Quotes From This Week's Readings on India
From "A Day in the Life of a Brahmin Priest" by Peggy Bendet
"If someone knocks on your door between the time that you offer this food [for puja] and you eat it, then that is God and he must be fed...it is through this offering that food gains its power to nourish....think good thoughts while you are putting food into your mouth, then the food goes to the right place in the body and does the right thing there."
"But if the father hasn't been using the mantra, how will he have the power to make that mantra alive for his son?"
From "Hinduism: Experiments In the Sacred" on The Vedas
"First, the universe is a projection of a primordially sacrificed body of a cosmic being [Purusha]. Second, it is a human responsibility to refabricate and sacrifice anew that cosmic body. Third, there are two mysterious cosmic substances- fire and plant- that must be identified and made available through ritual work."
"First, existence is understood as a process of projection and assimilation. There is unity in the macrocosm (the world of the unmanifest) and multiplicity in the microcosm (creation, the world of phenomena). Each, however, is divided in three parts, each is hierarchic (that is, the three parts are ranked one above the other in authority and power), and each is organically interdependent (that is, the parts work together as one being with three separate functions).
"A second imported concept concerns human responsibility for this continuous sacrificial process. Since the projected world is a result of a divine sacrifice (yajna), the continues existence of the world is dependent on repititions of that primordial, cosmogonic event. As the Purusha hymn declares, the original cosmic laws were laid down by sacrifice. Once created, the world is thus constantly re-created by sacrifice. But now the ritual action is accomplished by human agents, namely the godlike Brahmans who take upon themselves the work of the deities.
"The third Indo-European concept brought into India some 3,500 years ago involves an interaction of both myth and cult focused on concepts of sacred fire and sacred plant. There i a life-maintaining fire that pervades all and translates mutable existence to immutability, and there is a life-transcending plant of celestial origin that provides mortals with poetic inspiration and immortality. Like Purusha these two substances are divisible, macro-micro-cosmic, and obtainable by the ritual use of a special knowledge, that of operational correspondences between the divine/human and the unmanifest/manifest realms."
From "A Survey of Hinduism" by Klaus K. Klostermaier
"The aim of Vedantic knowledge is to reach reality, not to abstract a concept from it. This means the training not only of the mind, but the development of a lifestyle of inwardness, from within which life then develops in a new way."
From "Religion And The Body, Ch 10: Medical and Mythical constructions of the Body in Hindu Texts" by Wendy Doniger
"We hoped to ground even religious history in the study of the body, [because] the body is always mediated by symbolic expression of the culture...The body is both given and constructed."
("mythological somatic themes")
"A basic assumption of Hindu medical texts is the doctrine of the three humours, closely related to the Hindu belief that all matter, including the human body, is composed of the three elements of lucidity (sattva), energy (rajas), and torpor (tamas). This remains the prevailing view of Ayurvedic practitioners today."
"Not until you shake off the torpor of factionalism from what you want to know will true knowledge emerge. The use of good food is one cause of the growth of a person, and the use of bad food is a cause of diseases."
"This physical model, of danger flowing in and out of the body at all times, is echoed in the social model of karmic transactions."
"As [the baby] comes out, it is hurt by the wind of procreation; it comes out crying, because it is pained by the misery of its heart. When it has come out of the womb, it falls into an unbearable swoon, but it regains consciousness when it is touched by the air. Then Visnu's deluding power of illusion assails him, and when his soul has been deluded by it, he loses his knowledge. As soon as the living creature has lost his knowledge, he becomes a baby."