Experiencing the Sacred: Embodiment and Aesthetics in South Asian Religions

This course explores South Asian religions through the body, aesthetics, and the senses, with a focus on Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. Concentrating on embodied practices like meditation, chanting, eating, sex, asceticism, ritual, possession, and performance, we will examine experiences of the sacred past and present. How have sensory and material cultures shaped lives, practices, and doctrines? What placed does the pursuit (or denial) of sensual pleasure have in South Asian religious cultures? This course will draw on texts as various as sermons of the Buddha and the Kamasutra, and integrating a range of media from ethnographic films to graphic novels.