation’ or a ‘heaven’ or some variation of an ideal of perfection. Religion is always teleological and orientated towards transcendence of the human condition; religion is predominantly soteriological. The theoretical apparatus behind some of this thinking lies in Bakhtin’s Towards a Philosophy of the Act in which he presents a distinction between the world of culture (which contains various theoretical frameworks such as philosophy, sociology, politics) and the world of life, the world in which we live our lives and die and in which acts are accomplished once and for all (and only once) as being is unrepeatable action (Being-as-event). The theory of religious action I am proposing claims that religious action is a penetration of being-as-event, that it is not restricted to the world of culture but is the only practice and discourse that attempts to penetrate, order and make sense of world of life. This world of life is a synonym for the strangeness of the world.
It follows from this is that the heart of religion is human action that forms a kind of subjectivity. This action and its accompanying subjectivity is formed only in inter-subjective, tradition specific ways that entail a particular kind of orientation towards the future. This orientation entails hope or anticipation of the future and a retrieval of meaning from the past (expressed as text) which are realised in present action. The sacred text from the past is brought to life through ritual in the living context of present speech for a particular speech community. Religious actions and their accompanying kinds of speech foster a subjectivity, inwardness, or interiority which is the realisation of a religion’s claims, a soteriology, and the projection of a narrative into the future. This kind of inwardness feeds back into the community as a source of life, of new interpretations, and of new vision.
A religious community is defined and adapts to present conditions by the way it reads or receives its sacred texts realised in the present in a ritual space and internalised within subjectivity. The self becomes an index of tradition and subjectivity is formed through repeated liturgical acts which are enactments or embodiments of the revelation or text (broadly defined and not restricted to written document). The lecture will explore the internalisation of the text through the ritual process as the expression or realisation of the religious imperative. The realisation of the text in present speech (and it can only be realised in the present here and now) is accompanied by the internalisation of the text in subjectivity and also by the externalisation of the text in ethics, art and politics: the religious imperative comes to be articulated through ethical behaviour defined by a community, artistic expression and political institution. The ritual space within which the text is realised and brought to life for a present speech community, along with the internalisation of text and tradition, is the site of transcendence as instantiated in the history of religions. In technical terms from Linguistic Anthropology this is the subordination of the ‘indexical-I’ to the ‘I’ contained within the text, the implied reader or ‘I of discourse’ (Urban ‘The ‘I’ of Discourse’). The self of religions is formed through revelation mediated by tradition and realised in specific acts of ‘reading’ or the reception of texts. The argument will be that the central aspect of the religious self is the internalisation of the text and the alignment with the narrative of one’s own life with the tradition. This is to see life as quest for meaning through the internalisation of tradition. This internalisation is also an orientation towards the future.
Religion has always been deeply implicated with politics. While the claim of these lectures is that the religious imperative cannot be reduced to power, the formation of religions as institutions has always been closely implicated in the formation of states and the legitimising of particular social and political structures. Many contemporary thinkers, deriving inspiration from genealogical thinkers such as Foucault, claim that religion can be understood in terms of power relationships and that the discourse of religion hides a will to power. By contrast many religious communities claim that religion is the well spring of their life’s energy and that tradition cannot be explained only in terms of a politics of representation.
In this lecture we presented a particular view of the religious imperative as being expressed in a community’s reception of its revelation and the internalisation of the revelation. The lecture will develop the political implications of the religious imperative. We will discuss the externalisation of religious subjectivity through institutions and examine the interface between secular institutions and religious tradition. This is especially pertinent where there is a conflict between religious law and secular law. While the issue of this relation will be examined at a fairly abstract level, engaging with relevant philosophical literature such as Batnitzky’s work on Strauss and Levinas (Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas CUP 2006), the lecture also needs to discuss contemporary examples of the relation of the religious imperative to politics and the conflict of religious and secular law. For religions, adherence to revelation and the law that expresses it is primary, for secular modernity, adherence to secular law is primary. This might also be configured as a conflict between revelation and philosophy. The contemporary religious subject in the global context of late modernity needs to negotiate these complex identities and the success to which that occurs is the degree to which the religious imperative can locate itself within the modern context.
Shifting from explicit politics to implicit cultural politics, this lecture will focus on the relation of religion to art, raising questions about how religious art expresses tradition and links in to a cosmology absent from secular art. Questions of aesthetics and function will be raised. An exhibition in London by Gilbert and George in January 2006 presented religion through a pastiche of images that showed religions to be essentially oppressive. In the context of this radical juxtaposition between secular art in late modernity and religious art, the lecture will show how the problem of aesthetic appreciation in tradition and modernity is linked to the problem of the world seen as cosmology or as stripped of cosmological understanding. Thus icons, cathedrals and images of gods function only within religious cosmology in contrast to the work of Gilbert and George which draws on an aesthetic devoid of, and antithetical to, religious cosmologies.
But the religious imperative, while prototypically expressed in religious tradition, also finds expression through art. In the contemporary context this can be seen especially in the work of artists such as Bill Viola who deals explicitly with the themes of transcendence and being born and dying and whose work attempts to penetrate the world of life. The idea of the artist as shaman who shows human communities something from another place is relevant here. The religious imperative shows us the proximity of art to religion and in the context of modernity shows how art outside of religious tradition nevertheless still deals with questions of transcendent meaning in human life.
The Indian model of philosophical analysis, technically devised by the Neo-Logicians, known as the Navya Nyaya school, places forth a PRAMA-oriented picture of the World (visva). This world features four basic constituents stated as (i) pramata, the knower, (ii) prameya, the knowables, (iii) pramana, the process of knowing, and, (iv) pramiti, the knowledge achieved by the pramana. Nothing in this world is left out of these broad categories, i.e., each and every entity in this world must find its place in any of those characters noted above. To speak more specifically, all worldly entities must fall either under the category of prameya, the knowables or under pramana, the process of knowing; in fact while we speak or even think about the process of knowing, pramana also happens to fall under the character of prameya. Hence, to take a definite look into this character – prameya, was of utmost importance for the Indian philosophers to get a clear picture of this world. Neo-logicians adopted the Vaisesika theory of padartha and developed it through linguistic elaboration since for them this world appeared to be not only a prameya but also as abhidheya – verbalisable – which was accepted by all the philosophical schools. Practically, knowability and verbalisability are two basic properties of this world of our experience, and, virtually our experiences tell us how we know and how we express our experiences through language or try to communicate with others. The neo-logicians marked the process of knowing as ‘encoding’, i.e., internalization of the external world, while the process of expressing verbally was marked as ‘decoding’ or ‘sabda-vyavahara’. Before we go into details of these two processes, a holistic picture of this world as ‘padartha’ following the Neo-logicians will be discussed.
