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The Indian spiritual entrepreneur Maharishi Mahesh Yogi took the West by storm in the 1960s and '70s, charming Baby Boomers fed up with war and social upheaval with his message of meditation and peace. Heeding his call, two thousand followers moved to tiny Fairfield, Iowa, to set up their own university on the campus of a failed denominational college. Soon, they started a school for prekindergarten through high school, allowing followers to immerse themselves in Transcendental Meditation from toddlerhood through PhDs. Although Fairfield's longtime residents were relieved to see that their new neighbors were clean-cut and respectably dressed-not the wild-haired, drug-using hippies they had feared-the newcomers nevertheless quickly began to remake the town. Stores selling exotic goods popped up, TM followers built odd-looking homes that modeled the guru's rules for peace-inspiring architecture, and the new university knocked down a historic chapel, even as it erected massive golden-domed buildings for meditators. Some newcomers got elected-and others were defeated-when they ran for local and statewide offices. At times, thousands from across the globe visited the small town. Yet Transcendental Meditation did not always achieve its aims of personal and social tranquility. Suicides and a murder unsettled the meditating community over the years, and some followers were fleeced by con men from their own ranks. Some battled a local farmer over land use and one another over doctrine. Notably, the world has not gotten more peaceful. Today the guru is dead. His followers are graying, and few of their children are moving into leadership roles. The movement seems rudderless, its financial muscle withering, despite the efforts of high-profile supporters such as filmmaker David Lynch and media magnate Oprah Winfrey. Can TM reinvent itself? And what will be the future of Fairfield itself? By looking closely at the transformation of this small Iowa town, author Joseph Weber assesses the movement's surprisingly potent effect on Western culture, sketches out its peculiar past, and explores its possible future.

Branding Bhakti not only investigates the methods the ISKCON movement uses to position itself for growth but highlights devotees' painful and complicated struggles as they work to transform their shrinking, sectarian movement into one with global religious appeal.

Explored here is a series of rhetorico-narrative linkages in the Sanskrit play Mṛcchakaṭika (\"The Little Clay Cart\"), a set of associations between terms such as wealth, poverty, virtue, and crime. These connections add up to a governing sociopolitical concept, allowing us to extrapolate from the world of the Mṛcchakaṭika's concepts to its concepts of its world.

This paper seeks to emphasize what may be the most primary mode of altering consciousness in the ancient world: namely, the burning of substances for inhalation in enclosed areas. While there is abundant literature on archaic uses of entheogenic plants, the literature on psychoactive incenses is quite deficient. From the tents of nomadic tribes to the small meditation rooms of Taoist adepts, the smoldering fumes of plants and resins have been used to invoke and banish and for shamanic travels since humanity mastered fire. The text provides details of primary \"incense cults\" while highlighting some commonalities and shared influences when possible. Further speculation suggests that selective burning of certain substances, such as mercury and sulphur, may have contributed to their lasting use and veneration in alchemy from India and China to the Arabian and European protochemists. This article would have a companion online database for images and further examples of ingredients in various incenses from China to ancient Greece.

This essay examines a series of ‘Hindustani’ meditation manuals from the high colonial period against a sample of etiquette and medicinal works from the same era. In doing so, the essay has two principal aims, one specific to the Indian past and one pertaining to more general historical enquiry. The first aim is to subvert a longstanding trend in the ‘history’ of religions which has understood meditational practices through a paradigm of the mystical and transcendent. In its place, the essay examines such practices—and in particular their written, and printed, formulation—within the ideological and technological contexts in which they were written. In short, meditation is historicised, and its ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ expressions, compared in the process. The second aim is more ambitious: to test the limits of historical knowledge by asking whether it is possible to recount a history of breathing. In reassembling a political economy of respiration from a range of colonial writings, the essay thus hopes to form a listening device for the intimate rhythms of corporeal history. In doing so, it may suggest ways to recount a connected and necessarily political history of the body, the spirit and the world.

Erotic religious imagery is as old as Hinduism. The earliest Hindu sacred text, the Rig Veda (c. 1500 BCE), revels in the language of both pleasure and fertility. In addition to this and other religious texts that incorporated eroticism, there were more worldly texts that treated the erotic tout court, of which the Kamasutra, composed in north India, probably in the third century CE, is the most famous. The two words in its title mean \"desire/love/pleasure/sex\" (kama) and \"a treatise\" (sutra). Virtually nothing is known about the author, Vatsyayana, other than his name and what we learn from this text. There is nothing remotely like it even now, and for its time it was astonishingly sophisticated; it was already well known in India at a time when the Europeans were still swinging in trees, culturally (and sexually) speaking. The Kamasutra's ideas about gender are surprisingly modern, and its stereotypes of feminine and masculine natures are unexpectedly subtle. It also reveals attitudes to women's education and sexual freedom, and views of homosexual acts, that are strikingly more liberal than those of other texts in ancient India-or, in many cases, in contemporary India. Adapted from the source document.

Scared Sacred is a feature documentary that asks the question: can we be Scared into the Sacred? Can we take the trials of extreme historical situations and transform them into a force of awakening? Or will we succumb to groundlessness and fear? The film will take us on a journey to the pivotal 'Ground Zero's' of the world, places like Wounded Knee, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, New York City, and Afghanistan, among the darkest moments of human history. Yet this is not a gloomy film. We will seek out the stories of hope, of transformation, of resistance.

