Self and self-transformation in the history of religions / edited by David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Shulman, David Dean, 1949-

Stroumsa, Guy G.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Religions--History.

Religions.

History.

Physical Description:

xii, 268 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2002.

Summary:

This book brings together scholars of a variety of the world's major civilizations to focus on the universal theme of inner transformation. The idea of the "self" is a cultural formation like any other, and models and conceptions of the inner world of the person vary widely from one civilization to another. Nonetheless, all the world's great religions insist on the need to transform this inner world, however it is understood, in highly expressive and specific ways. Such transformations, often ritually enacted, reveal the primary intuitions, drives, and conflicts active within the culture. The individual essays--by such distinguished scholars as Wai-yee Li, Janet Gyatso, Wendy Doniger, Christiano Grottanelli, Charles Malamoud, Margalit Finkelberg, and Moshe Idel--study dramatic examples of these processes in a wide range of cultures, including China, India, Tibet, Greece and Rome, Late Antiquity, Islam, Judaism, and medieval and early-modern Christian Europe.

Contents:

Introduction: Persons, passages, and shifting cultural space / David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa

A body made of words and poetic meters / Charles Malamoud

On becoming a fish: paradoxes of immortality and enlightenment in Chinese literature / Wai-yee Li

Transformations of subjectivity and memory in the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa / Wendy Doniger

Madness and divinization in early Christian monasticism / Guy G. Stroumsa

Possessed transsexuals in antiquity: a double transformation / Cristiano Grottanelli

Madness and suffering in the myths of Hercules / Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier

Healing as an act of transformation / Shaul Shaked

Tirukkovaiyār: downstream into God / David Shulman

Spirit possession as self-transformative experience in late medieval Catholic Europe / Moshe Sluhovsky

Religion and biography in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus / Margalit Finkelberg

The ins and outs of self-transformation: personal and social sides of visionary practice in Tibetan Buddhism / Janet Gyatso

The self and its transformation in Ṣūfīsm: with special reference to early literature / Sara Sviri

From Platonic to Hasidic Eros: transformations of an idle man's story / Moshe Idel

Postlude: the interior sociality of self-transformation / Don Handelman.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0195144503

0195148169

OCLC:

45505993