Dr. Piyali Palit, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Jadavpur University, did her Ph.D. thesis on ‘The Role of Syncategorimaticity as the Principle instrument in Linguistic behaviour in Vedic and Popular Usages’. She did her MA in Sanskrit from Visva Bharati, Santiniketan and Acharya in Advaita Vedanta from Rashtriya Sanskrita Sansthan, New Delhi. She was awarded a fellowship for the project on ‘Influence of Indian Tradition on Rabindranath Tagore’ at the Asiatic Society, Kolkata. She is also associated with the Centre of Advanced Studies in Philosophy at Jadavpur University. Presently she holds the chair of Principal Investigator, Major Research Project in Indian Philosophy and Research Methodology, sponsored by University Grants Commission, Govt. of India. Her recent research works extend in the areas: Analytic Research and Theory Development, Ontological Issues in Ayurveda, Advaita Vedanta, Vaisesika, Purva Mimamsa and Panini-Vyakarana. Apart from a number of articles published in various National and International journals, proceedings, and anthologies, she has authored titles including Basic Principles of Indian Philosophy of Language, A Treatise on Arthasamgraha, Samksepa-Sariraka (Trans. & Comm.), Panchikarana-Varttika, Vedanta-Sanja-Prakarana (both are transcribed from rare original manuscripts).
This lecture will continue the themes of the first. Here we will focus on the process of encoding/decoding (sabda-vyavahara) following Navya Nyaya language and methodology.
From the eleventh century, there is evidence of a remarkable pattern of the circulation of goods, men, and texts between two seemingly unlikely corners of southern Asia: the Valley of Kashmir and the western Deccan (in what is now Karnataka). The broad contours of this mobile world can be traced through a variety of methods, including political history, numismatics, archeology, and the history of art. In this presentation, however, I will concentrate on literary evidence, touching on the lives of two Kashmirian brahmans who found employment in the court of the Kalyani Calukya emperor Vikramaditya VI. One of these men was a state official whose public career took place in the midst of a period of great institutional change; the other was a leading court poet and biographer of his royal patron. Looking at these two emigres together, we can better understand the world and mindset of the cosmopolitan Brahman literatus, and can begin to better chart the changing nature of the early-second millennium South Asia social order.
Whitney Cox is lecturer in Sanskrit at SOAS. His research work focuses on the history of textual creation and dissemination in the far South of the Indian subcontinent in the early second millennium of the Common Era, focusing especially on Sanskrit and Tamil. Dr. Cox was awarded his Ph.D. in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago in 2006 for a doctoral dissertation on the medieval Saiva author Mahesvarananda. He is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Empire of Wisdom: Mobility, Belonging, and Things Made of Language in Medieval India.
The four main Vedic Samhitas are sub-divided into a number of differing branches. The names of these branches or Shakhas are available in ancient texts and Anukramanies but at present not all Shakhas are available. The branching of one Veda into many Shakhas has taken place for many reasons – geographical, phonetic, and ritualistic. Every Shakha has a different mode of chanting and recitation, although they belong to one and the same Veda. At present two Shakhas of Rigveda, three Shakhas of Samaveda, four Shakhas of Yajurveda, and two Shakhas of Atharvaveda are available in India with their reciters who know the text of these Samhitas by heart. It is interesting to note the differences in the accent system and the way of chanting of these Shakhas. This lecture aims to help students understand the Vedic texts and their mode of accentuation more clearly.
Students of Sanskrit may have little knowledge of how a Sanskrit Shloka should be read and correctly recited, often reading the verse as prose, breaking the Sandhis and spoiling the character of the verse. All the metres of classical Sanskrit have a fixed structure with rules for pauses in the middle or at the end of a foot. Some metres are recited slowly and some have a fast cadence. The metre in Sanskrit plays an important role in expressing its subject and the emotions connected with it. Correct recitation of a verse also leads to correct pronunciation of Sanskrit.
Prof. Gaya Charan Tripathi was born at Agra (India). He went to school and pursued higher studies at Agra, Pune, and Benares. He has a Masters in Sanskrit (1959) from the University of Agra with a Gold Medal and first position in the University. He received his Ph.D. from the same University in 1962 on Vedic Deities and their subsequent development in the Epics and the Puranas supported by a Fellowship of the Ministry of Education. He is a Fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for Higher Studies in Germany. He has a Dr.Phil. from the University of Freiburg/Br (1966) in History of Religions, Comparative Indo-European Philology, and Latin (besides Indology) as elective subjects in the grade Summa cum Laude. D.Litt. in Ancient Indian History and Culture from the University of Allahabad on ‘A critical Study of the daily Puja Ceremony of the Jagannatha Temple in Puri’ (published under the title ‘Communication with God’). He has taught at the Universities of Aligarh, Udaipur, Freiburg (twice), Tuebingen (twice), Heidelberg, Berlin, Leipzig, and British Columbia (Vancouver). He is Chief Indologist and Field Director of the Orissa Research Project (1970–5) of the German Research Council (DFG), and has been Principal of the Ganganatha Jha Research Institute, Allahabad, for over twenty years. He is presently Professor and Head of the Research and Publication wing of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Delhi. He has contributed around ninety papers in English, German, Sanskrit, and Hindi to various Indian and International Journals on Religion, Philosophy, History, Literature, and Vedic/Puranic studies. Published 22 books on subjects mostly pertaining to religions and literature of India. His specialisations are: Indian Religions and Philosophy, Vishnuism (especially Pancharatra school), Vedic sudies, Sanskrit Literature, Grammar, and Philology, Cult practices of Orissa, and Gaudiya Vishnuism.
This lecture explores the convergence of mother-goddesses, maps, and martyrdom that is critical to the people’s imagining of national territory in modern India. Building on Christopher Pinney’s suggestion that embodiment is crucial to nationalism, I suggest that the dismembered body of the martyred patriot is a reminder that disembodiment as well is critical to the hold of the nation on the millions who live and die on its behalf. The archive for the essay is constituted by visualisations of Indian national territory produced by ‘barefoot’ artists who drew embodied maps of the nation that transform India into a corporealised home-place to which the citizen is expected to respond with an affective intensity that leads the most patriotic among them to martyr themselves.
This lecture considers the appearance of cartographic imagery in the form of maps and globes in the so-called god pictures that have been such a ubiquitous feature of popular Indian visual culture for the past two centuries. A special focus is on tracking the transformations through time of representations of Varaha who is shown in much of twentieth-century popular art in the company of a globe with a map of India clearly delineated on its surface. Through a consideration of such images, I suggest that the secular modern science of cartography has enabled the transformation of ‘Hindu’ deities into ‘Indian’ gods.
Prof. Sumathi Ramaswamy is Professor of History at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Prior to this appointment, she was Professor of History at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She studied for her MA and M.Phil. in ancient Indian history at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She also has a Master’s in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and graduated with a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970 (University of California Press, 1997) and The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (University of California Press, 2004). She has also edited a volume entitled Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (Sage, 2003), and has recently completed a book manuscript entitled The Goddess and the Nation: Picturing Mother India that is part of a larger project on empire, nationalism and cartographic culture
This lecture will present an account of tantric traditions in Kerala and place these in their historical and social context. Of particular interest is the way in which these traditions respond and adapt to modernity as we see in the school which trains priests – the Tantra Vidya Peetham.
Dr Rich Freeman, Study of Religions, Duke University. Dr Freeman is an Anthropologist who has worked for many years in Kerala and is fluent in Malayalam. Dr Freeman’s work is particularly valuable because he combines textual knowledge of the Kerala traditons, both through Malayalam and Sanskrit, with ethnography. His initial focus of research was the teyyam dance tradition on which he is the world’s leading expert and he has published on the history of Malayalam religious literature and continues to work on the tantric traditions of Kerala.
