Symposia: The Journal of the Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto
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155 research outputs found
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Burying the Buddha: Stūpas and Bodily Imagery in the Senior Collection of Gandhāran Manuscripts
No full textThe Senior collection of Gandhāran manuscripts, written in the Gāndhārī language and Kharoṣṭhī script, offers one of the earliest collections of Buddhist documents discovered to date. Written in roughly 140 C.E. in what is today eastern Afghanistan and deposited in a burial mound (stūpa) housing Buddhist relics, the collection consists of 30-odd texts of an unidentified Mainstream (or non-Mahāyāna) school of Buddhism. Out of the many thousands of Buddhist texts circulating in ancient India, what factors led these particular texts to be written and stored in the way that they were? That scrolls often functioned as relics (dharma-śarīra) is well attested in Buddhist traditions. But the compilers of the Senior collection took this a step further by emphasizing tales of local Gandhāran relics, the benefits of donating to stūpas and the impermanence of one’s body and the five aggregates (skandhas) that compose a being.
Mai Misra\u27s Khicari: Remembrance and Ritual Re-presentation in the Sidi (African-Indian) Sufi Tradition of Western India
No full textThis paper presents the private, women-only ritual called “Mai Misra’s Khicari,” a tradition preserved by the Sidis (African-Indians) of western India. Through spirit mediumship, the ceremony provides a meeting space for two historically disjointed waves of African dispersals in India: the Abyssinian or northeast African (Habshi) elite of premodern India, and contemporary Sidis of largely southeast African descent. Harnessing the Sufi modes of remembrance [dhikr] and ecstasy [hal], and conceptualizing the latter as the experience of a saint’s “presence” [haziri], the khicari ceremony facilitates the ritual re-presentation of the African Sufi saint Mai Misra and her seven female companions, and the reenactment of their historical roles in 14th century Gujarat. The materiality of the ritual underscores the Sidi Sufi tradition’s historiographic potential, illuminating obscure facets of the history of the African diaspora to India to complicate the accepted view of historical discontinuity between its premodern and modern waves
(Not So Much) Dancing by the Book: Mapping a New Religious Discourse around the Practice of Indian Classical Dance
No full textThis paper seeks to problematize the current state of Indian classical dance and its relation to religion in the Canada-based Indian diaspora, with a special focus on Toronto and Montreal. Using data from the early stages of my PhD ethnographic research, this essay contrasts text and practice to demonstrate that the current state of dance in the diaspora has evolved: while the “classical” norms of aesthetics and ideas about religion/spirituality that have been mobilized in the discourse about and practice of Bharatanātyam since the late 19th century still have some salience to this day, a new discourse and approach are emerging from this “ideal” state of dance, allowing performers not only to redefine their own practice in their changing socio-cultural environment, but also to decide for themselves whether their practice is spiritual/religious or not.
Surrendering to God in Tamil: A Study based on Vedāntadeśika’s Mummaṇikkōvai
No full textThis study investigates one of Vedāntadeśika’s under-researched Tamil masterpieces, the Mummaṇikkōvai. Vedāntadeśika (13th century C.E.) was one of the most authoritative figures in the medieval period of the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition, the Tamilnadu-centered Vaiṣṇava tradition that originated in 10th century C.E. By situating the Mummaṇikkōvai within the Tamil literary context, I read the Mummaṇikkōvai as a kōvai, a well-established Tamil genre that narrates a continuous love story through a string of akam and puṟam verses. The Mummaṇikkōvai centers on a story of the girl in love with Viṣṇu in the form of Devanāyaka at Tiruvahīndrapuram. I argue that Vedāntadeśika makes use of the narrativity, the main feature of the kōvai genre, to further the praise of Viṣṇu’s supremacy in the Paripāṭal, one of the anthologies [eṭṭuttokai], and the story of the girl in love with Viṣṇu in Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoli, the most authoritative Tamil devotional poetry of the Śrīvaiṣṇavas
Mark A. Jason, Repentance at Qumran: The Penitential Framework of Religious Experience in the Dead Sea Scrolls
No full textProphetic Urgency: The 1963 James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. Warnings to America
No full textIn 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin prophetically warned America to head King’s nonviolent calls for equality and racial progress. Through a comparison of The Fire Next Time and “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” we see how Baldwin and King respectively describe American racism, and the militancy, which they warned would not be as palatable as King’s approach. King’s piece was famously syncretic, fusing disparate sources (Socrates, Gandhi, Thoreau, Niebuhr) with the biblical cadences of the social gospel tradition of his beloved father. Baldwin\u27s imagination, shaped by his experience of Harlem rather than Atlanta, and by a more fraught conflict with his tormented father, was apocalyptic. Nevertheless, they admired and respected each other, played complementary roles in the history of their time, and produced works of such eloquence and power that they have transcended the particular circumstances of 1963 and become permanent contributions to American literature
