Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture.Marvin Harris

PrefaceBackground InformationChapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: More about karma, and its social contextChapter 3: The antecedents of the karma doctrine in brahminismChapter 4: Jain antecedentsChapter 5: What did the Buddha mean by no soulA"?Chapter 6: The Buddha's positive values: love and compassionChapter 7: Assessing the evidenceChapter 8: Everything is burning: the centrality of fire in the Buddha's thoughtChapter 9: Causation and non-random processChapter 10: Cognition language nirvanaChapter 11: The Buddha's pragmatism and intellectual styleChapter 12: The Buddha as satirist brahmin terms as social metaphorsChapter 13: Is this book to be believed?Appendix: The Buddha's appropriation of four (or five?) brahminical terms

What the Buddha Thought

This book examines catalysts for Buddhist formation in ancient South Asia and expansion throughout and beyond the northwestern Indian subcontinent to Central Asia by investigating symbiotic relationships between networks of religious mobility and trade.

Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks: Mobility and Exchange Within and Beyond the Northwestern Borderlands of South Asia

This paper is a philological and textological complement to a new translation, produced in Cardiff, of the Sanskrit Harivaṃśa, the final part of the Mahābhārata. The paper is a project report, providing a detailed behind-the-scenes account of the translation project. It discusses the specific 118-chapter published text that was chosen for translation, and the reasons for that choice; it discusses the emendations that were made to that text, and the reasons for making them; it discusses the method, process, and conventions of the translation, with particular reference to the intended audience, the accompanying apparatus, the format of the translation, its literary and linguistic register, and the treatment of specific words; and it discusses a selection of problematic passages in relation to previous translations. The paper’s discussion of the Sanskrit Harivaṃśa is wide-ranging, rigorous, unprecedentedly in-depth, and makes significant original contributions in the fields of Sanskrit philology, translation studies, and world literature. The appendix to the paper is a searchable electronic version of the Sanskrit Harivaṃśa text that was translated.

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Translating Vaidya’s Harivaṃśa

Richard Seaford is one of the most original and provocative classicists of his age. This volume brings together a wide range of papers written with a single focus. Several are pioneering explorations of the tragic evocation and representation of rites of passage: mystic initiation, the wedding, and death ritual. Two papers focus on the shaping power of mystic initiation in two famous passages in the New Testament. The other key factor in the historical context of tragedy is the recent monetisation of Athens. One paper explores the presence of money in Greek tragedy, another the shaping influence of money on Wagner's Ring and on his Aeschylean model. Other papers reveal the influence of ritual and money on representations of the inner self, and on Greek and Indian philosophy. A final piece finds in Greek tragedy horror at the destructive unlimitedness of money that is still central to our postmodern world.

Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece: Selected Essays

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction 1. The problem: asceticism and urban life Part I. Context: 2. The social elite 3. Economic conditions 4. Urbanization, urbanism and the development of large-scale political structures 5. Brahmins and other competitors 6. Folk religion and cosmology: meeting of two thought worlds Part II. Mediation: 7. The holy man 8. Preparation of the monk for the mediatory role. Evidence from the Sutta Nipata 9. The Dhammapada and the images of the bhikkhu 10. The mediating role as shown in the Canon 11. Exchange Conclusion Bibliography Index.

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The Sociology of Early Buddhism

(1996). The exaggeration of religion in the study of ancient India. Asian Studies Review: Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 62-65.

The exaggeration of religion in the study of ancient India

(1993). Humanistic elements in the Mahabharata. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 1-23.

Greg Bailey

Papers

The Sociology of Early Buddhism

The exaggeration of religion in the study of ancient India

Humanistic elements in the Mahabharata

Trifunctional Elements in the Mythology of the Hindu Trimurti

The problem: asceticism and urban life