Ontology of Jain authors: Ramayana
I I am not sure what the discussions are about. Here are some of the problems that have surfaced. 1. Do (did) people in India believe that Ramayana is (was)…
Read moreInterpretations
There are multiple kinds of interpretation. For instance, there is interpretation of symbols in a domain like Physics: μ (in elementary optics) is “interpreted” as the refraction index of a substance. We use a…
Read moreHistoriography and Myths
The western intellectual tradition has bemoaned the fact that the Indians never indulged in history-writing (or historiography). In this tradition, there is an obsessive need for collecting “facts” about the…
Read moreBlind men and an Elephant: Historicity of Rama
[From What do Indians need: a history or the past] Let me begin with the following dialogue between a Swiss-German and a young Balinese (from Bichsel, Peter, Der Leser, Das Erzählen: Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen, 1982,…
Read moreWhat do Indians Need: A History or the Past–S.N.Balagangadhara
[For the full version of the ICHR Maulana Azad lecture, check this paper ; for the audio of this ICHR talk, check this youtube. ] Today, both in India and abroad, we see…
Read moreCreation stories: Christianity vs. Indian traditions
Of course there are any number of stories in other cultures, ‘Hinduism’ included, about the creation of the world and what happened ever since. However, not every story about the…
Read moreStories and intelligibility
(I) In a Greek story, Persephone spends part of the year in the underworld and part of the year on earth, and winter is caused by her mother Demeter’s sorrow…
Read moreVacuity of NRIs and their symbolic interpretations
1. Vyasa’s argument (to the extent we can speak of an argument in this context) is quite subtle: When Urvasi comes to Arjuna at the behest of his father, and…
Read moreIndian culture’s attitude toward sex vs. Christian Morality
Let us begin with the assumption that our stories about Indra and the Gandharvas are just that: stories, authored by human beings, without truth-content. (That is to say, they are…
Read moreAre stories symbols?
1. Here is one way of looking at what stories are. They are symbols. What are they symbols of? Well, they could symbolize acts; they could also be symbolically interpreted as…
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