These lectures will examine conceptions of liberation and paths leading to liberation in the history of ‘Hindu’ traditions. After an introductory lecture that raises some of the theological questions about the relation of path to goal and the importance of ritual and asceticism in the history of Indian religions, we will begin with an examination of Samkhya, the philosophical backdrop of Yoga, and move on to the opening Yoga-sutras, their ideal of liberation as isolation (kaivalya), and the means of achieving that goal. We will trace the development of devotion (bhakti) and examine bhakti and yoga in the Bhagavad-gita before moving into the medieval period. Here the lectures will describe some developments of bhakti in vernacular literatures, focusing both on texts that advocate devotion to iconic forms and the later texts that advocate devotion to an absolute without qualities. Here we will also examine the importance of ritual texts and the relation between ritual, devotion, and yoga. Lastly we will trace the themes of liberation and path with examples from selected tantric traditions within Vaisnavism and Saivism.
While the lectures will place texts in their historical contexts, the course will not examine texts in a strictly chronological sequence, the stress being on theme. Throughout we will raise critical theological questions through engaging with texts in translation and raise the question about the extent to which liberation is a rhetoric that overlays other cultural forces. By the end of the course the student should have an understanding of soteriology in Hindu traditions, an understanding of some the main literatures associated with this, and an awareness of the philosophical and theological problems entailed. These lectures are aimed at students of theology and religious studies.
- Introduction: the question of soteriology in India
- The Samkhya and Yoga
- Yoga-sutras of Patanjali
- Bhakti and Yoga in the Bhagavad-gita and its interpreters
- Bhakti literatures and ritual texts
- The Sant tradition: Kabir, Mirabai
- The Pancaratra
- Monistic Saivism
This paper explores the role of a Brahman intellectual and diplomat, Kesava pandit, in the service of the Maratha state in the later 17th century. Through focusing on Kesava pandit the paper brings together themes in the social history of Mughal India and in the history of colonial Maharashtra.
Professor O’Hanlon is in Indian history and culture at the Oriental Institute. Among her research interests are the social history of India in the early modern period, politics and society in colonial India, histories of gender and the body, and the language, literature, and history of Maharashtra. She has worked on the history of colonial Maharashtra and on the social history of Mughal India.
This afternoon conference examines the idea of surrender to God in three religions and provides the opportunity to address comparative theological concerns. In all three theistic traditions there is the idea of human surrender to God. The conference will explore what this means in the different traditions and look towards a theological dialogue between them.
Dr. Yahya Michot is lecturer in the Centre for Islamic Studies. He has research interests in medieval Islamic theology and mysticism and Islam in the modern world.
Professor Keith Ward is Emeritus Professor of Theology at Oxford University. He has many publications on theology and comparative theology. Among his interests are concepts of God, the idea of revelation, religion and science, inter-religious dialogue and Christianity in the context of world religions.
Professor Julius Lipner is Professor of Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion, and Fellow of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely in the field of Hindu Studies. Among his research interests are Classical Vedanta, truth and inter-religious dialogue, and 19th century Bengal.
This lecture will reflect upon some of the teachers and doctrines associated with the Pasupatas in Sanskrit literature. Specific attention will be paid to the meaning of the term Pancartha in the Pancarthabhasya – Kaundinya's commentary on the Pasupatasutra – to uncover a pre-Kaundinyan form of Pasupata doctrine. Evidence from the Puranas, in particular the original Skanda-purana, will be used to throw light on the subsequent spread and development of the Pasupata movement.
This course offers a thematic and historical introduction to Hinduism for students of theology and religious studies. Focussing on the brahmanical tradition we will explore the textual sources, categories, practices, and social institutions that formed that tradition. Primary texts in translation will provide the basis for reflection on issues such as dharma, renunciation, caste, and concepts of deity. We then move on to some of the major philosophical developments of the tradition, with particular emphasis on the Vedanta. The course will raise theological and cultural questions about the relation between reason and practice, person and world, and society and gender. We will conclude with a consideration of Hinduism and modernity.
A simple answer to the question is that ‘Hinduism’ is a term denoting the religion of the majority of people in Indian and Nepal and of some communities in other countries who refer to themselves as ‘Hindu’. In India there are about 700 million people classified as Hindu in contrast to Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jain, Buddhist, Jew, Parsi, and tribal people (adivasi). All these are within a vast continent that contains eighteen official languages and many dialects. Because of the diversity of peoples, practices, and beliefs denoted by the term, some claim that ‘Hinduism’ is a meaningless abstraction, while others claim that it is indeed a unified field of belief, practice and history, linked to India as a nation and the struggle against colonialism. In understanding Hinduism we need, therefore, to be aware of the development of the category within the colonial context and to raise questions about category formation, internal and external accounts of identity formation, and power. We will raise the question of the origins of Hinduism in the Indus valley civilization and Aryan migrations, and begin to trace the historical trajectories that have lead to Hinduism, focusing on the Brahmanical-Sanskritic tradition, folk or regional traditions, and founded traditions or sects.
Integral to an understanding of Hinduism is the Veda. This textual corpus has its roots in the early second millennium BC and is regarded as revelation. It was maintained for many hundreds of years by oral transmission through the generations in priestly lineages. They began to be put to writing around the fifth century AD and printed in the nineteenth. The word ‘veda’ means knowledge or wisdom and various layers of texts developed over the centuries. The content therefore reflects the historical development of traditions from hymns to gods of nature recited in the context of ritual sacrifice through to discourses about the meaning of the sacrifice and more abstract philosophical speculation in the Upanishads.
The idea of dharma, often translated as ‘duty’, ‘law’, or ‘religion’, is a central concept in Hindu traditions, vital to understanding social organisation and religious literature and ways of life. We will examine the traditional brahmanical understanding of dharma and the scheme of the stages of life or estates and the endogamous social organisation known as caste and often identified as being at the heart of Hinduism. We shall describe some textual sources for dharma, particularly the dharma-sastra, and raise contemporary questions about gender and social justice. An important issue in relation to dharma is caste and the extent to which it is linked to a scale of purity and pollution from an early period (Dumont) and to what extent it arose as a result of colonialism (Dirks, Inden).
There is evidence for the development of ascetic practices for inner purification and the attaining of supernatural powers from an early period. The Rg-veda seems to refer early ascetic figures and in the Upanishads the renunciation of ritual action and the internalisation of the sacrifice become the means of attaining liberation from the world. Ascetic traditions responded to brahmanical tradition by re-interpreting it or by rejecting it, as in the case of Buddhism, Jainism, and other Sramana movements. By the early centuries of the common era, ascetic practices and yoga became associated with particular sectarian traditions, such as the Dasanamis claimed to have been founded by Sankara, and Saiva and Vaisnava traditions. Ascetic practice was linked to speculation about the nature of the world and there would seem to be an early link between ascetics and the development of philosophy, particularly Samkhya. Some scholars have claimed that there is a tension between the brahmanical, ritual tradition that emphasises dharma as social obligation and ascetic, renouncer traditions that emphasise liberation (moksa) from the world and from social obligation. The Bhagavad-gita, it could be argued, attempts to reconcile this tension by maintaining that true renunciation is inner renunciation of the fruits of action, a position which still allows the fulfilment of dharmic obligation. Some scholars, such as Jan Heesterman, put the renouncer and Brahman householder along the same scale of a path of purification. In contrast to Dumont, Heesterman claims that the real tension in the tradition is not between the renouncer and the Brahman but between the Brahman and the King. We will attempt to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these claims.