The prakaraṇa text called \"Pañcīkaraṇa\", attributed to Śaṅkara, is investigated here. Through a comparative analysis with Śaṅkara's commentaries on the \"Gītā\" and some of the principal \"Upaniṣads\", it is shown that this text is most probably genuine. The background of Yoga in pre-Śaṅkaran Vedānta and in Śaṅkara's thought is completely reevaluated, and the need to develop new criteria to determine the validity of the attribution of these texts to Śaṅkara is highlighted.

Vimuttimagga, Vimuktimargas astra, Chieh-to-tao-lun,2 Gedatsud oron, Rnam par grol bai lam or (Treatise on) the Path to Liberation. Since the original language of this text is uncertain, I shall refer to it by the English translation of its title, Path to Liberation (PL). In other words, the Abhayagiri became a distinct nik aya.10 It came to an end in the 12th century when the Abhayagiri monks were forced to disrobe or seek fresh ordination within the Mahavihara nik aya.11 While the historicity of the Abhayagirivihara is not in doubt, the nature of its teachings and traditions remains unknown due to the paucity of extant textual material from Abhayagiri itself or detailed and non-partisan discussion of them in the texts of other Buddhist traditions.12 Accused by its main rivals of unorthodox teachings and Mahayana leanings,13 for scholars of medieval South and Southeast Asian Buddhism the Abhayagirivihara has by this very mystery acquired an irresistible allure as the possible source of heterodoxies and practices which are not validated within the Pali canon or the known commentarial writings of the Mahavihara tradition.Bechert, in his preface to Bizots volume on Theravada pabbajj a liturgies, connects the esoteric Theravada of Southeast Asia and the Abhayagirivihara tradition of Sri Lanka in the following terms: Thusit is not out of the way if we suppose that the old Southeast Asian Theravada tradition of the Mons was also somehow connected with the Abhayagiri tradition which was later on replaced by the Mahavihara lineages and teachings.14Bechert does not give details of possible links between the Abhayagirivihara and yog avacara traditions, but cites as support, firstly, Bizots Le figuier `a cinq branches where Bizot has argued with good reason that the Abhayagirivasa school may have been instrumental inHISTORY VERSUS MODERN MYTH 505elaborating the concepts on which the tantric practices are based, and secondly, the use in North India of Upatis.yas Path to Liberation: The most important post-canonical doctrinal text of the Abhayagiri monks was Upatissas Vimuttimagga, and as Peter Skilling has recently discovered this work was extensively used to describe Theravadadoctrine by the 12th century North Indian author Dasabalasrmitra.15 Bechert qualifies his proposition by observing that the existence of secret teachings is known to Buddhaghosa in his Visuddhimagga, the most influential text of Mahavihara orthodoxy.16 This suggests the possibility that such texts as those studied by Bizot could have been current within the Mahavihara, although Probably, for want of further evidence, we shall never know which secret teachings were hinted at by Buddhaghosa.17 Bechert concludes his discussion by pointing out that tantric methodology is a pan-Indian religious phenomenon.18Becherts supposition of a link between the yog avacara traditions and the Abhayagirivihara is, then, based on two pieces of evidence. [...]in his discussion of the evidence for the doctrines of the Abhayagiri school on the basis of the remnants of its literature, Bechert criticises Kalupahana for his restatement of the outdated opinion that no literature of the Abhayagiri school remains.19 Curiously, von Hinuber, in his Handbook of Pali Literature, repeats this outdated view: their texts gradually disappeared, and the only Theravada textssurviving are those of one single nik aya, the Mahavihara,20 and appears to cite page 16 of this very article by Bechert as his authority.

[...]I generally translate nirodha as cessation; which I think is usually closer to the sense than restraint or control, but these latter terms are sometimes used when they seem more appropriate. When not-Self seeing stops, the mind naturally takes on the form of the Self; he compares this pure mind to a pots original, natural condition of holding empty space ([#16]ak[#16]a[#13] sa), while anything else present is, in both cases, an adventitious adjunct. [...]the unobstructed Self is experienced by the mind which is one-pointed due to its turning toward pure consciousness alone and subtle with only latent impressions remaining, effectuated by the enstasis of cessation. Vidy[#16]aran. ya continues that having described the external means to reach superconscious sam[#16]adhi, Pata[~]njali indicates in YS I. 51 that the effort to stop even this latent impression is the internal (or most direct) means to this enstasis; it states that when even this (obstructing impression) is restrained, since all is restrained, seedless sam[#16]adhi (arises). [...]again here we see Vidy[#16]aran. ya attempt to clarify the exact nature of the process of yogic mastery which eventually culminates in Advaitic liberation.After considering the relationship of unconditioned enstasis and deep dreamless sleep (sus. upti),19 Vidy[#16]aran. ya continues to discuss calming and controlling the lazy, distracted, and desire-filled mind. [...]cutting off all conceptual constructions(vikalpa), he saw the sun of discrimination hidden in the darkness, dispelled the dark with the light of right knowledge, and was immersed in light.