The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the basics of Sanskrit grammar, syntax and vocabulary. By the end of the course students will have competency in translating simple Sanskrit and reading sections of the Bhagavad-gītā and passages from other texts. The course book will be Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language.
Archives: Lectures
Readings in Early Modern Bengali Texts: Session four (MT15)
We will read sections from key devotional and theological Vaiṣṇava texts in Bengali from the early modern period and discuss their meaning. Some proficiency in Bengali is a requirement.
Hinduism 1: Sources and Development – Lecture four (MT15)
This lecture series provides some basic material for Theology FHS Paper 20, “Hinduism 1: Sources and Development.’ These lectures offer a thematic and historical introduction to the sources and early development of ‘Hindu’ traditions from their early formation to the early medieval period. We will explore the formation of Hindu traditions through textual sources, such as the Vedas, Upaniṣads and Bhagavad Gītā, along with the practices and social institutions that formed classical Hindu traditions. The course will include an introduction to Hindu philosophy. A detailed reading list will be supplied at the start of the lectures, which will be based loosely around Gavin Flood’s Introduction to Hinduism (CUP 1996).
Sanskrit Prelims:Session five (MT15)
The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the basics of Sanskrit grammar, syntax and vocabulary. By the end of the course students will have competency in translating simple Sanskrit and reading sections of the Bhagavad-gītā and passages from other texts. The course book will be Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language.
The Mammoth, Multi-faith Kumbh Mela: A Place of Practical Plurality amid Colossal Chaos
This lecture is based on the 2013 Maha-Kumbh Mela held in Allahabad, in which Kalpesh Bhatt conducted field research as a part of the Harvard Kumbh Workshop. Recognized as the largest religious gathering in the world, the Kumbh Mela is a mammoth, multi-faith event that hosts around 100 million pilgrims from diverse and at times antithetical Hindu traditions ranging from polytheistic to monotheistic to atheistic. Even a few Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, and other South Asian traditions also participate in the Kumbh, making it an intricately convoluted convergence of manifold beliefs, practices, and rituals. The enthusiasm of and differences among the millions of laypersons and ascetics who flock to the Kumbh occasionally culminate into a fierce commotion arising from mundane issues such as space allocation, crowd control, unchecked competition, and crass commercialization.
Despite embodying such a colossal chaos, the Kumbh Mela provides an example of practical pluralism by effecting a mostly harmonious confluence of diverse belief systems and practices. Drawing from textual sources as well as his ethnographic fieldwork in the 2013 Kumbh Mela, Allahabad, India, Bhatt examines how does the spirit of sacrifice embedded in the spatial and spiritual vastness of the Kumbh engender the active seeking of understanding across lines of differences without leaving one’s identities and commitments behind? Although grounded in disparate theological, philosophical, and sociocultural foundations, millions of lay people, religious leaders, wandering sadhus, and solitary ascetics coexist and coalesce, albeit temporarily, in this month-long event. How we can extrapolate this ecumenical model of the Kumbh Mela to embrace pluralism pragmatically in a larger context.
Kalpesh Bhatt joined the collaborative doctoral program at Department for the Study of Religion, Centre for South Asian Studies, and Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, after completing Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Prior to that, fusing his interests in science, religion, and art, Kalpesh led a number of creative projects, including the production of an IMAX film, Mystic India, and a high-tech water spectacular, Sat-Chit-Anand, based on the Upaniṣadic story of Naciketā. Kalpesh’s doctoral project is to do modern Hindu theology from pre-modern Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gītā and study its role in Indian diaspora’s grappling with everyday personal and socioeconomic struggles.
Readings in the Netra Tantra: Session five (MT15)
The Netra Tantra is an important text of Śaiva tantrism popular in Kashmir some time between the eighth and eleventh centuries CE. These readings will use the KSTS edition along with two manuscripts from Nepal.
Readings in Phenomenology: Session five (MT15)
Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century that has had a deep impact on Theology and Religious Studies. The reading group seeks to engage with some of the fundamental concepts of phenomenology that underlie much work in Theology and the Phenomenology of Religion. This term we hope to read two texts. The recent new realism and speculative materialism has questioned the correlationalism (between consciousness and world) in Phenomenology. To get some perspective on this critique we will read Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum 2009). After this short book we will read Zizek’s Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2012).
‘Srīkaṇṭhācāryair eva sa panthā darśitaḥ’: Historiographical remarks on the Śivādvaita Vedānta corpus
In the course of the sixteenth century, the South Indian scholar Appaya Dīkṣita (1520-1593) composed a number of works devoted to the exegesis and promulgation of a Śaiva-leaning school of Vedānta—Śivādvaita Vedānta—whose origins he traces to Śrīkaṇṭha’s Brahmamīmāṃsābhāṣya. One of Appaya’s concerns in his elaborate reconstruction of the school is to situate Śrīkaṇṭha vis-à-vis other Vedānta theologians, and at times to show that Śrīkaṇṭha was the first among them to have proposed certain key ideas. In this lecture, I wish to reflect on this question through contextualizing the Śivādvaita interpretation of the ānandamayādhikaraṇa in the Brahmasūtra. I will discuss Śaṅkara’s and Rāmānuja’s interpretations on the same, and shall present evidence that points to another important participant in this scholarly discussion: the Vīraśaivas. As such, this lecture will also lay the basis for a forthcoming study of the Vīraśaiva Śivādvaita tradition and its hitherto uncharted role in the formation of Śrīkaṇṭha’s school.
Dr Jonathan Duquette is a scholar of South Asian religions whose work concentrates primarily on the history of late medieval and early modern Sanskrit intellectual traditions in India. After completing his Ph.D. in Montreal in 2011, Dr. Duquette was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hamburg, Leiden University, Kyoto University and the University of Oxford, where he currently pursues his research as a Newton International Fellow on the history and literary corpus of Śivādvaita Vedānta. Trained initially as a physicist, Dr. Duquette also nourishes an interest for the interaction between natural sciences and religions as well as for recent developments in philosophy of science and comparative philosophy. He has published articles in Journal of Indian Philosophy, Numen, Zygon and Philosophy East and West, and was also co-editor for a felicitation volume collecting essays on South Asian religions.
Sanskrit Prelims (MT15)
The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the basics of Sanskrit grammar, syntax and vocabulary. By the end of the course students will have competency in translating simple Sanskrit and reading sections of the Bhagavad-gītā and passages from other texts. The course book will be Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language.
Hinduism 1: Sources and Development – Lecture five (MT15)
This lecture series provides some basic material for Theology FHS Paper 20, “Hinduism 1: Sources and Development.’ These lectures offer a thematic and historical introduction to the sources and early development of ‘Hindu’ traditions from their early formation to the early medieval period. We will explore the formation of Hindu traditions through textual sources, such as the Vedas, Upaniṣads and Bhagavad Gītā, along with the practices and social institutions that formed classical Hindu traditions. The course will include an introduction to Hindu philosophy. A detailed reading list will be supplied at the start of the lectures, which will be based loosely around Gavin Flood’s Introduction to Hinduism (CUP 1996).