The Bhagavad-gita is a text that, along with some others such as the Svetasvatara-Upanishad, marks the emergence of theism in which the Lord is conceptualised as a wholly transcendent power and, indeed, supreme person. Theistic traditions developed from the end of the first millenium BC into the medieval period of the current era focussed on Vishnu and his incarnations, Siva, and the Goddess in gentle and ferocious form. The Lord (Bhagavan) or Goddess (Bhagavati) becomes the focus of devotion (bhakti) by devotees (bhagavatas). The bhakti religions are associated with the development of genres of Sanskrit literature, the great epics and above all the Puranas, as well as devotional poetry in Sanskrit and vernacular languages, especially Tamil. Later bhakti becomes influenced by Islam with the development of the north Indian Sants. Regional traditions articulate with the Sanskritic tradition to form new devotional movements. We will begin with an examination of the Vaisnava sources.
The term ‘philosophy’ has often been used to describe systems of thought that arose alongside ritual traditions and the rise of the theistic religions, although what counts as Hindu philosophy would only be partially recognised in departments of Philosophy in the west. In some ways ‘theology’ is more appropriate, although some schools are atheistic and not concerned with a ‘theos’ (and one could include advaita Vedanta or the Pratyabhijña here too). We will inquire into how Indian philosophy has addressed questions that arise in the philosophy of religion and offer a description of the main traditions, particularly the six systems. This lecture will mainly concentrate on Mimamsa and Vedanta (Saṅkara, Ramanuja, Madhva).
We will continue our examination of Indian philosophy looking particularly at theistic arguments developed by Nyaya, especially Udayana. These developments are clearly parallel to arguments developed in the West and raise questions about the rational justification for theistic belief.
Finally we shall briefly examine the rise of ‘Hinduism’ in the nineteenth century and the development of political Hinduism in the twentieth. The boundaries around some forms of Hinduism become more clearly delineated when linked to nationalist politics. We shall examine the idea of ‘Hinduness’ (hindutva) and the politics of representation which takes us back to our opening question, ‘What is Hinduism?’
Scholars of religion have sought to make sense of human experience through the lens of one of its most powerful, pervasive, yet enigmatic dimensions: religion. In the contemporary world this involves weaving diverse perspectives on that rich phenomenon into a single coherent picture. Modern theorists have sought to advance classic approaches to religion through groundbreaking theories, borrowing from disciplines ranging from anthropology, psychology and sociology, to theology, philosophy, and hermeneutics.
This lecture series addresses major questions in the contemporary study of religion through the ideas of key twentieth-century thinkers such as Evans-Pritchard, Gellner, Geertz, Turner, Eliade, Said, McCutcheon, Neville, Van der Leeuw, Ricoeur, Flood, and Hick. It will explore their background and motivations, their insights and pitfalls, and attempt to assess them in the light of the world’s religious traditions. It will ask what religion is, how we can best understand the experiences, discourses, actions, and communities of which it consists, and what it has to tell us about human life itself.
Week 4, Friday 18 May, 5–6pm, Lecture Room 1, Faculty of Oriental Studies
While Vedanta Desika (fourteenth century, South India), as a Srivaisnava Hindu, was a member of a tradition with the greatest respect for the Goddess Sri, in his era there was still lively debate about her precise status in relationship to the supreme deity, Narayana.
In his Srimad Rahasyatrayasara, Desika pushes for a complete acceptance of Sri as the eternal consort of Narayana, an indispensable equal participant in the divine work of enabling human salvation.
Though in many ways a theological conservative and defender of traditional orthodoxy, Desika here shows himself to be radical and innovative in his defense of Sri. Comparison and contrast with debates over the identity of Jesus in early Christian theology and over the role of Mary, mother of Jesus, as co-mediatrix of redemption, clarify Desika's theological method and contribution to the theology of Sri.
Professor Frank Clooney, SJ, is Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology at Harvard. Prof. Clooney is the author of numerous articles and books in the area of Hindu Studies and comparative theology, including Fr. Bouchet's India: An 18th-Century Jesuit's Encounter With Hinduism (2005), Divine Mother, Blessed Mother (2005), and Hindu God, Christian God (2001).
Week 7, Thursday 31 May 2007, 2–3pm, OCHS Library
Among the varied ways of worshipping a goddess, the chanting of her eulogy is favoured by many a devotee and the existence of a wide range of such litanies are part of India’s religious tradition.
The Saundaryalahari, of the 9th–10th century, probably falsely attributed to Shankaracharya, is one such grand prayer. Can the explicit delineation of beauty, rampant in this text, be a path to mukti? In this case what are the ramifications for the worshipper? The Saundaryalahari deals with esoteric cults such as Srividya and its technicalities. However despite the Tantric nature of this text, it has been ‘appropriated’ by large numbers of city dwelling self-confessedly, ‘non-tantric’ women, who chant it regularly.
Besides embarking on an exegetical study, this talk will share some of the explorations the speaker has been able to make through interviews held in major cities in India. The lecture will examine the way beauty has been delineated in this text and how it has been entwined with bhakti, both from the view of the goddess herself as well as the worshipper.
Nilima Chitgopekar is Associate Professor of History in the Jesus and Mary College, Delhi University. She has written books dealing with the Shaiva pantheon which include, Encountering Sivaism: The Deity, the Milieu, the Entourage (Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers), and The Book of Durga (Penguin), and edited Invoking Godesses: Gender Politics in Indian Religion (Shakti Books). Her forthcoming title, Rudra:The Idea of Shiva (Penguin), a fictionalised biography of Shiva, will be released in June of this year.
Week 1, Friday 27 April, 11am–12 noon, OCHS Library
The lecture will present Indian theories of consciousness and experience in the context of some of the current discussions on consciousness and brain.
Week 3, Monday 7 May, 11am–12 noon, OCHS Library
This lecture will be a comparative study of emotions, facial expressions, and gestures in the Natyasastra, Abhinayadarpana, and the works of Charles Darwin and Paul Ekman.
Dr Sangeetha Menon graduated in Zoology, and then took her postgraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Kerala, with a thesis entitled ‘The Concept of Consciousness in the Bhagavad Gita’. A gold-medalist and first rank holder for postgraduate studies, she has been a fellow at the National Institute of Advanced Studies since 1996.
Week 2, Monday 30 April, 11am–12 noon, OCHS Library
This lecture will examine various aspects of dharma as suggested in the Vaisesika system, namely its historical, metaphysical, and moral aspects. The concept of dharma is so central in Vaisesika philosophy that Kanada begins his discourse with an aim of explaining dharma.
Week 4, Monday 14 May, 11am–12 noon, OCHS Library
This lecture highlights five Sanskrit commentaries on the Vaisesikasutras that have been written and published in the last century. The commentaries are: (i) Vaidikavritih, by Pt. Hariprasada, Nirnayasagar, 1951; (ii) Rasayana, by Sri Uttamur Viraraghavacharya, Madras, 1958; (iii) Brahmamunibhasyam, by Swami Brahmamuni, Baroda, 1962; (iv) Vedabhaskarabhasyam, by Pt. Kashinath Sharma, Himachal, 1972; (v) Sugama, by Desika Tirumalai Tatacharya, Allahabad, 1979.
