John Stratton Hawley

Author and Authority in the Bhakti Poetry of North India

In america we love to put our names on things. Everything from tree trunks to subway cars bears the evidence of our desire to announce what we are and own, and in the world of arts and letters the landscape is little changed. There the copyright expresses our instinct that even creativity has its property aspect: we claim what we have composed. There is a great tendency among us to be suspicious of anything unsigned, and pseudonymity is rare.

Yoga and Viyoga : Simple Religion in Hinduism *

As the comparative study of religion has advanced in recent years, one of its most salutary effects has been the qualification, if not the removal, of old caricatures about other peoples religions. It is increasingly recognized that only distance and ignorance make religious traditions seem homogeneous entities, and that the tensions they encompass within themselves are often at least as extreme as the gulfs that separate one tradition from another.

Imagining Religious Weeping

In assembling 14 essays written by scholars of religion, Holy Tears aims to venture into a new field of research: the comparative study of weeping in the religious imagination. The editors’ goal is twofold: (1) to examine “in social and historical context the role played by tears, weeping, and lamentation in the life of religion” and (2) to chart “theoretical grounds for approaching the category of weeping in the comparative and historical study of religion” (p. 4). They summarize the thematic issues of this volume as follows: “Weeping: Spontaneous vs. Scripted; Private vs. Public,” “Ritual Weeping as Social or Existential Protest,” “The Genders of Weeping,” “Absence and Presence,” “Weeping as Generation of Water,” “Weeping vs. Crying,” and “The Weeping of God.” Although some of these issues are addressed in the subsequent essays, others, such as “the weeping of god” and whether weeping can be considered a coded language serving communicative purposes, receive little or no attention. In addition, the thematic issues are not conceptually related, and, as a consequence, the articles seem to follow an arbitrary order. This would be excusable if the aim of the volume were not so ambitious, but abstract schematics are not suitable for establishing or organizing a field of research in an analytically responsible or heuristically useful way. The loose order and unexplained selection of essays indicate a conviction that historically grounded, comparatively motivated, and theologically inspired essays will all fit well within a diffuse field of religious studies. In “The Poetics and Politics of Ritualized Weeping in Early and Medieval Japan” (pp. 25–51), Gary L. Ebersole uses historical analyses of three textual examples to raise questions about the use of the comparative method in the study of tears. He takes ritualized weeping as “a culturally choreographed act, stylized, not spontaneous, expression of emotion” (p. 25) and argues that “we must pay attention to both the weeper and the intended audience for these affective displays” (p. 26) In “Productive Tears: Weeping Speech, Water, and the Underworld in the Mexica Tradition” (pp. 52–66), Kay A. Read shows how tears can be seen as generating “a carefully formed, nonverbal, but nevertheless noisy language that was intended to both express emotion and create or recreate morally good order on a number of cosmic and human levels” (p. 59). In “‘Why Do Your Eyes Not Run Like a River?’ Ritual Tears in Ancient and Modern Greek Funerary Traditions” (pp. 67–82), Gay O. Lynch addresses the contribution of tears to the cultivation and dissemination of aesthetic form and creativity. In “‘Sealing the Book with Tears’: Divine Weeping on Mount Nebo and in the Warsaw Ghetto” (pp. 83–93), Nehemia Polen introduces the motive of the weeping god and shows how this motive was seen shortly before the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. In “The Gopis’ Tears” (pp. 94–111), John S. Hawley postulates that religious tears are enacted, communicated, gendered, and frequently about death and concludes from the Hindu poetic material under consideration that tears are first and foremost “markers of transcendence” (p. 110). In “Hsuan-tsang’s Encounter with the Buddha: A Cloud of Philosophy in a Drop of Tears” (pp. 112–31), Malcolm D. Eckel argues that it was the landscape that shaped the pilgrim’s understanding of Buddha and that his tears are to be seen as “the deepest emotional response” of “a bodhisattva’s encounter with the vision of the reality represented by the Buddha” (p. 127). In “Weeping in Classical Sufism” (pp. 132–44), William C. Chittick argues that the Qur’ān conceives weeping as “the natural response to the human awareness of distance from the Creator” (p. 138). Amy Bard, in “‘No Power of Speech Remains’: Tears and Transformation in South Asian Majlis Poetry” (pp. 145–64) explores ritual weeping as “a transformative process” in a Shi‘i mourning assembly and addresses the question “how crying can concretize feelings and align multiple perspectives and complex emotional claims” (p. 145) In “Ekun Iyawo: Bridal Tears in Marriage Rites of Passage among the Oyo-Yoruba of Nigeria” (pp. 165–77), Jakob K. Olupona and Sola Ajibade argue that performance of the ekun iyawo ritual provides the bride an avenue for expressing her “deep emotions at the time of marriage” (p. 165) and at the same time enables the playing out of the cultural and social issues surrounding her new role and reflection on her preparation for it (p. 173). In “A Love for All Seasons: Weeping in Jewish Sources” (pp. 178–200), Herbert W. Basser explores “the tension between tears as a ritual expression of remorse and loss that is culturally regulated and tears as personal grief” (p. 180). In “‘Pray with Tears and Your Request Will Find a Hearing’: On the Iconology of the Magdalene’s Tears” (pp. 201–28), Diane Apostolos-Cappadona argues that an analysis of the iconography of Mary Magdalene as weeper through the religious gaze may bring one closer to the believed reality of earlier Christian understandings. In “Tears and Screaming: Weeping in the Spirituality of Margery Kempe” (pp. 229–41), Santha Bhattacharji looks at the medieval Western tradition of compassionate religious weeping through the figure of a fifteenthcentury English mystic and argues that “it is, paradoxically, not the absence of the physical Christ through his human death that provokes her mourning and weeping but fleeting glimpses of his presence, mediated to her by other physical means: crucifixes, peoples, animals, events” (p. 237). “‘An Obscure Matter’: The Mystery of Tears in Orthodox Spirituality” (pp. 242–54) by Kallistos Ware is about “the mystery of weeping” in Eastern Christian sources and functions as an introduction to the concluding essay, “‘Howl, Weep and

