Translation and Annotation of ‘Svarajya Siddhi’ of Gangadharendra Sarasvati from the nineteenth century. This text is considered one of the five Siddhi texts, the other four being Naishkarmya Siddhi, Advaita Siddhi, Ishta Siddhi, and Brahma Siddhi. These texts have a very great value in Advaita Vedanta.

Translation and Annotation of ‘Svarajya Siddhi’ of Gangadharendra Sarasvati from the nineteenth century. This text is considered one of the five Siddhi texts, the other four being Naishkarmya Siddhi, Advaita Siddhi, Ishta Siddhi, and Brahma Siddhi. These texts have a very great value in Advaita Vedanta.

This article focuses on Jewish women’s experiences of the amen meal ritual. The central intention of this meal is to achieve many recitations of the word “amen” in response to benedictions recited for different sorts of food. The women’s voices and experiences, reflected in in-depth interviews with participants and participant observa…[Read more]

When it comes to Japanese literary heritage, why and how are we able to access it? The shape of what is preserved and available is driven by and in turn dictates the shape of our canon(s). Yet we often do not think of the labor and social networks behind the reprinting and digitizing that allows us to access literature in the first place, whether…[Read more]

A commentary of Yinming zhenglimen lun 因明正理門論 (A Chinese translation of Nyāya-mukha) written by Gesshu 月珠 (1795-1856), a scholar priest of Shin Buddhism.

The purpose of this course is to introduce graduate students to the tools, methods, and history of sinology. Sinology refers to the study of China as performed in a philological manner. Philology refers to the historical study of language and literature in its fullest context. It is inherently interdisciplinary. It draws on the fields of…[Read more]

This presentation explains my undergrad/grad seminar “East Asian DH” (EALC111/511) at University of Pennsylvania in Spring 2018. I focus on the survey format of the seminar, as dictated by the challenge of trying to reach students working on many aspects of the un-discipline of East Asian studies, which encompasses a large region, at least three…[Read more]

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (1314) portrays Hell as an alienated realm, in which the doomed spirits must spend eternity in isolation and regret. Franz Liszt’s two-movement Dante Symphony (1857), based on the Inferno and Purgatorio, gives musical form to Dante’s textual expressions of agony. These evocations of suffering are enhanced by Lisz…[Read more]

Syllabus for my course 3UU3, Buddhism in East Asia planned for Winter term 2019

Syllabus for my course 3UU3, Buddhism in East Asia planned for Winter term 2019

This is the version of the syllabus for Asian Meditation Traditions at the end of the first term in which I offered it–Fall 2018.

This is the version of the syllabus for Asian Meditation Traditions at the end of the first term in which I offered it–Fall 2018.

Draft version of syllabus for graduate seminar on Nirvana Sutra

Draft version of syllabus for graduate seminar on Nirvana Sutra

This article is a detailed review of Constructions of Space III: Biblical Spatiality and the Sacred, ed. Jorunn Økland, J. Cornelis de Vos, and Karen J. Wenell (Bloomsbury, 2016); and The King and the Land: A Geography of Royal Power in the Biblical World, by Stephen C. Russell (Oxford University Press, 2017).

The paper argues that the pesaḥ is a ritual with no origins in the literature we have, from the earliest recoverable fragment, through the first revision that introduces as many problems as it aims to solve, to subsequent extensions in multiple directions, with no arc, no trajectory, no telos, but recurrent hermeneutic expressive engagement.

This book is one of the few in a great corpus of literature on meditation, that makes understanding meditation effortless. Not posing as a one-cure-for-all instant solution, this book attunes and trains a person’s mind, and makes one ready to get immersed in meditation, which according to Kamlesh D Patel and Joshua Pollock can be done only t…[Read more]

Psychoanalysis and its father in the West, Sigmund Freud, have often been seen as the antitheses of religion and faith. This book seeks to dispel this misconception and place Freud and psychoanalysis as hopes to the faithful and the hedonist alike. Ethics and morality do not get compromised and unethical and immoral behaviour do not get free…[Read more]