Dr Shashiprabha Kumar is Professor in Sanskrit Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University and specialises in Nyaya-Vaisesika. She has published widely in this field over the past thirty years and has particular interest in the idea of consciousness in Nyaya, as well as the early history of the school.
The Majewski Lecture
The Subhasita as a Social Artifact: Notes toward the History of Ethics in Medieval India.
Dr. Daud Ali
Week 6, Tuesday 27th February 4.30pm, Oriental Institute, Lecture Room 2
Subhasitas are Sanskrit sayings that generally make a moral point. This lecture will examine the role of ‘eloquent speech’ in the formation of social and political relationships in medieval India, showing the role of subhasita in the formation of ethics.
Daud Ali is Senior Lecturer in Early Indian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He is author of Courtly Culture and PoliticalLife in Early Medieval India, and, with Ronald Inden and Jonathan Walters, of Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practice in South Asia.Hinduism II Series
Prof. Gavin Flood
As series of eight lectures. Seminar Room, Theology Faculty Centre, St. Giles
Each Friday, from Week 1, 19th January 2007.
These lectures will examine conceptions of liberation and paths leading to liberation in the history of Hinduism. After an introductory lecture that raises some theological questions about the relation of path to goal and the importance of ritual and asceticism, we will begin with an examination of Samkhya, the philosophical backdrop of Yoga, and move on to the opening Yoga-sutras, their ideal of liberation as isolation (kaivalya), and the means of achieving that goal. We will trace the development of devotion (bhakti) and examine bhakti and yoga in the Bhagavad Gita before moving into the medieval period. Here the lectures will describe some developments of bhakti in vernacular literatures, focusing on both texts that advocate devotion to iconic forms and the later texts that advocate devotion to an absolute without qualities. Here we will also examine the importance of ritual texts and the relation between ritual, devotion and yoga. Lastly we will trace the themes of liberation and path with examples from selected tantric traditions within Vaisnavism and Saivism.
While the lectures will place texts in their historical contexts, the course will not examine texts in a strictly chronological sequence, the stress being on theme. Throughout we will raise critical, theological questions through engaging with texts in translation and raise the question about the extent to which liberation is a rhetoric that overlays other cultural forces. By the end of the course the student should have an understanding of soteriology in Hinduism, an understanding of some the main literatures associated with this, and an awareness of the philosophical and theological problems entailed. These lectures are aimed at students of theology and religious studies.
Lecture Schedule
Introduction: the question of soteriology in India
Sankhya and Yoga
Yoga-sutras of Patañjali
Bhakti and Yoga in the Bhagavad-gita and its interpreters
Bhakti literatures and Ritual texts
The Sant tradition: Kabir, Mirabai
The Pañcaratra
Saivism
Religious Studies Reading Group
This is an informal reading group oriented towards graduate students which will meet weekly during term time to discuss a book, paper or selected chapters of a book. The books and papers will be germane to current debates in the study of religion.This terms reading will be from Roy Rappaport's Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (CUP 1999).
RS Reading Group Friday 2.00 weeks 2-7, OCHS Library:
Desire in Christianity and Indian Religions
One day conference, Regents Park College, Oxford
Thursday 9th November, 9.30am - 3.30pm
Speakers:
Dr. Dermott Killingley
Dr. Ulrike Roesler
Prof Keith Ward
Desire in its widest sense is fundamental to human existence and has been the focus of much discussion in religious traditions over the centuries. Desire has been seen as a negative quality which keeps people in bondage, as generally seen in Buddhism, but desire for a greater good has also been seen as a positive force in different traditions. The aim of this conference is explore the idea of desire and its understanding in Christianity and Indian religions and to generate discussion of comparative philosophy and theology across traditions. The conference is free but lunch will be provided for a cost of £5 to be paid in advance by 30th October. Please send cheques to OCHS, 15 Magdalen Street, Oxford, OX1 3AE.
The Majewski Lecture
It's a Kind of Magic: The Powers of Yoga and Their Interpretation
Dr. Angelika Malinar
Week 4, Monday 30th October 5pm Examination Schools, High Street
Flying through the air, the remembrance of former existence, being insensitive to pain - all these phenomena are known as the 'power' of Yogins and are usually regarded as signs of a successful practice of Yoga. Already in the oldest texts, such as the Mahabharata (400 BCE- 400 CE) and the Yogasutra (4th-5th century, CE), they are called bala (power), siddhi (achievements) or vibhuti (manifestation of might). In academic contexts these powers were rather neglected since they have often been interpreted as an expression of 'magical thinking'. The discussion of some of these academic views will be followed by an analysis of the description and interpretation of Yogic powers in the Yogasutra and the Mahabharata. It will be shown that the authors of these texts used their own philosophical framework for explaining the 'conquest' of the objects of Yogic practice.
Dr. Malinar is a renowned scholar who teaches in the Department for the Study of Religions, SOAS. She has done important work on the Bhagavad Gita, placing the text in a political context and showing the centrality of notions of kingship within it, and on the Jagannatha temple in Puri. She has published a number of books and articles.
Hinduism I Series
Prof. Gavin Flood
Seminar Room, Theology Faculty Centre, St. Giles, Each Wednesday, from 11th October, 11am
This course offers a thematic and historical introduction to Hinduism for students of theology and religious studies. Focusing on the brahmanical tradition we will explore the textual sources, categories, practices and social institutions that formed that tradition. Primary texts in translation will provide the basis for reflection on issues such as dharma, renunciation, caste, and concepts of deity. We then move on to some of the major philosophical developments of the tradition, with particular emphasis on the Vedanta. The course will raise theological and cultural questions about the relation between reason and practice, person and world, and society and gender. We will conclude with a consideration of Hinduism and modernity.
Lecture Schedule
Introduction: What is Hinduism?
The Veda and vedic traditions.
Dharma, society and gender
Ascetic Traditions
Indian Theism
Philosophical Traditions 1
Philosophical Traditions 2
Hinduism and Modernity
Sanskrit Reading Group
Dr. M. Narasimhachary, University of Chennai, OCHS Shivdasani Visiting Fellow
Dr. M. Narasimhachary will read Sanskrit with interested students at the Intermediate Level. The text for the readings will be the Ishavasya Upanishad.
Tuesdays at 11.00am, From Week 2 - Week 7, October 17, 24, 31 and November 7, 14, 21
OCHS Library, 15 Magdalen St.
Religious Studies Reading Group
This is an informal reading group oriented towards graduate students which will meet weekly during term time to discuss a book, paper or selected chapters of a book. The books and papers will be germane to current debates in the study of religion.
Fridays at 2.00pm OCHS Library, 15 Magdalen St.
The Majewski Lecture
Playing around with Sakuntala: Translating Sanskrit Drama for Performance
Dr. W. Johnson (Religious & Theological Studies, University of Cardiff)
This lecture considers possible strategies for translating the conventions and aesthetic of Sanskrit drama for a modern English-peaking audience. It takes the form of a case study of Dr. Johnson's own translation of The Recognition of Sakuntala for Oxford World's Classics, and reflects on some unintended consequences.
