Foundations in Hindu Traditions: Ritual and Text

3 credits · Divinity School

The course traces the ongoing experiments of ritual processes which sought to resolve or ameliorate the inexorable migratory effect of simple human action (karma). Over the last several thousand years these experiments have followed four fundamentally different trajectories that provide us with a broad historical frame: the sacrifice/yajina of the Vedic period, meditation/yoga, devotion/bhakit, and tantra/tragressive practices. Students will examine translations of the foundational texts that justify each of these four alternatives, pairing those with the persistence of material culture, from the sites used for consecrating kings, temple construction and iconography, domestic organization and rites of passage to sacred geography that becomes the object of pilgrimage. At the completion of the class, the student should have the conceptual vocabulary and analytical tools necessary to interpret intelligently any manifestation of the Hindu traditions they may encounter, from the ancient to the contemporary. The course satisfies the inter-religious encounter requirement for the master of divinity degree. [3]