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Book Details
Living Mantra - Mantra, Deity and Visionary Experience Today
Author(s) :Mani Rao

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ISBN : 9783030113285
Name : Living Mantra - Mantra, Deity and Visionary Experience Today
Price : Currency 995.00
Author/s : Mani Rao
Type : Text Book
Pages : 245
Year of Publication : 2019
Publisher : Springer / BSP Books
Binding : Paperback
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About the Book:

Living Mantra is an anthropology of mantra-experience among Hindu-tantric practitioners. In ancient Indian doctrine and legends, mantras perceived by rishis (seers) invoke deities and have transformative powers. Adopting a methodology that combines scholarship and practice, Mani Rao discovers a continuing tradition of visionaries (rishis/seers) and revelations in south India’s Andhra-Telangana. Both deeply researched and replete with fascinating narratives, the book reformulates the poetics of mantra-practice as it probes practical questions. Can one know if a vision is real or imagined? Is vision visual? Are deity-visions mediated by culture? If mantras are effective, what is the role of devotion? Are mantras language? Living Mantra interrogates not only theoretical questions, but also those a practitioner would ask: how does one choose a deity, for example, or what might bind one to a guru? Rao breaks fresh ground in redirecting attention to the moments that precede systematization and canon-formation, showing how authoritative sources are formed. 

Contents:


1.    Introduction

2.    A Mountain of Scholarship

3.    Crossing Over

4.    Are There Revelations Today?

5.    Body-Yantra: Sahasrakshi Meru Temple, Devipuram

6.    Self-Made: Svayam Siddha Kali Pitham, Guntur

7.    “I Am in Mantra, Mantra Is in Me”: Nachiketa Tapovan, Kodgal

8.    Understanding Mantra Again

About the Author:

Mani Rao moves beyond aesthetic and linguistic interpretations to elaborate mantra as an activating force and transformative embodied. Mantra deities, practitioners, communities of practice, even authoritative texts, emerge as dynamic, evolving assemblages of meaning, knowing and feeling. We are invited to think of mantra as a form of potency dynamized by the agency of its practitioners. An insightful, gripping and accessible scholarly work.”

“Mani Rao sgows an extraordinary ability to enter into the lived experiences of her informants. In this ‘anthropology of mantra,’ Rao studies modern situations of visionary and auditory religious experience, with many descriptions of the relationship between image and sound, deity and mantra. This book should be of great interest to scholars of Indian religion and to practitioners of both Hindu devotion and yogic meditation.”  
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