Thursday 18th May, 5.00–6.00pm Faculty Room, Oriental Institute
The Wahlstrom Lecture
The Bhagavad Gita: Innovations and Challenges in Its Translation
Graham M. Schweig (Dept. of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Christopher Newport University, Virginia, USA)
Many translators of the Bhagavad Gita resort to an informationally accurate prose translation that sometimes loses the poetic power and expression of the original verse. Others resort to constricted verse translation droping important and nuanced meanings of the text. Schweig is developing a way to translate Sanskrit philosophical verse that is both loyal to the meaning of the text while conveying something of the poetic power of the text in what he calls “dedicated free verse translation,” without falling prey to the weakness of either approach. Schweig will present some of the discoveries on which he is writing for his forthcoming introduction and translation of the Bhagavad Gita for Harper Collins / Harper San Francisco.
Tuesday 30th May, at 5pm, OCHS Library
Workshop: ‘Towards Equality: Writing/Reading Gender in Texts of Hinduism’
Friday 19th May, 11.00-4.00, OCHS Library
This workshop will seek to address the question how women are represented within Hinduism and the question of women’s agency in the history of the Hindu traditions. These issues are closely linked to broader questions of power in the history of Hinduism and roles within clearly demarcated boundaries that go against the spirit of modernity.
10.30-11.00 Coffee and opening
11.00-12.00 Dr. Sanjukta Gupta: Towards Equality: Women Neither as Goddess nor As Victim
This talk will introduce the theme of the worskshop and will address the problem of traditional representations of women as Goddess or Victim and will provide a historical overview of the problem. This will set the scene and provide the background for the discussion that follows.
12.00-1.00 Prof. M. Bose: Texts of Hindu Sacred Law and the Construction of Women's Lives
In India the treatises of law founded upon the sacred books of the Hindus had a far-reaching and defining influence on social life. As foundational documents of the Hindu way of life which codified social relations as well as personal belief as religious imperatives, these texts have exerted the deepest influence on the lives and conduct of women through history and their teachings have not yet entirely lost their force. In this lecture I shall consider some of the provisions in Hindu sacred law that moulded the lives of women, as derived from the writings of Manu and other ancient Hindu lawgivers, as well as some later writers on this basis we shall attempt to understand the intimate connection between the religious framework and the social, which has laid the basis of women's status, roles, rights and duties in Hindu society.
1.00-2.30 LUNCH
2.30-3.30 Prof. Rukmani: The Concept of Nivrtti as Translated in the Lives of Women in Hinduism: A Survey
Nivrtti denotes disengagement with worldly conventions. Of course it is used more in the context of samnysins/samnyasinis in connection with the pursuit of moksa (liberation). But this paper intends to release the word nivrtti from this narrow application and look at it in a wider context. The paper will examine the instances in the texts which have representations of women who go against the conventional, mother/warrior image. For instance is the brahmavadini/scholar woman like Gargi for instance, discarding by choice the role of a married woman and opting for a life of scholarly/spiritual search? Again is Savitri exerting her independence and opting to marry Satyavan in spite of her father's advice? Sulabha again could be someone who did not want to marry anyone because she was far superior to all those who wooed her. She makes the deliberate choice to become a bhiksuni. There are any number of these examples in Sanskrit texts which will form the basis of the talk.
3.30-4.00 General Discussion
Religious Studies Reading Group
Fridays at 2.00, OCHS Library
This is an informal reading group oriented towards staff and graduate students which will meet weekly during term time to discuss a book or selected chapters of a book. It is hoped to find readings that will be of interest to a wide range of students and researchers in the study of religions and to see whether or how shared themes develop in the discussions.
Hilary Term 2005 (January–March)
Hinduism II Lecture series: Yoga, Bhakti, Tantra
Prof Gavin Flood
Wednesdays, 11.00am from January 18th, Theology Faculty Seminar Room
These lectures will examine conceptions of liberation and paths leading to liberation in the history of ‘Hindu’ traditions. After an introductory lecture that raises some of the theological questions about the relation of path to goal and the importance of ritual and asceticism in the history of Indian religions, we will begin with an examination of Samkhya, the philosophical backdrop of Yoga, and move on to the opening Yoga-sutras, their ideal of liberation as isolation (kaivalya), and the means of achieving that goal. We will trace the development of devotion (bhakti) and examine bhakti and yoga in the Bhagavad Gita before moving into the medieval period. Here the lectures will describe some developments of bhakti in vernacular literatures, focussing on both texts that advocate devotion to iconic forms and the later texts that advocate devotion to an absolute without qualities. Here we will also examine the importance of ritual texts and the relation between ritual, devotion and yoga. Lastly we will trace the themes of liberation and path with examples from selected tantric traditions within Vaisnavism and Saivism.
While the lectures will place texts in their historical contexts, the course will not examine texts in a strictly chronological sequence, the stress being on theme. Throughout we will raise critical theological questions through engaging with texts in translation and raise the question about the extent to which liberation is a rhetoric that overlays other cultural forces. By the end of the course the student should have an understanding of soteriology in Hindu traditions, an understanding of some the main literatures associated with this, and an awareness of the philosophical and theological problems entailed. These lectures are aimed at students of theology and religious studies.
Lecture Schedule
Introduction: the question of soteriology in India
Samkhya and Yoga
Yoga-sutras of Patañjali
Bhakti and Yoga in the Bhagavad-gita and its interpreters
Bhakti literatures and Ritual texts
The Sant tradition: Kabir, Mirabai
The Pañcaratra
Monistic Saivism
The Majewski Lecture
The Adequacy of Language: re-evaluating Shankara's understanding of the Veda
Dr. J.S. Hirst (Manchester)
Thursday 2nd March, 5.00pm, Lecture Room 1, Oriental Faculty
If ultimate reality is beyond language, how can language comprise the only valid method of acquiring knowledge of it? And if no language whatsoever can describe ultimate reality, what guarantee could there be that what Vedic language purports to disclose is anything other than a chimera?
These are problems that lie at the heart of Shankara's Advaita Vedanta, but occur, in different guises, in a wide range of religious traditions. They are problems which raise questions about text and interpretation, about 'revelation' and the ways in which language is held to work. They require us to reflect on how we know what we know. They challenge us to define in what senses, if any, the ultimate may be said to be ineffable.
In this lecture, I shall re-examine the work of the famous Indian non-dual commentator, Shankara (c.700 A.D.), who held that ultimate reality (brahman) is beyond language and who frankly admitted that the Veda has no authority once brahman is known. I shall, however, challenge interpretations of his work which assume that language is inadequate to its task and so locate knowledge of the ineffable either in some kind of mystical experience or in the secondary or poetic use of language. I shall argue that, in Shankara's view, the language of the Upanishadic Vedic texts is precisely adequate to its task, given the epistemological and hermeneutical strategies the Veda provides for the Advaitin commentator to deploy.
Other Programmes
Religious Studies Reading Group
Fridays at 2.00, OCHS Library
This is an informal reading group oriented towards staff and graduate students which will meet weekly during term time to discuss a book or selected chapters of a book. It is hoped to find readings that will be of interest to a wide range of students and researchers in the study of religions and to see whether or how shared themes develop in the discussions.
Sanskrit Readings
Tuesdays 12.00, Academic Director's room, OCHS
Readings in the Jayakhya Samhita lead by Prof Gavin Flood
Michaelmas Term 2005 (October–December)
Introductory Lectures
Hinduism One: Themes and Textual Sources
Prof. Gavin Flood (OCHS Academic Director)
Each Wednesday from 12th October, at 11am.
