Category: Academic

Talk: Thursday 22 October 2.00-3.00 | “Was Sāṃkhya non-Vedic?” with Prof. Knut Jacobsen

Talk: Thursday 22 October 2.00-3.00 | “Was Sāṃkhya non-Vedic?” with Prof. Knut Jacobsen

Posted on by shawna

Lectures of the J.P. and Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow

 

Was Sāṃkhya non-Vedic?

Week 2, Thursday 22 October 2.00-3.00, OCHS

Professor Knut Jacobsen

As late as in the 8th century CE, the philosopher and promoter of Advaita Vedānta, Śaṅkara argued strongly and repeatedly in his Brahmasūtrabhāṣya that the Sāṃkhya system of religious thought was a non-Vedic system, that it had no support in the Veda and was even fundamentally opposed to the Vedic views. He argued that the two main doctrines of Sāṃkhya, the independence of pradhāna or prakṛti (principle of matter) and the plurality of puruṣas (principle of consciousness) were unacceptable and opposed to the Veda because they were contradicted by the doctrine of the oneness of brahman. There are good reasons to accept that Śaṅkara was right, that Sāṃkhya was non-Vedic. However, Sāṃkhya did later appear as an āstika tradition and was included among the so-called six darśanas and this inclusion gives the impression of Sāṃkhya having a Vedic origin. In this lecture I evaluate the arguments for a non-Vedic origin of Sāṃkhya in scholarship and in the Sanskrit sources and its appearance as an āstika tradition.

 

Knut A. Jacobsen is professor in the study of religions at the University of Bergen, Norway and a senior fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. His research focuses on Sāṃkhya-Yoga in Hindu culture and society, Hinduism in the world, Hindu conceptions and rituals of space and time, and the plurality of religious traditions and practices in South Asia. His publications include numerous articles and edited volumes and five monographs, Hinduism in the World (Routledge, 2025), Yoga in Modern Hinduism: Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Sāṃkhyayoga (Routledge, 2018), Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition: Salvific Space (Routledge, 2013), Kapila: Founder of Sāṃkhya and Avatāra of Viṣṇu (Munshiram Manoharlal, 2008), and Prakṛti in Sāṃkhya-Yoga (Peter Lang; 1999). Jacobsen is the founding editor in chief of the seven volumes Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, and he is an Elected member of Academia Europaea as well as The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Talk: Wednesday 21 October 2.30-3.30 | “Engaged Jain Studies: Methods for Studying Engaged Jainism” with Prof. Christopher Jain Miller

Talk: Wednesday 21 October 2.30-3.30 | “Engaged Jain Studies: Methods for Studying Engaged Jainism” with Prof. Christopher Jain Miller

Posted on by shawna

Engaged Jain Studies: Methods for Studying Engaged Jainism

Week 2, Wednesday 21 October 2.30-3.30, OCHS

Professor Christopher Jain Miller

 

Jains have espoused nonviolence and compassion for millennia, continually redefining and reengaging these and other principles with their changing social realities. Using case studies from contributors’ chapters in Engaged Jainism (SUNY 2026), I will present a three-fold set of inclusive methodological tendencies used in engaged Jain studies to study the field’s object, engaged Jainism. 

These three tendencies include: 1) the constructive-reproductive model, through which researchers unquestioningly repeat emic Jain discourse, thereby reproducing approaches to the study of the Jain tradition initiated by romantic Orientalist scholars of the nineteenth century, 2) the critical-analytical model, which uses critical etic frameworks for analyzing emic Jain discourse, and has origins in colonial Orientalist studies of Jainism, and 3) the critical-constructive model, which draws from both the “critical-analytical” and “constructive-reproductive” models, engages etic epistemic frameworks with emic epistemic frameworks, and in the process remains open to the transformation of both scholars and Jains in the research process.

Participants will take away a renewed understanding of the ways that Jain social engagement can be effectively studied in the academy today, particularly in light of the manifold ways that scholars and universities engage with members of the Jain community supporting their research. 



Christopher Jain Miller is Vice President of Academic Affairs and Professor of Jain and Yoga Studies at Arihanta Institute; Professor of Engaged Jain Studies at Claremont School of Theology; and Visiting Researcher at the University of Zürich’s Asien-Orient-Institut. He is the author of Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation (Routledge 2024) and co-editor of Engaged Jainism: Critical and Constructive Studies of Jain Social Engagement (SUNY 2026).

