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    Dance of Divine Love: India's Classic Sacred Love Story: The Rasa Lila of Krishna
    Dance of Divine Love: India's Classic Sacred Love Story: The Rasa Lila of Krishna
    Dance of Divine Love: India's Classic Sacred Love Story: The Rasa Lila of Krishna
    Ebook360 pages7 hours

    Dance of Divine Love: India's Classic Sacred Love Story: The Rasa Lila of Krishna

    By Graham M. Schweig

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    About this ebook

    The heart of this book is a dramatic love poem, the Rasa Lila, which is the ultimate focal point of one of the most treasured Sanskrit texts of India, the Bhagavata Purana. Judged a literary masterpiece by Indian and Western scholars alike, this work of poetic genius and soaring religious vision is one of the world's greatest sacred love stories and, as Graham Schweig clearly demonstrates, should be regarded as India's Song of Songs. The story presents the supreme deity as the youthful and amorous cowherd, Krishna, who joins his beloved maidens in an enchanting and celebratory "dance of divine love."


    Schweig introduces this work of exquisite poetry and profound theology to the Western world in the form of a luminous translation and erudite scholarly treatment. His book explores the historical context and literary genre of the work and elucidates the aesthetic and emotional richness of the composition, highlighting poignant details of this drama of divine love. Schweig illuminates the religious dimensions and ethical nuances of the drama, drawing widely from the commentaries and esoteric vision of masters of the Caitanya school of Vaishnavism, a prominent devotional Hindu tradition.


    Themes such as transcendence of death through love, the yoga of devotion, the contrast between worldly love and passionate love for God, and the dialectical tension between ethical boundaries and boundless love are presented. The final event of the Rasa dance, the author concludes, presents a dynamic symbol of supreme love that provides the basis for a theological vision of genuine religious pluralism.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJun 26, 2018
    ISBN9780691190174
    Dance of Divine Love: India's Classic Sacred Love Story: The Rasa Lila of Krishna
    Author

    Graham M. Schweig

    Graham M. Schweig is the author and translator of Dance of Divine Love: The Råsa Lîlå of Krishna. After completing graduate work at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, he became associate professor of religious studies at Christopher Newport University and visiting associate professor of Sanskrit at the University of Virginia. Schweig was recently a Visiting Fellow of Hindu studies at Oxford University, and has been accepted as a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. He has traveled to India several times where for one year, under a Smithsonian Institution-funded grant, he researched ancient handwritten manuscripts. Since an early age, Schweig has practiced various forms of meditational and devotional yoga.

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    • 5/5
      Had enough non-personalistic Hindu mystical blither? Ready for a rich entrance into classical India's realm of personalistic mysticism? This is the book (along with Schweig's just-out translation of the Bhagavad-gita...

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