Seminar Room, Faculty of Theology Centre, St. Giles.
This course offers a thematic and historical introduction to Hinduism for students of theology and religious studies. Focussing on the brahmanical tradition we will explore the textual sources, categories, practices and social institutions that formed that tradition. Primary texts in translation will provide the basis for reflection on both philosophical and social issues such as dharma, renunciation, caste, and concepts of deity. Not only presenting an account of the texts and traditions, the course will raise theological and cultural questions about the relation between reason and practice, person and world, and society and gender. The last two lectures will examine contemporary traditions in Kerala and we will conclude with a consideration of Hinduism and modernity.
Lecture Schedule
The Majewski Lecture
Rationalism, Atheism and Hinduism in 'Dravidian' India, c.1920-90
Dr. David Washbrook (St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.)
Week 6, Wednesday 16th November, 5pm
Lecture Room 1, Oriental InstituteIntroduction to the Shivdasani Series of Lectures & Seminars
The Archaeology of Sacred Space: The Hindu Temple in Peninsular India (2nd Century BC – 8th Century AD)
This series of two lectures and two seminars presents the social context of the Hindu temple in peninsular India from its inception in the 2nd-1st centuries BC to the 8th century AD. Archaeological data encompasses not just religious structures and standing monuments, but more importantly it also includes an analysis of the location of religious architecture within the social domain. Temple architecture is thus an important indicator of interaction with diverse interest groups, such as worshippers, ritual specialists, patrons, artisans, etc. No temple can survive without adequate maintenance and we do know that shrines and other sacred architecture far outlived their patrons. The focus within this larger canvas is on the biography of temple complexes at Alampur, Aihole, Pattadakal and Badami, which evolved as major centres for Hindu, Jaina and Buddhist worship from 6th to 8th centuries, thus epitomising a microcosm for religious developments in peninsular India and the larger Indian Ocean world.
Shivdasani Lecture 1
Colonial Knowledge, Archaeological Reconstructions: The Discovery of the Hindu Temple in 19th – 20th Century India
Dr. Himanshu Prabha Ray (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
Week 4, Tuesday 1st November, at 12pm
OCHS Library, 15 Madgalen St.
The first lecture in the series traces the beginnings of the archaeology of religion in 19th-20th century India and highlights the trends that emerged in the study of the Hindu temple as a result of this intervention. Perhaps the most salient is the disjunction between religious praxis and theory and the study of architecture divorced from its ritual and philosophical moorings. A second is the change in the character of religious sites in the subcontinent from a culturally pluralistic personality to a monotheistic religious identity as a result of early archaeological legislation in the 19th century and more specifically from the early years of the 20th century onwards. This is best achieved by contrasting the ‘discovery’ of the site of Amaravati (1798-1867) with that of Nagarjunakonda (1920-1938) – both located along the river Krishna in the Guntur district of Andhra.
Shivdasani Lecture 2
The Shrine in Early Hinduism: The Changing Sacred landscape
Dr. Himanshu Prabha Ray (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
Week 5, Tuesday 8th November, 12pm
OCHS Library, 15 Madgalen St.
This lecture counters the linear view of religious change in South Asia, which suggests that the Hindu temple came into its own after the decline of Buddhism in the fourth-fifth centuries AD. Instead the presentation shows that the temple form was part of a common architectural vocabulary widely used from the second century BC onwards not only for the Buddhist shrine, but also for the Hindu and Jain temples and several local and regional cults. The speaker thus makes a case for plurality of religious beliefs and practices in ancient South Asia as against the prevailing view that these local and regional cults were gradually subsumed under the mantle of Sanskritisation starting from the 4th-5th centuries onwards.
Trinity Term 2005 (April–June)
Hinduism II: Bhakti Through Vernacular Traditions
Prof. P. Kumar
Day: Tuesdays
Time: 2.30pm.
Commencing: 26th April
Place: Common room, Faculty of Theology Centre, St. Giles.
Week 1: April 26:
Historical Overview of Bhakti in India
Week 2: May 3:
South Indian Bhakti Traditions: Tamil Alvars
Week 3: May 10:
North Indian Bhakti Traditions: Kabir, Mirabai, Tulsidas
Week 4: May 17:
South Indian Shaiva Bhakti: Tamil Nayanmars
Week 5: May 24:
Shaiva Bhakti in the North (Kashmir)
Week 6: May 31:
The Goddess Bhakti Tradition of India
Week 7: June 7:
Goddess in Bengal Tradition (Kali, Uma)
Week 8: June 14:
Goddess in Popular Hinduism
Week 2: May 5 (Thursday)
Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky and Sanskrit – by Prof. Ashok Aklujkar, University of British Columbia, Canada
Week 3: May 12 (Thursday)
Philosophy’s Linguistic Turn: The case of Naagaarjuna and Bhartrihari – by Prof. Ashok Aklujkar, University of British Columbia, Canada
All the above lectures are held on Thursday at 5:00 p.m. at the Oriental Institute’s Lecture Room
Hilary Term 2005 (January–March)
Hinduism One: Introduction
Dr Pratap Kumar (OCHS Academic Director)
Day: Week 1 and 2 will be on Thurs (thereafter on Tues).
Time: 2.30pm.
Commencing: 20th January.
Place: Common room, Faculty of Theology Centre, St. Giles.
Week 1: Introduction to Hinduism: History, Sources, and Ethos
Week 2: Upanishadic Teachings: Idea of Brahman, Self, and
Liberation
Week 3: Hindu Laws (dharma): Ramayana and Manu’s Laws
Week 4: God and the Goddess: Bhagavad-Gita and Devi Gita
Week 5: Shavism, Siva Jnana Bodham, Sankara, and
Vivekacudamni
Week 6: Hindu Society
Week 7: Hindu Rites: Gender
Week 8: Assessment of Brahmanical Hinduism: General
Characteristics
Shivdasani Lectures:
K. Maheswaran Nair (Professor, Department of Sanskrit, University of Kerala)
Week 4, Tuesday 8th February, at 12pm
OCHS Library, 15 Madgalen St. All are welcome
The Dvaita-Advaita Controversy
K. Maheswaran Nair (Professor, Department of Sanskrit, University of Kerala)
Week 5, Tuesday 15th February, at 12pm
OCHS Library, 15 Madgalen St. All are welcome
Advaita-tattvam (delivered in Sanskrit)
K. Maheswaran Nair (Professor, Department of Sanskrit, University of Kerala)
Week 8, March 7th, 3-4pm
The Majewski Lecture:
Hinduism and Women: Uses and Abuses of Religious Freedom
Ursula King (Professor Emerita, Senior Research Fellow and Associate Member of the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Bristol. Professorial Research Associate, Centre for Gender and Religions Research, SOAS, University of London)
Monday 7th February, at 5pm
Lecture Room 1, Oriental Institute
Michaelmas Term 2004 (October–December)
Hindus in the Diaspora: Their Histories and Traditions
Professor Pratap Kumar (OCHS Academic Director)
This lecture series includes a general survey of the histories of Hindu communities outside India. The series will focus on the development and the maintenance of their traditions.
More specifically the series will unpack issues related to the contemporary understanding of Hinduism and the implications that the developments of Diaspora Hinduism have on how we conceptualise Hinduism. The discourse will look at the orientalist constructions through classical texts and the predominantly oral traditions that have influenced the diaspora Hinduism. It will raise methodological and theoretical issues in conceptualising Hinduism.
