 |
| Image of Brahma, courtesy of Wikipedia |
I have never visited Asia or the Indian subcontinent, but I look forward to the opportunity to do so in the future.
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Course Overview Write Up
I have decided to read the second version of the Ramayana, the one available in the public domain. I have decided to read this version because it will be closer to the original writing style, and I believe this allows more of the original context and meaning to come through. The originally conveyed context and meaning of religious texts in the native language can have far reaching impacts on the culture of a society, so I am hoping to remain as close to that as possible. I am most interested in seeing why so many paintings of traditional Indian religious characters have so many extra faces and limbs (such as in the image below), no one has ever been able to explain it to me satisfactorily.
A little more background on me, I have taken a world religions class before in high school. However, the course was only a semester long, and non-Abrahamic religions were covered very lightly, since it was a Catholic high school. If I remember correctly, we only spent 3 weeks covering Hinduism, Buddhism, and the other major traditional Asian religions. I have also spent a long time reading fantasy novels, I read Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit as a teenager, and have more recently finished the A Song of Ice and Fire series.
I have never visited Asia or the Indian subcontinent, but I look forward to the opportunity to do so in the future.
I have never visited Asia or the Indian subcontinent, but I look forward to the opportunity to do so in the future.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
If you are interested in the depictions of the gods and goddesses (that is Brahma there), you might really enjoy these videos by Devdutt Pattanaik: Stories from Calendar Art. That is an extra reading option you can do now, or you can do that for reading (well, viewing!) in the second half of the semester. He has a lot to say about Brahma and those four heads. Brahma used to have another head on top, but he lost it... that's a good story too! And how Ganesha got his elephant head: another good story. If you want to put together a collection of stories like that for a Storybook project, it could be really cool! The artwork is seriously AMAZING, and often the objects the gods hold in their hands are symbolic. Oh, the villain of the Ramayana, Ravana - he has ten heads and twenty arms. Pretty wild: it causes the artists some dilemmas in depicting him as you will see!
ReplyDelete