Book•
Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism
23 Dec 2008-
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe the practice of seeing and knowing in the context of the Divorce and Vad?NA BIBLIOGRAPHY, and see the BUDDHA.
Abstract: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION PART I: THE PRACTICE OF ?RADDH? 1. Seeing and Knowing 2. Getting and Giving PART II: THE PRACTICE OF PRAS?DA 3. Agency and Intentionality 4. Participation and Exclusion 5. Proximity and Presence 6. Politics and Aesthetics PART III: SEEING THE BUDDHA 7. Past and Present 8. Images and Imagination EPILOGUE APPENDIX: CONTENTS OF THE DIVY?VAD?NA BIBLIOGRAPHY
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TL;DR: This paper argued that the bank-account metaphor differs in significant respects from these emic metaphors, displaying certain Judeo-Christian preconceptions of moral bookkeeping, sin, and salvation.
34 citations
Dissertation•
25 Sep 2015
TL;DR: This paper examined the Drukpa Kunley Namthar from a perspective that considers writing as a spiritual discipline akin to other practices of spiritual formation such as prayer, meditation and confession.
Abstract: This dissertation explores the ethical formation of persons depicted by the 15 century text entitled the Liberation Life Story of Drukpa Kunley (‘Brug pa kun legs kyi rnam thar). My analysis examines the Drukpa Kunley Namthar from a perspective that considers writing as a spiritual discipline akin to other practices of spiritual formation such as prayer, meditation and confession. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault and Alasdair McIntyre, I argue for a position whereby life-writing functions to form ethical persons. Using Drukpa Kunley’s namthar as an outstanding example of this ethically-formative function of literary activity, I examine the text’s presentation of what it means to be an ethical person and how such persons arise through a particular way of interacting with the world. In considering the Drukpa Kunley Namthar, I explore questions about authorial intent, textual agency, and the readers imagined by the text. In addition, I highlight three principal themes developed within the text: exposure of hypocrisy, joyful acceptance of truth, and an unstinting examination of authority. These themes are expressed through both content and form: the narrator openly discusses them, and the text itself creates an experience for the reader that resonates with these themes through its repeated shifting among diverse literary forms and genres. I refer to this strategy as a cacophony of genres, and my assertion is that this
26 citations
Book•
25 Mar 2010TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a systematic and narrative thought: eternity and closure in structure and story, and a concept of Nirvana as a concept and an image as an image.
Abstract: Introduction 1. Systematic and narrative thought: eternity and closure in structure and story 2. Nirvana as a concept 3. Nirvana as an image 4. Nirvana, time and narrative 5. Past and future Buddhas Conclusion Endnotes and bibliography.
22 citations
TL;DR: A review of the ways in which Eck's definition has become standard in studies of South Asian religious (and in some cases, secular) visuality can be found in this article.
Abstract: The 1981 publication of the first edition of Diana Eck’s Darcan: Seeing the Divine Image in India marked an important watershed in the scholarly understanding and interpretation of visual interaction with and experience of three-dimensional temple icons in Hinduism (and by extension, South Asian religions more broadly). While there had been previous publications on ritual visuality in India (most notably Jan Gonda’s Eye and Gaze in the Veda [1969]), and 1981 also saw the publication of Lawrence A. Babb’s article “Glancing: Visual Interaction in Hinduism,” 1 Eck’s monograph, especially in its 1998 third edition, has remained definitively central in all subsequent discussions of darcan. In the words of Philip Lutgendorf (2006: 233), Darcan is now the “key text” on the subject. It is usually the first source on ritual visuality to which scholars of South Asia turn, and its prominence is equally evident in comparative discussions of icons and visuality by non-South Asianists. 2 Due in significant part to Eck’s thin volume, darcan has become what we can call—to import a term John Carman (1985: 117) used in a different context for the concept of the ‘sacred’ or the ‘holy’—a “super-category” in the study of South Asian religion and visual culture. In this essay, following a review of the ways in which Eck’s definition has become standard in studies of South Asian religious (and in some cases, secular) visuality, I argue that thirty years after the publication of her slim monograph, it is now time to revisit the broadly phenomenol
17 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that the "aura" of modern Buddhist-inspired modern religious goods is not so much effaced as it is reconfigured and transformed by technological mediations, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin's essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939).
13 citations
Cites background from "Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith..."
...In his recently published book, Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism, Andy Rotman (2008) shows how images functioned as a key for opening up Buddhist conceptualizations and ways of categorizing the world....
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