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Matthew Robertson, "Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Matthew Robertson, "Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India" (Oxford UP, 2024)
ratings:
Length:
69 minutes
Released:
Apr 9, 2024
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
The concept of the puruṣa, or person, is implicated in a wide range of ancient texts throughout the Indian subcontinent. In Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, Matthew I. Robertson traces the development of this concept from 1500 BCE to 400 CE: in the Ṛg Veda, the Brāhmaṇas, the Upaniṣads, Buddhist Pāli suttas, the Caraka and Suśruta Saṃhitā, and the Mahābhārata. Pushing back against the interpretation of personhood as a cosmological microcosm, Robertson argues instead that, in these texts, personhood and the “world” (loka) are interrelated concepts. He investigates how persons were understood to expand to the fill the horizons of their world, attending to ritual-political, aesthetic, yogic, and medicinal techniques deployed for this purpose.
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Released:
Apr 9, 2024
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Lori Meeks, “Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2010): Scholars have long been fascinated by the Kamakura era (1185-1333) of Japanese history, a period that saw the emergence of many distinctively Japanese forms of Buddhism. And while a lot of this attention overshadows other equally important periods of J... by New Books in Buddhist Studies