Mondays, weeks 1-6 (commencing 11th October), at 4pm
OCHS Library, 15 Magdalen St.
Modernity and Madhva Vedanta: The Beginning or the End of an Esoteric Tradition?
Deepak Sarma (Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Case Western Reserve University, USA)
The Madhva school of Vedanta is an orthodox tradition that is being forced to rise to the challenges of modernity, and in particular, recent technological advances. Are these changes minor ones or do they strike at the very heart of Madhva doctrine? Do they point towards its end or are they a chance to flourish? Dr Sarma's talk addresses these and other related issues that would face any esoteric tradition.
Week 1, Friday 15th October, at 2pm
OCHS Library, 15 Madgalen St. All are welcome
Shivdasani Lectures
Consulting God through Boards and Gaming Pieces
Vasantha Rangachar (Sri Krishnadevaraya University, Anantapur, and Andhra Pradesh and Shivdasani Visiting Fellow)
The turf, the tennis court, the chess board, and pavement hopscotch cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle. Game diagrams were built into roofing slabs or the floor of temples in ancient India, sometimes carved into the cloister seats. Professor Rangachar explores how the devotee, the deity, and the game met.
Week 5, Thursday 11th November, at 12pm
OCHS Library, 15 Madgalen St. All are welcome
In Hindu Tradition is Gaming and Gambling Fun or a Sin?
Vasantha Rangachar (Sri Krishnadevaraya University, Anantapur, and Andhra Pradesh and Shivdasani Visiting Fellow)
Any discussion of the motivation of gambling usually starts with the natural comparison to life. Life is a gamble. Everyday, people are faced with situations which involve risk and chance. Professor Rangachar looks at the religious antecedents of gaming and the reaction to its development.
Week 6, Thursday 18th November, at 12pm
OCHS Library, 15 Madgalen St. All are welcome
The Wahlstrom Lecture
Transnational Religion: Hindu Traditions in Cambodia, 5th-12th centuries
Professor Vasudha Narayanan (University of Florida, USA and Tamal Krishna Visiting Fellow, President of the American Academy of Religion [2001–2])
Week 2, Tuesday 19th October, at 5pm
OCHS Library, 15 Madgalen St. All are welcome
Trinity Term 2004 (April–June)
Is There a Hindu
Monotheism?
Professor Francis X. Clooney, SJ
In light of Biblical and Christian reflections on monotheism (week 1), an inquiry, by way of four examples (weeks 2-6), into the nature of Hindu belief in one supreme divinity, asking whether such belief can be termed "monotheistic." No background in Hindu studies required.
Week 1: Refining the question – Biblical and Christian monotheism, Hindu traditions, and the problem of a comparative study of monotheism
Week 2: The case for Krsna and Siva as the one true God – early resources in the Bhagavad-Gita and Svetasvatara Upanisad
Week 3: No lecture.
Week 4: Narayana alone, in medieval Tamil Vaisnavism – Tiruvaymoli 4.10 and Vedanta Desika's Srimat Rahasyatrayasara c. 6.
Week 5: Is the Goddess a monotheist? Reflection on three Goddess hymns and the Devi Gita
Week 6: In dialogue with the West: Rammohun Roy and 19th century Hindu monotheisms.
Tuesdays, 4pm – 5pm (commencing 27th April)
Campion Hall, Brewer St., St Aldates
The Distinguished Majewski Lecture
What Do We Learn from the Iconography of the Goddess
Dr Sanjukta Gupta (Oriental Institute)
Week 4, Wednesday 19th May, at 5pm
Oriental Institute, lecture room one. All are welcome
Sanskrit Readings
Professor S. Ramaratnam (Vivekananda College, Chennai, and OCHS Shivdasani Visiting Fellow)
Professor Ramaratnam will read Sanskrit with interested students at the intermediate level. Times and texts are subject to arrangement. Please contact the Centre if interested.
Enquiries
Tel.: 01865 304300
E-mail: info@ochs.org.uk
Relating
to the 'Other': Hindu and Christian Perspectives
Presented by the Centre for Hindu Studies and the Centre for Christisanity
and Culture
Thursdays 5pm, Regent's Park College, London
Understanding Hindus as an Educational Exercise in Understanding
Self and Other
Peggy Morgan
22 January, Mansfield College, Oxford
Christian and Indian Traditions in Historical Perspective
Dr Dermot Killingley
29 January, University of Newcastle
Authority and Scripture in Hindu and Christian Thought
Professor Francis X. Clooney, SJ
5 February, Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
Violence and Peacemaking in Hindu and Christian Tradition
Ken Valpey, Oxford Centre for Hindu
Studies
Reverend Dr Stephen Finamore, Bristol
12 February
Christian Theological Responses to Hinduism
Reverend Dr Michael Barnes, SJ, Heythrop
College, University of London
Ravi Gupta, Oxford Centre for Hindu
Studies
19 February
Hindus and Hinduism in Contemporary Britain
Dr Savita Vij
26 February, Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
Hinduism I: Primary Texts in Translation
Prof Francis X. Clooney, SJ
These lectures (for which the source material lies almost entirely
in Sanskrit texts read in English translation and with the help
of reliable secondary sources) treats major components of the brahminical
Hindu tradition which, though of ancient origin, is still relevant
today. Particular attention will be paid to important themes developed
in the listed primary texts read in translation. The approach taken
is classical and textual. These lectures are intended for students
in theology and religious studies.
Tuesdays, 4pm – 5pm (commencing 20th
January)
Campion Hall, Brewer St.
Lecture
Schedule
Lecture 1: Introduction and overview
to the textual study of brahminical Hinduism.
Lecture 2: Early wisdom on reality,
God, self in the Upanisads.
Lecture 3: Vedanta's move to
theological system will be noted by attention to the defence of
religious non-dualism offered in the Vivekacudamani of Sri Sankaracarya.
Lecture 4: Ritual theory in language
and practice.
Lecture 5: Living the orthodox life
The Laws of Manu.
Lecture 6: The world of Rama and Sita – the Ramayana of Valmiki
Lecture 7: Knowing, acting, loving
Krsna – Bhagavad-Gita.
Lecture 8: An approach to the religion
of Siva
The Majewski Lecture
On Defining Hinduism
Dr Julius Lipner (Cambridge University.
Dr Smith is author of: Hindus, their religious beliefs and practices, Routledge)
Week 5, Wednesday 18th February, at 5pm
Oriental Institute, lecture room 2. All are welcome
Hindu Non-dualism (Advaita) in Theory and Practice
The
Majewski Lecture
The Hindu Imagination and Imaginary
Hinduisms
The
Wahlstrom Lecture
Madhvacarya's Mitigated Monotheism
Science
& Religion Lecture
Intelligent Design & Darwinian
Evolution
Sanskrit
Readings
Bhagavata Purana, Skandha X, Chapters 29,
31-33
Prof. M. Narasimhachary, Shivdasani Visiting Fellow
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9.45am - 10.45am, commencing 14th October.
Oriental Institute.
Sankara's,
Upadesa Sahasri
Dr Godavarisha Mishra, Shivdasani Visiting Fellow
Mondays and Wednesdays, 11.00am - 12.00pm, commencing 13th October.
Oriental Institute.