Feeding the Dead

Ancestor Worship in Ancient India

Matthew R. Sayers (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

208 Seiten

2013
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-991747-1 (ISBN)

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Feeding the Dead outlines the early history of ancestor worship in South Asia, from the earliest sources available, the Vedas, up to the descriptions found in the Dharmshastra tradition. Most prior works on ancestor worship have done little to address the question of how shraddha, the paradigmatic ritual of ancestor worship up to the present day, came to be. Matthew R. Sayers argues that the development of shraddha is central to understanding the shift from Vedic to Classical Hindu modes of religious behavior. Central to this transition is the discursive construction of the role of the religious expert in mediating between the divine and the human actor. Both Hindu and Buddhist traditions draw upon popular religious practices to construct a new tradition. Sayers argues that the definition of a religious expert that informs religiosity in the Common Era is grounded in the redefinition of ancestral rites in the Grhyasutras. Beyond making more clear the much misunderstood history of ancestor worship in India, this book addressing the serious question about how and why religion in India changed so radically in the last half of the first millennium BCE. The redefinition of the role of religious expert is hugely significant for understanding that change. This book ties together the oldest ritual texts with the customs of ancestor worship that underlie and inform medieval and contemporary practice.

Matthew R. Sayers is Assistant Professor of Religion at Lebanon Valley College.

List of Tables ; Acknowledgements ; Abbreviations ; Introduction ; Chapter 1: Ancestral Rites in the Early Vedas ; Chapter 2: The Solemn Ancestral Rites ; Chapter 3: The Domestic Rice-ball Sacrifice to the Ancestors ; Chapter 4: The sraddha-rite ; Chapter 5: Ancestral Rites in the Buddhist Literature ; Chapter 6: Soteriology ; Chapter 7: Mediation ; Conclusion ; Appendix ; Notes ; Glossary of Sanskrit Terms ; Bibliography ; Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	12.9.2013
Zusatzinfo	3 illus.
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	236 x 160 mm
Gewicht	456 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Hinduismus
ISBN-10	0-19-991747-7 / 0199917477
ISBN-13	978-0-19-991747-1 / 9780199917471
Zustand	Neuware