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Во Папуа Нова Гвинеја родовиот идентитет бил опишуван како строга сегрегација и угнетување врз жените. Но, канибализмот може да ни даде нови ви- дувања за родовиот идентитет. Културата создава граници што имплицираат подел- ба, која се доживува преку истоста. Ова општествено искуство е проектирано врз телото. Во чинот на канибализмот, материјата и моќта се заменуваат. Тогаш, родо- виот идентитет рефлектира идеологија, а не телесна функција.
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The elaborate rituals accompanying the construction of a temple and the installation of its idols characteristic of Tantric traditions were meant to ensure a perfect abode and receptacle for the highest god in his earthly manifestation. Descriptions of these rituals in religious texts supplement technical prescripts included in texts on art and architecture and provide a theoretical and theological background for the temple cult. The practices enable the proper creation and then the appropriate use of the temple and its idol, guaranteed by the permanent presence of god. But in the every-day temple practice the ritual could be endangered by the fact that the temple and the idol in some situations lose their perfection. This can be caused by impurity or damage. The ideal structure can be spoilt and therefore the religious practice and ritualistic manuals have to provide practical methods of reacting to such inevitable events. The article refers to several Pāñcarātrika sources which in their passages concern the impurity and damages as well as the renovation and replacement of old temples and images. The actions to be undertaken in such cases are presented in the texts under the heading jīrṇoddhāra.
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The literature of the Śaiva Mantramārga evidences differing strategies of incorporating prasenā divination into its theoretical frameworks. The early Niśvāsaguhya confines prasenās a prognosticatory role in support of a more common method of dream divination used to determine reasons for failed initiation. Questions of intertextuality and doctrinal dependence are raised when the Trika’s Tantrasadbhāva envisages prasenās as fulfilling exactly the same function.
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The study of ritual in India is indissociable from the study of prescriptive texts. Now the Śaiva scriptures of the Śaivasiddhānta purport to lay down every aspect of the Śaiva religion, from doctrine to comportment, but they are for various reasons typically not straightforward guides to the performance of rituals and, in spite of their presenting themselves as revealed literature, they do not teach one body of ritual activity that is coherent and free from internal contradictions, as Śaiva exegetes have long freely acknowledged. One way of helping practitioners to perform rites ‘according to the rules’ was to write commentaries on particular scriptures. The tenth-century Kashmirian theologian Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha, a back-to-the-texts fundamentalist at least in the matter of ritual correctness, clearly advocated this strategy and has left us commentaries on the ritual portions of the Mataṅgapārameśvaratantra and the Sārdhatriśatikālottara. Another strategy was to craft ritual handbooks, paddhatis, that clearly set out ritual practice step-by-step. Almost all surviving paddhatis, as Sanderson has observed (Sanderson 2004:358), are notionally based upon a single scripture, the Dviśatikālottara; but in practice this strategy gave ample room for innovation, typically by eclectic blending of ritual elements from different sources. A large number of Śaiva ritual manuals composed from the tenth century onwards survive (the best known are listed by Sanderson in his fn. 24 on p.358 of Sanderson 2004), only a few of which have been published to date. Because these manuals acknowledge themselves to be the works of human authors rooted in time and place, they can be of particular interest to the religious historian partly because they allow us to map the spread of different currents of Śaivism in time and place. Like the scriptures, they borrow generously from each other, thus demonstrating how they are mutually related. This article, to be followed by a few others on the same general theme, is intended as a small contribution to the history of Saiddhāntika paddhati literature.
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Rather than studying various manifestations of the “divine feminine” in Hindu tantric texts, this paper proposes to examine the ritual role of women in the earliest (seventh to ninth centuries CE) scriptural sources that teach the cult of goddesses and other divine females (yoginīs). Women have three main ritual roles in these sources, which often overlap: they may be (1) consorts in sexual rites (dūtī/śakti), (2) witch-like semi-divine yoginīs, who transmit the doctrine and help practitioners to obtain supernatural powers, and (3) female practitioners (sādhakī/bhaginī), who are initiated in the same way as male ones. Concerning the last category, it is shown that women had the right to receive full initiation according to early śākta scriptures (which was not the case according to mainstream śaiva Tantras) and were able to practice the same rites for the same purposes as men.
