Category Archives: Scriptures

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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Garuda Purana

Friday, February 26, 2010

The Garuda Purana, one of the puranas of Hindu tradition, embodies the Hindu (Vaishnava) understanding of death and afterlife. The Purana is generally perceived as divided into two parts: the first describing death itself, and the second detailing what happens after death. The Purana is often recited during funeral rites in North India, and for [...]

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