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5 books match the query 'Renunciation'

cover of Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation

Making a Mantra

Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation

Ellen Gough

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Jainism originated in India and shares some features with Buddhism and Hinduism, but it is a distinct tradition with its own key texts, art, rituals, beliefs, and history. One important way it has often been distinguished from Buddhism and Hinduism is through the highly contested category of Tantra: Jainism, unlike the others, does not contain a tantric path to liberation. But in Making a Mantra, historian of religions Ellen Gough refines and challenges our understanding of Tantra by looking at the development over two millennia of a Jain incantation, or mantra, that evolved from an auspicious invocation in a second-century text into a key component of mendicant initiations and meditations that continue to this day.

Typically, Jainism is characterized as a celibate, ascetic path to liberation in which one destroys karma through austerities, while the tantric path to liberation is characterized as embracing the pleasures of the material world, requiring the ritual use of mantras to destroy karma. Gough, however, argues that asceticism and Tantra should not be viewed in opposition to one another. She does so by showing that Jains perform “tantric” rituals of initiation and meditation on mantras and maṇḍalas. Jainism includes kinds of tantric practices, Gough provocatively argues, because tantric practices are a logical extension of the ascetic path to liberation.
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cover of Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint

Renunciation and Longing

The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint

Annabella Pitkin

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Through the eventful life of a Himalayan Buddhist teacher, Khunu Lama, this study reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern.
 
In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this elusive wandering renunciant became a revered teacher of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At Khunu Lama’s death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The many surviving stories about him reveal significant dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of religious affect and memory that reimagines cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern.
 
In Renunciation and Longing, Annabella Pitkin explores devotion, renunciation, and the teacher-student lineage relationship as resources for understanding Tibetan Buddhist approaches to modernity. By examining narrative accounts of the life of a remarkable twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist and focusing on his remembered identity as a renunciant bodhisattva, Pitkin illuminates Tibetan and Himalayan practices of memory, affective connection, and mourning. Refuting long-standing caricatures of Tibetan Buddhist communities as unable to be modern because of their religious commitments, Pitkin shows instead how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist narrators have used themes of renunciation, devotion, and lineage as touchstones for negotiating loss and vitalizing continuity.
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cover of Renunciation as a Tragic Focus: A Study of Five Plays

Renunciation as a Tragic Focus

A Study of Five Plays

Eugene H. Falk

University of Minnesota Press, 1954

Renunciation as a Tragic Focus was first published in 1954. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Norman J. DeWitt explains, in an introduction to this volume, that these essays are written in terms of a personal humanism.

"Personal humanism," Mr. DeWitt says, "comes from an awareness of a world in which pain is real, and it leads to the traditional virtues of wisdom and justice, terms that are seldom heard in academic circles today."

Traditionalist though he may be in the basic virtues, Professor Falk, in these studies, challenges a traditional concept. By analyzing the conflicting values in five plays, he demonstrates why the traditional definition of tragedy should be broadened. He shows that martyrdom and self-sacrifice, when they involve an act of renunciation, should be included in the realm of tragedy. The older concept ruled out these elements by its insistence that the death of a martyr is not the defeat but the victory of an individual.

The five plays studied here are Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Antigone,Corneille's Polyeucte,Maeterlinck's Aglavaine and Selysette,and Samain's Polypheme.In all of them, the tragic experience of man's defeat in an unequal struggle against destiny is examined in the light of the conflict between his worldly and his spiritual aspirations. The plays illustrate the tenet that renunciation becomes a tragic experience only if the character's devotion to both worldly and spiritual values is genuine. In succession, the five plays represent a progression from authentic to seeming renunciation.

The studies are pertinent to many interests in the broad academic field of the humanities as well as to such specific disciplines as comparative literature, drama, French literature, and the classics.

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cover of Renunciation: POEMS

Renunciation

POEMS

Corey Marks

University of Illinois Press, 2000

Renunciation introduces a powerful new poet whose work, though it treads the ground of silence and loss, bears a redemptive grace. Disquieting and healing, Corey Marks's poems hold to "a moment when possibility / bristles so close it holds a shape in the air."
 
The sculptor Gislebertus, Doubting Thomas, Theseus, and John Keats share space in the pages of Renunciation with a survivor of the bomb in Hiroshima, a blind girl in the South American jungle, and DeSoto's thirteen swine in the hold of a ship bound for America. Rich with almost palpable nuances of light and sound, Marks's lyric meditations unravel a constant play of loss and continuation, "mending sense from spare threads" and hovering over connections undone even as they are made.
 
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cover of Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan: The Works of the Poet-Priest Kamo no Chomei

Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan

The Works of the Poet-Priest Kamo no Chomei

Rajyashree Pandey

University of Michigan Press, 1998

This is the first monograph-length study in English of Kamo no Chōmei, one of the most important literary figures of medieval Japan. Drawing upon a wide range of writings in a variety of genres from the Heian and Kamakura periods, Pandey focuses on the terms kyōgen kigo (wild words and fancy phrases), shoji soku nehan (samsara is nirvana), hōben (expedient means), and suki (single-minded devotion to an art). She shows how these terms deployed by writers in an attempt to reconcile literary and artistic activities with a commitment to Buddhism. By locating Chōmei within this broad context, the book offers an original reading of his texts, while at the same time casting a light upon intellectual preoccupations that were central to the times.
Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan is an important contribution to a growing body of work that challenges the rigid distinction between the religious and literary—a distinction that would have made little sense to medieval writers, many of whom were poets as well as priests—and sheds light on the particular ways in which a religio-aesthetic tradition came to be articulated in medieval Japan. Through an examination of records left by Chōmei's contemporaries, the book also traces the life of Chōmei, particularly his activities as a court poet and the circumstances that led to his taking the tonsure.
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