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The term prāyaścitta covers a number of rites and actions that are held to expiate or repair faults of omission and commission. In fact, many of the expiable offenses that are discussed in Saiddhāntika sources are not exclusively Śaiva but belong also to the realm of smārta traditions for they include such non-criminal and non-transgressive things as states of ritual impurity caused, for example, by life-events such as birth and death. The expiatory procedure for the five great sins vary between Śaiva and smārta systems. Śaiva scriptures prescribe different types of maṇḍalas for these five great sins using five BRAHMA-mantras to expiate along with moon-related fasting of kr̥cchra, cāndrāyaṇa etc., and initiation (dīkṣā) or an installation of Śiva (pratiṣṭhā). Most of the smr̥ti nibandhas say that the great sins are not expiable. Here I have focused on these two systems regarding the great sins, mainly taking into consideration the 12th-century Śaiva expiatory manual Prāyaścittasamuccaya of Trilocanaśiva.
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My essay investigates a short passage of the Guhyasūtra—the longest, most detailed, and arguably youngest of the ‘Sūtras’ constituting the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā, being the earliest Śaiva Tantra known to us. This is formed by verses 1–22ab of Paṭala 12, which single out the soteriological means and goals specific to such scantily documented Śaiva groups as the Pāñcārthika Pāśupatas, the followers of the Pramāṇaśāstras, the Kārukas, and the Vaimalas. By categorizing such groups according to their emphasis on conduct, initiation, or gnosis, the text presents a taxonomy of the Atimārga as seen from the perspective of Mantramārga Śaivism. Having compared, and contrasted, this model to analogous ones found scattered over the extant literature of the Śaiva Mantramārga, I tackle the issue as to whether those taxonomies reflect actual social realities or are the result of post hoc systematising attempts by medieval authors.
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The purpose of the present paper is to discuss a specific conceptualization of the four goals of human life, namely dharma, artha, kāma and mokṣa, known under the collective term puruṣārtha, in the terms of magical rites. Such conceptualization appears in the Sātvatasaṃhitā, which, together with the Jayākhyasaṃhitā and the Pauṣkarasaṃhitā, is classified as the oldest available text of the Tantric Vaiṣṇava Pāñcarātra. It seems that the reason of such a strategy might be not, as it happens in the case of later saṃhitās, to refer simply to the orthodoxy for the sake of proving that the Pāñcarātra belongs to the religious mainstream, but, in a sense, to adjust the way of realization of the four goals of life to the requirements of a particular Tantric practice. Obviously, the manner of presenting consecutive puruṣārthas in the Sātvatasaṃhitā aims at securing a quick and purely ritualistic method of their fulfillment to the people who were not able to realize them in the traditional way, obediently passing through the successive stages of their life.
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The ritual manuals produced in Kerala are unique in their nature since most of them do not make a precise difference between the systems of Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava but rather adopt a synthesized approach. The authors of these ritual manuals were ready to introduce or omit rituals that were described in the early texts, according to need. The manuals that were written in the early period included initiation rituals and gave importance to the theological aspect; the later ones completely omitted these elements, being written as guides for temple rituals. They are not, however, uniform in their ritual prescriptions. While these manuals were intended as guides for the performance of rituals, in practice some of the rituals prescribed in the manuals are left out, altered or localized. In this article, ‘paḷḷivēṭṭa’, a ritual that is presently performed during the annual festival in Kerala temples, is examined to show how this ritual is described in the manuals and how it is practised today.
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Józef Lączak was born in the village of Książnice near Mielec in the south-east of Poland. He attended elementary school in Mielec in 1942. During the 2nd World War he was forced to work for a year in the Mielec Aircraft Factory. At that time he also continued his high school education in secret courses, a year of trade school and two years of grammar school. After the war, in 1947, he got his secondary school certificate, got married to Marta Krawczyk and started studying Indo-Iranian and Polish philologies at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. He studied Sanskrit, Avestan and Dravidian languages with Professor Helena Willman-Grabowska.
