Encyclopedia of Religion

New York, 1992. Studying the case of Deguchi Nao, a ge- nius of Japanese religious history who began her career as a possessed w ...

brighter for a person whose community considers them pos- sessed than is the prognosis for a person whose community considers th ...

will show that individual disciples and specific traditions practice a combination of all three. Heteronomous discipline. In het ...

world. The adept’s task is to discover that inner wisdom. The discipline that arises from this notion of the guide may be called ...

tion and doubt,” Vincent van Gogh wrote of the creative process, “the hand may not tremble, nor may the eye wander, but must rem ...

tions but general descriptive groupings of a variety of prac- tices and ideas. Ecstatic discipline. Many religious traditions ma ...

But it need not be explicit ritual behavior only that em- bodies the ideals and techniques of constructive discipline. Such disc ...

The sixth level, known as dha ̄ran:a ̄, a term that might best be translated as “mental concentration,” is a form of eka ̄grata ...

The Hebrew Song of Songs (whose verses date as early as the tenth century BCE) presents classic love imagery set in a dia- logue ...

( ́su ̄dras) perform the manual work the other classes need in order to fulfill their responsibilities. Dharma ́sa ̄stra literat ...

with commentaries by Vya ̄sa and Va ̄caspati Mi ́sra has been translated by James Haughton Woods as The Yoga-System of Patañjali ...

Pythagoras or Socrates. The first written material on the “master” or founder of these traditions emerges often only after a lon ...

Christianity has stressed the importance of the startsy, or el- ders, who guide one’s spiritual and practical work. The pri- mar ...

eage is traced by his biographer through ten p ̄ırs to Muh:ammad; the twentieth-century S:u ̄f ̄ı saint Shaykh Ah:mad al-EAlaw ̄ ...

Although the tendency to deify the guru only gradually gained a doctrinal position, the idea can already be seen in the S ́veta ...

Lama. In what historians have termed the “second dif- fusion of the teaching” in Tibet, the Buddhist masters em- phasized the ne ...

up a tile and started rubbing it on a stone. Mazu asked, “What are you doing, Master?” “I am polishing this tile to make a mirro ...

Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975. Yampolsky, Philip, ed. and trans. The Platform Su ̄t ...

Spiritualists accepted the naturalistic idea of geological and biological change and development, and they extended the idea to ...

tion between spirit and body (Did sexual prompting signal an attraction of true spiritual “affinities”?). THE FORMS AND PRACTICE ...