Search results for ""Author Richard H. Davis""

The Bhagavad Gita, perhaps the most famous of all Indian scriptures, is universally regarded as one of the world's spiritual and literary masterpieces. Richard Davis tells the story of this venerable and enduring book, from its origins in ancient India to its reception today as a spiritual classic that has been translated into more than seventy-five languages. The Gita opens on the eve of a mighty battle, when the warrior Arjuna is overwhelmed by despair and refuses to fight. He turns to his charioteer, Krishna, who counsels him on why he must. In the dialogue that follows, Arjuna comes to realize that the true battle is for his own soul. Davis highlights the place of this legendary dialogue in classical Indian culture, and then examines how it has lived on in diverse settings and contexts. He looks at the medieval devotional traditions surrounding the divine character of Krishna and traces how the Gita traveled from India to the West, where it found admirers in such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Aldous Huxley. Davis explores how Indian nationalists like Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda used the Gita in their fight against colonial rule, and how contemporary interpreters reanimate and perform this classical work for audiences today. An essential biography of a timeless masterpiece, this book is an ideal introduction to the Gita and its insights into the struggle for self-mastery that we all must wage.

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Stanley Lombardo's new verse translation of the most famous free-standing sequence from the great Indian epic The Mahabharata hews closely to the meaning, verse structure, and performative quality of the original and is invigorated by its judicious incorporation of key Sanskrit terms in transliteration, for which a glossary is also provided. The translation is accompanied by Richard H. Davis' brilliant Introduction and Afterword. The latter, "Krishna on Modern Fields of Battle," offers a fascinating look at the illuminating role the poem has played in the lives and struggles of a few of the most accomplished figures in recent world history.

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Stanley Lombardo's new verse translation of the most famous free-standing sequence from the great Indian epic The Mahabharata hews closely to the meaning, verse structure, and performative quality of the original and is invigorated by its judicious incorporation of key Sanskrit terms in transliteration, for which a glossary is also provided. The translation is accompanied by Richard H. Davis' brilliant Introduction and Afterword. The latter, "Krishna on Modern Fields of Battle," offers a fascinating look at the illuminating role the poem has played in the lives and struggles of a few of the most accomplished figures in recent world history.

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For many centuries, Hindus have taken it for granted that the religious images they place in temples and home shrines for purposes of worship are alive. Hindu priests bring them to life through a complex ritual "establishment" that invokes the god or goddess into material support. Priests and devotees then maintain the enlivened image as a divine person through ongoing liturgical activity: they must awaken it in the morning, bathe it, dress it, feed it, entertain it, praise it, and eventually put it to bed at night. In this linked series of case studies of Hindu religious objects, Richard Davis argues that in some sense these believers are correct: through ongoing interactions with humans, religious objects are brought to life. Davis draws largely on reader-response literary theory and anthropological approaches to the study of objects in society in order to trace the biographies of Indian religious images over many centuries. He shows that Hindu priests and worshipers are not the only ones to enliven images. Bringing with them differing religious assumptions, political agendas, and economic motivations, others may animate the very same objects as icons of sovereignty, as polytheistic "idols," as "devils," as potentially lucrative commodities, as objects of sculptural art, or as symbols for a whole range of new meanings never foreseen by the images' makers or original worshipers.

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