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Verses 9–16 of the Parātriṃśikā prescribe a ritual application of the hr̥dayabīja mantra ‘sauḥ’. In this case the mantra ‘sauḥ’ has different effects according to durations of the mental recitation of it. This is a very simple example of one type of tantric ritual where a limited number of mantras of a certain deity are used in different ways to accomplish a variety of efficacy by changing ritual elements of them. In Hindu tantric texts we find more similar cases. In the newest layer of Vedic texts such as the Ṛgvidhāna, Sāmavidhāna Brāhmaṇa and the Atharvavedapariśiṣṭa there are some similar examples of this kind. The Taittirīyasaṃhitā describes in two succeeding chapters various applications of two mantras called rāṣṭrabhr̥t and devikāhavis respectively. In this paper I examine more Vedic examples and elucidate the basic idea underlying this type of ritual.
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In his Pāñcarātrarakṣā, Veṅkaṭanātha states that a Pāñcarātrin is not obliged to follow the prescriptions of the Pāñcarātra Saṃhitās, but can also follow those of the Vedic Sūtras when performing sandhyā worship. The paper tries to clarify the meaning and background of this statement by presenting and comparing various sandhyā prescriptions—from Veṅkaṭanātha himself, from Vedic Sūtras, and from several Pāñcarātra Saṃhitās—and it investigates the question of whether this statement gives us insight into the relationship between theory and practice of sandhyā worship in Veṅkaṭanātha’s lifetime.
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The 16th volume of Cracow Indological Studies, which we would like to dedicate to the memory of Mr. Józef Lączak, concentrates on Tantric traditions of South Asia, just as the 8th volume, published in 2006. The contributions to the present volume refer both to the topic of the theoretical side of these traditions and to practical issues; some of them pertain also to the mutual relations between theory and practice.
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The unity and the diversity of cultures is a major and challenging topic for modern philosophical thinking. On this ground, different schools of thought and explanatory models are facing each other. Of the multitude of factors that generate the differences among cultures, in this study I shall refer only to the importance of certain communication languages and means. I shall address in particular the differences between modern written culture and current media culture, based on the audiovisual and the new communication forms and technologies. The book and the screen are representative communication means for the two types of cultures.
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This article argues that Kant attempted to but was unsuccessful in resolving the issue of whether or not emphasis should be placed on experienced phenomena (rationally analyzed) or if inquiry should include the possibility of discerning some underlying essence that is manifest as natural law. The controversy over unresolved issues related to epistemology and ontology subsequently led to the “Continental Divide” with dire consequences for Western Civilization that would eventually engulf the entire world. This article analyzes the issue from the perspective of the Philosophy of Religion and points out why complementarity has been successful in reconciling the seeming contradictions.
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At first glance, game theory could support with logical, ideologically neutral arguments, the rationale of acting ethically in business. Apparently, this is what we learn from the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Peasant’s Dilemma, Tit for Tat, and other strategic games, suggesting that the winning business strategies combine the competitive aggressiveness and a disposition for cooperation with other players of the economic game. Consequently, it is only rational to adopt an ethical behaviour in business activities, respecting the legitimate rights and interests of different categories of stakeholders. Nevertheless, this view is arguable, since game theory is grounded on the obsolete concept of homo economicus and ultimately suggests that the best strategy in business is the cooperation of the competitors. On the other hand, except utilitarianism, the rest of the major ethical theories deny the moral character of those actions that are motivated by self-interest. This study concludes that game theory cannot offer a solid ground for business ethics.
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The abstract is dedicated to the dissemination of Demetrius and Antiochus Cantemir's works in the eighteenth-century Germany. The author highlights the historical and cultural conditions that have aroused interest in the work of Moldovan scholar and his son. The circumstances of publishing The History of the Ottoman Empire and Descriptio Moldaviae of Demetrius Cantemir and The Satires of Antiochus Cantemir have been cleared up, proving that the familiarisation with Demetrius and Antiochus Cantemir’s works in eighteenth-century Germany was not achieved from a simple literary curiosity, but for some cultural needs of German society.
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