Table of Contents

List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction, Maria Heim (Amherst College, USA), Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Lancaster University, USA) and Roy Tzohar (Tel Aviv University, Israel) 1. Grief, Tranquillity, and Santa Rasa in Ravisena’s Padmapurana, Gregory Clines (Trinity University, USA) 2. Emotions in Visistadvaita Vedanta, Elisa Freschi (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria) 3. Joy as Medicine? Yogavasistha and Descartes on the Affective Sources of Disease, Ana Laura Funes Maderay (Eastern Connecticut State University, USA) 4. Some Analyses of Feeling, Maria Heim (Amherst College, USA) 5. Lament and the Work of Tears: Andromache, Sita and Yasodhara, Steven P. Hopkins (Swarthmore College, USA) 6. The Mind in Pain: The View from Buddhist Systematic and Narrative Thought, Sonam Kachru (University of Virginia, USA) 7. Transparent Smoke in the Pure Sky of Consciousness: Emotions and Liberation-While-Living in the Jivanmuktiviveka, James Madaio (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic) 8. Gesture and Emotion in Tamil Saiva Devotional Poetry, Anne Monius (Harvard Divinity School, USA) 9. The Emotion that is Correlated with the Comic: Notes on Human Nature through Rasa Theory, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Lancaster University, USA) 10. Is there a Cankam Way of Feeling? Body, Landscape, Voice and Affect in Old Tamil Poetry, Martha Selby (University of Texas at Austin, USA) 11. Wretched and Blessed: Emotional Praise in a Sanskrit Hymn from Kashmir, Hamsa Stainton (McGill University, Canada) 12. Savouring Rasa: Emotion, Judgement, and Phenomenal Content, Sthaneshwar Timalsina (San Diego State University, USA) 13. How Does it Feel to be on Your Own: Solitude (viveka) in Asvaghosa's Saundarananda, Roy Tzohar (Tel Aviv University, Israel) Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

The first comprehensive exploration of human subjectivity and emotion in classical Indian traditions.

About the Author

Maria Heim is George Lyman Crosby 1896 & Stanley Warfield Crosby Professor in Religion, Amherst College, USA. Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad is a Fellow of the British Academy, and Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK. Roy Tzohar is Associate Professor in the Department of East and South Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Reviews

This Handbook is a splendid collection of essays by scholars well-established and some still early in their careers. Resisting the habit of fitting Indian understandings of experience into old or new theories imported from the West, the volume’s thirteen essays go deep into South Asia’s Sanskrit and vernacular traditions to find and make use of fresh vocabulary and concepts apt to that South Asian context but also, by extension, to bringing fresh insight into conversations about experience in the academy globally. After this volume, we will not want to think of “experience” and “experiences” in the same way again. This is indeed a research handbook that will adorn the bookshelves of scholars and students for a generation and more.
*Francis X. Clooney, SJ, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University, USA*

This book successfully outlines the pluralistic descriptions of emotions dealt with in Indian texts without categorizing them by Western concepts more dominant in the field. It is a laudable contribution to our understanding of the medieval Indian world of emotions in its own concepts and values.
*Religious Studies Review*