Self and Self-Transformations in the History of Religions

by Shulman, David; Stroumsa, Guy G.

• ISBN13: 9780195144505
• ISBN10: 0195144503
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-04-18
• 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, however it is understood, in highly expressive and specific ways. Such transformations, often ritually enacted, reveal the primary intuitions, drives, and conflicts active within the culture. The individual essays--by such distinguished scholars as Wai-yee Li, Janet Gyatso, Wendy Doniger, Christiano Grottanelli, Charles Malamoud, Margalit Finkelberg, and Moshe Idel--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	xi
Introduction: Persons, Passages, and Shifting Cultural Space	3	(16)
David Shulman
Guy G. Stroumsa
I. Alternative Economies of the Self
A Body Made of Words and Poetic Meters	19	(10)
Charles Malamoud
On Becoming a Fish: Paradoxes of Immortality and Enlightenment in Chinese Literature	29	(28)
Wai-yee Li
Transformations of Subjectivity and Memory in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana	57	(16)
Wendy Doniger
Madness and Divinization in Early Christian Monasticism	73	(18)
Guy G. Stroumsa
II. The Self Possessed
Possessed Transsexuals in Antiquity: A Double Transformation	91	(15)
Cristiano Grottanelli
Madness and Suffering in the Myths of Hercules	106	(15)
Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier
Healing as an Act of Transformation	121	(10)
Shaul Shaked
Tirukkovaiyar: Downstream into God	131	(19)
David Shulman
Spirit Possession as Self-Transformative Experience in Late Medieval Catholic Europe	150	(23)
Moshe Sluhovsky
III. Beyond the Self
Religion and Biography in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus	173	(10)
Margalit Finkelberg
The Ins and Outs of Self-Transformation: Personal and Social Sides of Visionary Practice in Tibetan Buddhism	183	(12)
Janet Gyatso
The Self and Its Transformation in Sufism: With Special Reference to Early Literature	195	(21)
Sara Sviri
From Platonic to Hasidic Eros: Transformations of an Idle Man's Story	216	(20)
Moshe Idel
Postlude: The Interior Sociality of Self-transformation	236	(19)
Don Handelman
Index	255