In this article, I will focus on the lengthy, convoluted, and symbolically weighty version of the Jaya, Vijaya, and Narasimha story that one can find in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, which I will henceforth refer to as the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam.
Since the Vedic era, the idea of incarnation has undergone many stages of evolution in order to reach its current interpretation wherein a soul, or an element of a divine consciousness essential to every being requires a physical body in order to grow and evolve through diverse experiences of struggle.
Amidst a revelry of dancers, drums, bells, flames in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, a black curtain opened to reveal the cover of the book entitled Death: An Inside Story.
According to the pervasive materialist ideology, the flip is nothing but a hallucination, a flight of fantasy, a delusory event that can easily be explained away as some less-than-rigorous thinker’s mistaken perception.
Beacons is divided into three parts: (1) Service, Compassion, and Humanitarianism, (2) Ecology and Environmental Activism, and (3) Peace, Knowledge, and Social Justice.
This 2019 book opens with a discussion of the Jaiminīyanyāyamālā (the Garland of Jaimini’s Reasons) of Mādhavācārya (1297-1388), a text that includes 1,536 verses that represent a distilled and comparatively concise summary of Mīmāṃsā reasoning.
Across religious traditions, revealed scripture is viewed by the faithful as a direct link to that Being/Deity/Truth that reveals the wisdom contained within Its revelation as scripture.
My hope was that every student would learn from and be challenged by the Gītā in a perfectly respectable academic fashion, yet without replacing study of the text by discussions of larger theoretical issues.