Talk: Friday 16 October 2.00-3.00 | “Jain Āsana Yoga: Textual History and Practical Perspective” with Dr Samani Pratibha Pragya

Talk: Friday 16 October 2.00-3.00 | “Jain Āsana Yoga: Textual History and Practical Perspective” with Dr Samani Pratibha Pragya

Posted on by shawna

Jain Āsana Yoga: Textual History and Practical Perspective

Week 1, Friday 16 October 2.00-3.00, OCHS

Dr Samani Pratibha Pragya

This lecture examines the historical development and practical dimensions of Jain postural yoga (āsana) with particular attention to the textual traditions in which bodily postures are represented, interpreted, and practiced. Rather than investigating āsana exclusively through the categories of modern postural yoga, the study situates Jain approaches to bodily discipline within broader Jain understandings of asceticism, meditation, restraint, and embodied practice. It traces references to postures across select Jain textual sources and considers how these descriptions relate to changing conceptions of the disciplined body. 

The paper also explores the practical significance of āsana in Jain contexts, including its relationship to meditation, ritual practice, and ascetic discipline. By bringing textual evidence into dialogue with embodied practice, the study highlights the distinctive features of Jain approaches to posture while also considering their place within the wider history of South Asian physical and contemplative traditions.

Samani Pratibha Pragya is currently a Visiting Teaching Assistant Professor at Florida International University. She is a scholar-practitioner and an ordained Jain nun (Samani). She received her PhD on “Prekṣā Meditation: History and Methods” from SOAS, University of London. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at SOAS, working on Terāpanth data pertaining to the Jaina-Prosopography Project. She is an authorized Prekṣā Yoga and Meditation teacher.

She initiated a rural development project in Tamkore, Rajasthan, and established MahapragyaInternational School there, where she worked for the education of underprivileged girls.

Talk: 11 June, 2.00-3.00 | “Islam’s Encounter with Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism in Seventeenth-Century Bengal” with Dr Ayesha Irani

Talk: 11 June, 2.00-3.00 | “Islam’s Encounter with Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism in Seventeenth-Century Bengal” with Dr Ayesha Irani

Posted on by user
Saiyad Sultān’s seventeenth-century Nabīvaṃśa, “The Prophet’s Lineage”—a universal history of the Prophet Muhammad—was the first major text to present Islamic doctrine to Bengalis in their mother-tongue.
 
The greater part of Book One of the Nabīvaṃśa translates into Bengali the thirteenth-century Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ attributed to a certain Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Kisāʾī; in Book Two, the author appends a full-blown biography of the Prophet Muḥammad, most likely a translation of an unknown source.
 
Sultān reconstitutes Islamic prophetology to include Hindu divinities and sacred texts, tacitly enlarging the Qurʾānic category of People of the Book to uniquely embrace the Hindus of Bengal. Specific Hindu deities, identifiable as Śiva and various avatāras of Viṣṇu, including Rāma, make their advent to eradicate evil from the earth. Their abysmal failure brings forth the creation of Ādam, and after him a line of prophets, including Śiś, Idris, Nūh, Ibrāhim, Musā, Dāud, Solemān, and Īsā, whose stories are told in some detail, culminating with the Prophet of Islam. Hari (Kr̥ṣṇa) is the only Hindu god who punctuates the line of traditional Islamic prophets after Ādam.
 
In this workshop, I shall share a draft-translation of the Hari cycle of the Nabīvaṃśa, which I am currently working on for the Murty Classical Library of India (Harvard University Press), and open up a discussion on the peculiarities of the Nabīvaṃśa’s Account of Hari in the context of the Vaiṣṇava corpus.
Ayesha A. Irani is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of  Massachusetts Boston. She is a scholar of Islam in South Asia and a specialist in the  early modern literature of Bengal. Her first monograph, The Muhammad Avatāra:  Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam (Oxford University Press,  New York, 2021), examines the role of translation in the Islamization of Bengal, through  a close reading of the seventeenth-century Nabīvaṃśa (“The Prophet’s Lineage”), the  first major work to translate Islamic doctrine for Bengalis into their mother-tongue. She  is currently translating the Nabīvaṃśa for the Murty Classical Library of India, Harvard  University Press, and is also working on two major research projects. The first involves  writing a literary history of Sufism in early modern and colonial Bengal. The second  explores Prabhāta Saṃgīta, a corpus of modern devotional songs composed by the  charismatic spiritual master, Shri Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (1921-1990), who is the founder  of the global spiritual organization, Ananda Marga. In addition to these projects, she is  co-editing with Lucian Wong a volume tentatively entitled, The Vaiṣṇava Sensorium. This  volume brings together the cross-disciplinary work of a group of international scholars  drawn from the fields of textual studies, philosophy, anthropology, history of religions,  art history, and ethnomusicology to examine how the senses mediate the experience of  the divine in Vaiṣṇava praxis in eastern India and beyond.
Talk: 3 June 2.30-3.30 “Ahiṃsā” | with Prof. Dr Peter Flügel

