Archives: Lectures
Elementary Sanskrit: Week Eight (TT12)
This course continues from the Elementary Sanskrit course of last term. The class is designed to introduce students to the basics of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary through a reading of the Bhagavad-gita.
Hindu Scriptural Reasoning
Scriptural Reasoning is a practice of reading scriptures and thinking about them across traditions. It was founded by Peter Ochs as a practice of Jews, Christians, and Muslims reading their scriptures together in small groups and comes out of the post-liberal Theology of the Yale School along with traditional Jewish practices of reading scripture (called Textual Reasoning). With a view to broadening the scope of Scriptural Reasoning it is proposed to transplant the practice into a Hindu context. The enterprise is hermeneutical in orientation although it assumes that much of the text-historical or philological work has been done. The practice will be simply to take a theme and passages from Hindu scriptures and discuss them. The aim of Scriptural Reasoning is to understand difference rather than to arrive at consensus (although that too can arise) but the practice is open ended. It is practice driven rather than theory driven although general features of Scriptural Reasoning have developed over the last twenty years or so. Probably the best way to describe it is to let Peter Ochs speak: Scriptural Reasoning (SR) is an open-ended practice of reading- and reasoning-in-dialogue among scholars of the three Abrahamic traditions. There are no set doctrines or rules of SR, since the rules are embedded in the texts of scripture and their relation to those who study and reason together. Individual practitioners of SR do find it useful, however, to reflect occasionally on their group practice and identify its leading tendencies. Such reflections differ from individual to individual and from time to time, but there are overlaps, and both the overlaps and the differences stimulate http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/jsrforum/ Hindu Scriptural Reasoning will be by way of experiment to see whether a practice developed out of a Jewish context can work in a Hindu context.
Hindu Scriptural Reasoning
Scriptural Reasoning is a practice of reading scriptures and thinking about them across traditions. It was founded by Peter Ochs as a practice of Jews, Christians, and Muslims reading their scriptures together in small groups and comes out of the post-liberal Theology of the Yale School along with traditional Jewish practices of reading scripture (called Textual Reasoning). With a view to broadening the scope of Scriptural Reasoning it is proposed to transplant the practice into a Hindu context. The enterprise is hermeneutical in orientation although it assumes that much of the text-historical or philological work has been done. The practice will be simply to take a theme and passages from Hindu scriptures and discuss them. The aim of Scriptural Reasoning is to understand difference rather than to arrive at consensus (although that too can arise) but the practice is open ended. It is practice driven rather than theory driven although general features of Scriptural Reasoning have developed over the last twenty years or so. Probably the best way to describe it is to let Peter Ochs speak: Scriptural Reasoning (SR) is an open-ended practice of reading- and reasoning-in-dialogue among scholars of the three Abrahamic traditions. There are no set doctrines or rules of SR, since the rules are embedded in the texts of scripture and their relation to those who study and reason together. Individual practitioners of SR do find it useful, however, to reflect occasionally on their group practice and identify its leading tendencies. Such reflections differ from individual to individual and from time to time, but there are overlaps, and both the overlaps and the differences stimulate http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/jsrforum/ Hindu Scriptural Reasoning will be by way of experiment to see whether a practice developed out of a Jewish context can work in a Hindu context.
Inwardness and Visual Contemplation in Tantric traditions (MT12)
Religion and the Human Person Series
In medieval Hinduism some renouncers and householders seeking a more intense religious experience adopted mystical or spiritual practices that involved the visualization of a deity or group of deities with a view to identification with the imagined image. This lecture will examine visual contemplation with reference to specific texts, showing how this pre-philosophical understanding of inwardness is shared by Śaiva and Pāñcarātra traditions. We see from these reading firstly how imagination can be guide to understanding them and secondly that these texts present us with ritual thinking and point to a layer of culture below a clearly articulated philosophical discourse. Yet this cultural layer is still a symbolic world, more complex than daily transaction, which entails a symbolism of the eradication of individuality and a process that we might call entextualisation.