Mirabai at the Court of Guru Gobind Singh

This chapter focuses on a surprising and little-known example of this phenomenon: What happens to Mirabai when she, or rather her story, visits the Punjab? Anyone who knows her story knows that she traveled to Vrindavan, while searching for Krishna. Mirabais attempt to enter the religious culture of Vrindavan precipitated an unusual intellectual exchange with the Chaitanyite theologian Jiva Gosvami, or as reported later on, his uncle Rupa Gosvami. The story of Mirabais life that has come to be conventional in the present day places her in each of the three regions that claim a poetic corpus bearing her name, Braj, western Rajasthan, and Gujarat. The chapter describes that those who heard the story of Mirabai being performed at the court of Guru Gobind Singh would have appreciated it fully, would have gotten more of the jokes, if they had been familiar with other tellings of her life. Keywords: Guru Gobind Singh; Jiva Gosvami; Mirabai; Rupa Gosvami

Devi: Goddesses of India.

This extraordinary collection explores 12 different hindu Goddesses all of whom are in some way related to Devi, the great Goddess. The collection combines analysis of texts with intensive fieldwork, allowing the reader to see how Goddesses are worshiped in everyday life. In these essays, the divine feminine in Hinduism is revealed as never before fascinating contradictory powerful.

Krishna, the Butter Thief.

The author traces the development of the theme of Krishna as butter thief from its earliest appearance in literature and art until the present. He focuses on the dramas (ras lilas) of Krishnas native Braj and on the Sur Sagar, a collection of verse attributed to the sixteenth-century poet Sur Das that is as familiar to Hindi speakers as Mother Goose is to us.Originally published in 1983.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Krishna in Black and White: Darsan in the Butter Thief Poems of the Early Sur Sagar

ANYONE FAMILIAR with Indian religion knows the potency that Hindus sense in the experience of sight (darsan). Much of Hindu bhakti is specifically iconic: perhaps nowhere else in the world is it so literally true that seeing is believing. Indian eyes silently search out the inner meanings of a guru’s face for hours on end; crowds in the streets push and shove to see the great pass by; babies are held aloft to absorb the blessings that visual contact with a revered figure or icon can bring, even if the understanding is not mature enough to comprehend; villagers unable to name the images in temples nonetheless stand transfixed before them: the sight itself suffices. And icons of