Results for "images"

Sūrya is the visible presence of the divine — a deva who does not need to be inferred, only observed. He illumines the intellect (dhī) and is addressed in the Gāyatrī Mantra as Sav…

Why an island in the world's largest Muslim-majority nation remains over eighty per cent Hindu — the empty stone throne of Acintya, the daily canang sari, the instrument-free Kecak…

… nnot be caught in a likeness. - **Shrines without permanent images.** Where Indian temples house fixed *mūrtis*, Balinese temples are open-air courtyards with empty shrines. The go …

The ācāryas call chapter two the sūtra of the entire Gītā: if the rest were lost, the architecture of liberation would survive here. Arjuna's collapse, the refutation of Cārvāka ma…

… weapons, fire, water, wind (2.23) — and by the plainest of images: worn clothes exchanged for new (2.22). Śaṅkara's *Bhāṣya* makes the therapeutic logic explicit. Until the fear o …

Pradakṣiṇā, temple bells, kīrtana, touching an elder's feet, tilaka, and offering water to the Sun each carry real, textually grounded meaning — reverence, purification, remembranc…

… walking around a temple image. It's attested around divine images, trees associated with deities, sacred fire, and the pilgrimage circuit around the Narmadā river. In each case th …

This series has hedged most of its Mahābhārata citations, unable to trace a popular retelling to a specific parva. This one is the exception: Nāga Pañcamī's origin story is the fra…

… res on offering milk, along with turmeric and vermilion, to images of serpents — carved stone Nāga figures, anthills understood to house snakes, or simply printed pictures kept for …

… d change to it.** The milk-and-turmeric offering to serpent images, and the shift away from offering milk to live captured snakes in response to documented harm to the animals, con …