Self and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions

by Shulman, David; Stroumsa, Guy G.

• ISBN13: 9780195148169
• ISBN10: 0195148169
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-04-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book brings together scholars of a variety of the world's major civilizations to focus on the universal theme of inner transformation. The idea of the "self" is a cultural formation like any other, and models and conceptions of the inner world of the person vary widely from one civilization to another. Nonetheless, all the world's great religions insist on the need to transform this inner world. Such transformations, often ritually enacted, reveal the primary intuitions, drives, and conflicts active within the culture. The individual essays study dramatic examples of these processes in a wide range of cultures, including China, India, Tibet, Greece and Rome, Late Antiquity, Islam, Judaism, and medieval and early-modern Christian Europe.

Table of Contents

Contributors
Introduction: Persons, Passages, and Shifting Cultural Space	p. 3
A Body Made of Words and Poetic Meters	p. 19
On Becoming a Fish: Paradoxes of Immortality and Enlightenment in Chinese Literature	p. 29
Transformations of Subjectivity and Memory in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana	p. 57
Madness and Divinization in Early Christian Monasticism	p. 73
Possessed Transsexuals in Antiquity: A Double Transformation	p. 91
Madness and Suffering in the Myths of Hercules	p. 106
Healing as an Act of Transformation	p. 121
Tirukkovaiydr: Downstream into God	p. 131
Spirit Possession as Self-Transformative Experience in Late Medieval Catholic Europe	p. 150
Religion and Biography in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus	p. 173
The Ins and Outs of Self-Transformation: Personal and Social Sides of Visionary Practice in Tibetan Buddhism	p. 183
The Self and Its Transformation in Sufism: With Special Reference to Early Literature	p. 195
From Platonic to Hasidic Eros: Transformations of an Idle Man's Story	p. 216
Postlude: The Interior Sociality of Self-transformation	p. 236
Index	p. 255
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