The Bhagavad Gita is a dramatic poem which forms a small part of the great epic, the Mahabharata. The poem is the dialogue through which Arjuna`s doubts are resolved by Krsna`s teaching about the nature and place of action in the ultimate reality of things. The present translation is supplemented by a commentary; both seek to emphasize how the teaching is rooted in the concrete situation, and how its order and structure reflect the changing condition of the conversants and the purpose of the conversation. Footnotes and notes are included to clarify the Sanskrit, to indicate alternative translations, and to note relevant comments from other commentators and translators.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dramatic poem which forms a small part of the great epic, the Mahabharata. The poem is the dialogue through which Arjuna`s doubts are resolved by Krsna`s teaching about the nature and place of action in the ultimate reality of things. The present translation is supplemented by a commentary; both seek to emphasize how the teaching is rooted in the concrete situation, and how its order and structure reflect the changing condition of the conversants and the purpose of the conversation. Footnotes and notes are included to clarify the Sanskrit, to indicate alternative translations, and to note relevant comments from other commentators and translators.
How the I Ching became one of the most widely read and influential books in the world The I Ching originated in China as a divination manual more than three thousand years ago. In 136 BCE the emperor declared it a Confucian classic, and in the centuries that followed, this work had a profound influence on the philosophy, religion, art, literature, politics, science, technology, and medicine of various cultures throughout East Asia. Jesuit missionaries brought knowledge of the I Ching to Europe in the seventeenth century, and the American counterculture embraced it in the 1960s. Here Richard Smith tells the extraordinary story of how this cryptic and once obscure book became one of the most widely read and extensively analyzed texts in all of world literature. In this concise history, Smith traces the evolution of the I Ching in China and throughout the world, explaining its complex structure, its manifold uses in different cultures, and its enduring appeal. He shows how the indigenous beliefs and customs of Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Tibet "domesticated" the text, and he reflects on whether this Chinese classic can be compared to religious books such as the Bible or the Qur'an. Smith also looks at how the I Ching came to be published in dozens of languages, providing insight and inspiration to millions worldwide—including ardent admirers in the West such as Leibniz, Carl Jung, Philip K. Dick, Allen Ginsberg, Hermann Hesse, Bob Dylan, Jorge Luis Borges, and I. M. Pei. Smith offers an unparalleled biography of the most revered book in China's entire cultural tradition, and he shows us how this enigmatic ancient classic has become a truly global phenomenon.
For too long, argues Richard Harvey Brown, social scientists have felt forced to choose between imitating science's empirical methodology and impersonating a romantic notion of art, the methods of which are seen as primarily a matter of intuition, interpretation, and opinion. Developing the idea of a "cognitive aesthetic," Brown shows how both science and art—as well as the human studies that stand between them—depend on metaphoric thinking as their "logic of discovery" and may be assessed in terms of such aesthetic criteria of adequacy as economy, elegance, originality, scope, congruence, and form. By recognizing this "aesthetic" common ground between science and art, Brown demonstrates that a fusion can be achieved within the human sciences of these two principal ideals of knowledge—the scientific or positivist one and the artistic or intuitive one. A path, then, is opened for creating a knowledge of ourselves and society which is at once objective and subjective, at once valid scientifically and significantly humane.
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