In Buddhism, it is believed that a person’s state of mind at the moment of death can be more decisive than any virtuous deeds.
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.
The voice of the scholar-practitioner emerges from a confluence of well-established disciplines, both inside and outside the academy.
Though Sanskrit is often called a dead language, the ideas embodied in its texts help to make sense of this in a vibrant, dynamic way.
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.