Talk: 3 June 2.30-3.30 “Ahiṃsā” | with Prof. Dr Peter Flügel

Posted on by user

Wednesday 3 June, 2.30-3.30. OCHS Library. All are welcome!

“He who knows the violence done for the sake of special objects, knows what is free from violence; he who knows what is free from violence, knows the violence done for special objects” (Āyāraṅga 1.3.1.4). The apparent paradox, recognised in this and other canonical passages, that cognition of violence is a condition and hence integral part of a religious system aiming at the maximisation of non-violence, can be explained, with the help of the theory of autopoietic systems of N. Luhmann, as a consequence of the fact that all social systems constitute themselves through selective self-referential mechanisms, based on binary codes, programmes and routines, which constitute the elements of a system that function as its parts. The paper presents a theoretical interpretation of the Jaina tradition, arguing that, as a social system, the Jaina tradition reproduces itself with reference to a combination of an ontological code, jīva/ ajīva, and a moral code, ahiṃsā/hiṃsā, implemented through programmes, that is, criteria, for the allocation of objects and processes to one or to the other side of the constitutive distinctions directrices. Jaina philosophy itself highlights the significance of binary categorisations. Only with the development of the ahiṃsā-reductionism, predicated on the mushrooming of synonymous (a-) hiṃsā-words, described by K. Bruhn and C. Caillat, and the crystallisation of a central binary code in medieval times, the Jaina tradition could develop into a stable autopoietic social system, because all social systems are predicated on reductions of complexity. The paper argues that the self-differentiation of ahiṃsā through processes of semantic duplication and self-reference was the condition for the development of religious codes and programmes for their implementation, which still stabilise the Jaina system over time. As a social system, the Jaina religion is a relative late development. The paper presents an analysis of the semantics of (non)violence in the canonical Paṇhāvāgaraṇāiṃ.

Peter Flügel, Dr Phil Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, is Founding Chair of the Centre of Jaina Studies, and Professor of the Study of Religions and Philosophies at the Department of History, Religions and Philosophies at SOAS University of London.

Bursaries and Scholarships: Open for applications! Total: £20,412

Bursaries and Scholarships: Open for applications! Total: £20,412

Posted on by user

Applications are now open for the 2026 OCHS Bursaries and Scholarships.

Each year, the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies awards a range of bursaries and scholarships on behalf of our generous donors. This year, a total of £20,412 is available. All registered OCHS students are eligible to apply — awards can be used towards fees, maintenance, or research costs.

To apply, send a one-page application along with the completed application form to secretary@ochs.org.uk.

The deadline for submissions is Tuesday, 26 May 2026 at 12:00 PM.

Full details of all available bursaries and scholarships, along with the application form, can be found at

Bursaries and Scholarships

 

22 May: The Sanskrit Traditions Symposium

22 May: The Sanskrit Traditions Symposium

Posted on by user

Sign up for the symposium here!

We warmly invite you to the 42nd Annual Sanskrit Traditions Symposium, hosted at Trinity College, Oxford.

The Sanskrit Traditions Symposium (formerly STIMW) is a forum for the discussion of the Sanskrit traditions of South Asia, and the texts and cultures that have arisen out of them. It brings together established and rising academics for the focused examination of research pertaining to various aspects of South Asia’s rich Sanskrit religious and intellectual culture. It thereby seeks to sustain and build upon the long history of scholarship in this important area of study.

Friday 22 May 2026, time 11.00 am – 5.00 pm
Hosted at Trinity College, Oxford
By the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies