Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category
Wednesday, December 17th, 2014
The history of the specifically postural yoga that is the root of the yogas that are practiced in the modern West is not well known. We know that most forms of current Western practice can be traced back to the teachers Vivekananda, Yogananda, Sivananda, Kuvalayananda, Hariharananda, Krishnamacharya, and a few ...
Posted in History, Religion, Yoga | 2 Comments »
Sunday, November 30th, 2014
I knew that Frazer’s claim in his Golden Bough of a widespread myth of a dying and resurrected god had been heavily discounted amongst later researchers, but I still thought that the general template he presented was applicable to a significant number of myths, and not just around the Mediterranean. ...
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Wednesday, September 24th, 2014
There is a question whether Yoga is necessarily a religion or whether it is possible to be a practitioner and remain, for example, a good Christian. Now, ‘Yoga’ is the name of a wide variety of beliefs and practices – we might compare it to the Dao of the classical ...
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Sunday, March 16th, 2014
When the Dharma is forgotten in the world another Buddha arises to renew it. The earliest version seems to have 7 buddhas in this age, of whom gOtama is the current. These are mentioned in the Pali canon in the dIghanikAya (ii, pp 5ff) and sa~yuttanikAya (ii, pp. 5f) of ...
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Sunday, January 19th, 2014
In the course of researching the Samkhya cosmogony, I noticed that the diagrams indicate a great variety of interpretations. I thought it would be interesting to display them here.
Posted in Philosophy, Religion, Yoga | 3 Comments »
Sunday, March 18th, 2012
The Gospel of Mary, recovered in fragments in Greek (Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, Rylands III 463) and Coptic (BG 8502) is part of the Nag Hammadi Library (Robinson, J.M. (1990 revd. edn.) NHL, Harper Collins, pp. 523-7. Intro: K. King, tr: G. W. MacRae & R. McL. Wilson) and is generally ...
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Tuesday, March 13th, 2012
A temple site constructed, used, and reconstructed over a period of ~ 4ky from ~ 12.5 ky BP. Its material culture, location, and date make it part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA.) The builders and users are assumed to be hunter-gatherers as no residential use structures have been discovered ...
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Sunday, February 26th, 2012
It is said that Enoch ‘walked with God, and then was no more; for God took him’ (Gen. v, 24.) At some stage it became accepted that after his assumption Enoch was transformed into an angel called Metatron. And this angel was also the result of several other amalgamations and ...
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Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
The theory of Seven Heavens is derived from astrological speculation on the 7 visible regularly moving celestial objects. In the 2nd C BCE the Greeks developed the “Chaldean” order for these objects: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which generally replaced the older Babylonian and Egyptian orderings. These ...
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Monday, February 20th, 2012
Peter Berger in The American Interest (February 15, 2012) asks: ‘Is Confucianism a Religion?’ It’s an old question and Berger himself goes through some of the issues involved – though he does not much consider the many ways that ‘Confucianism’ (ru jia) changed over time, some of which seemed to ...
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