Behind or beside the great male spiritual leaders are great women, so we are told, although it is usually the case that their lives and deeds are often relegated to secondary importance by androcentric religious constructs put in place by those who come afterwards. For example, Jesus has two Marys (his mother and Magdalene), Muhammed has his principal wife Aisha bint Abu Bakr, and Buddha (Siddhartha) has Mahaprajapati. There are, however, many stories written about these women, and the often sparse historical records, if they exist at all, need to be fleshed out by these accounts, many of which, however, contain a great deal of imaginative fiction as well as kernels of truth. They form what Garling herself terms “a crazy quilt,” that is, numerous fragments based on what Tracy Cochran calls in her foreword “threads of instinct, intuition and common sense.” In the case of Mahaprajapati, we do not have even the kind of history which may be extracted, say, from the synoptic gospels, apocryphal writings (there is a Gospel of Mary Magdalene) or the various Islamic sources depicting Aisha as a scholar, judge and even military leader.
Author: John Butler
Is Confucianism a religion, or is it a philosophy?
From about 1765 to 1840 Japanese finding themselves in Edo might have been amused by skimming over a few senryū, short satirical or comical poems which made fun of the pretensions of the administrative capital.
In his perennially wonderful (if now dated—the abridged version was issued by its author in 1922 based on the 12-volume full one) Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Sir James Frazer tells us that magic was the precursor to religion. Van Schaik uses Frazer’s analysis as an example of what has by now become the “conventional” view of the subject, although it refers largely to what Frazer called “sympathetic magic,” which van Schaik says “has dominated much of the discussion of magical practice” since the issue of The Golden Bough. It was “the first primitive stage in mankind’s attempt to understand and control the world,” as Sam van Schaik sums it up, or the belief “that things act on each other through a secret sympathy,” as Frazer himself put it.
The poems of Song Lin, born in Fujian in 1959, are, according to his translator and personal friend, the poet Jami Proctor Xu, “weavings of history, myth, nature, city, everyday life, melancholy, joy, story, image, and classical and modern Chinese.” This would be a formidable range for any poet, but reading Sunday Sparrows leaves little doubt that Xu was completely accurate in her assessment, which is made easier (for her) and perhaps more profound (for us) by its personal nature.
Indian Sun is a large book teeming with larger-than-life characters, not all of whom are called Ravi Shankar. Oliver Craske gives us a whole complex world, or, if you like, two complex worlds, Indian and Western, meeting, sometimes uneasily, through music.
These two new books from Shambhala’s excellent series Lives of the Masters introduce readers to the life and teachings of two great Buddhist innovators who lived many centuries apart, but who both contributed to the way future generations came to understand Buddhism.
“I’d kill a Chinaman as quick as I would an Indian and I’d kill an Indian as quick as I would a dog.” This chilling remark, recorded in a police report, was made in 1884 by a man who had taken part in the lynching of Louie Sam, a fourteen-year old indigenous boy from the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada. He had been waiting to be tried for murder in New Westminster when he was kidnapped by an American mob, taken across the border and lynched, presumably because the alleged murder had taken place in Nooksack, Washington. It later transpired that two members of the lynch mob were likely responsible for the murder.
In 2007, Londoners found a new magazine on the stands called Monocle. Thirteen years later, as we are informed on the back cover, it grew from a fairly modest debut as “a briefing on the world, from diplomacy to design, business to travel, culture to hospitality” into “a fully-fledged media company with a 24-hour radio station, a website, films, shops and cafés—and books.” This book is just what one would expect from such a source—its emphasis is on modern and contemporary Japan rather than on historical aspects (although these are not entirely neglected), and is perhaps an ideal book for younger people who want to know what Japan in the 21st century has to offer.
When we think of Indian rivers, it’s usually the Ganges that comes to mind, that mysteriously holy river now polluted by sludge and city waste. It also features the half-burnt corpses of devout Hindus floating down it on their final journeys and people bathing in it to purify themselves. Like all rivers, the Ganges was, of course, a river of life as well as death, the reason for people settling along its banks and nurturing themselves with its flowing waters. The West has long been fascinated by the Ganges; writing in the late 1640s, the poet and MP Andrew Marvell imagined his “coy mistress” wasting her time, of which he imagines they had an eternity, in India instead of responding to his advances; “Thou by th’Indian Ganges side shouldst rubies find,” he whinges, while he is left in England “by the tide of Humber” to bemoan his enforced celibacy. But who in 1645 had heard of the Hooghly, a fairly short distributary of the Ganges which eventually finds its way south to the Bay of Bengal? Probably not even Andrew Marvell, writing a hundred years or so after the Portuguese merchant Pedro Tavares first set foot on its bank in 1578, and born a year after the English arrived in Bengal (1620).
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