Category Archives: Scriptures

Selections from Rajaji’s Mahabharata

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

One of my many purchases on a recent trip to India was a copy of Chakravarti Rajagopalachari’s English translation of the Mahabharata.  Rajaji (1878-1972) was an important Indian statesman, but he spent a bit of his active life on literature and religion rather than politics.  His Mahabharata is ~450 pages long, which can hardly include [...]

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The Ashramas of Life

Monday, March 8, 2010

It is noted that in almost every religion, there are ceremonies that celebrate rites of passage throughout a person’s life. In Judaism, there is the bar/bat mitzvah. In many sects of Christianity, the confirmation is held to declare that the individual is a participating member of the church. In Hinduism, for young individuals around the [...]

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The many paths to felicity

Monday, March 1, 2010

I’m currently taking a class on the 13th century Andalusian Islamic poet-mystic-philosopher-theologian Ibn `Arabī, whose worldview is tremendously fascinating and worth studying in depth (if only we had lifetimes enough!). One of the assigned books for the class, William Chittick’s Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-`Arabī and the Problem of Religious Diversity, closes with two passages from [...]

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