Author: Gregory P Fields
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 222
ISBN/UPC (if available): 812081875X
Description
Religious Therapeutics explores the relationship between psychophysical health and spiritual health and presents a model for interpreting connections between religion and medicine in world traditions.
This model emerges from the work’s investigation of health and religiousness in classical Yoga, Ayurveda, and Tantra- three Hindu traditions noteworthy for the central role they accord the body. Author Gregory P. Fields compares Anglo-European and Indian philosophies of body and health and uses fifteen determinants of health excavated from texts of ancient Hindu medicine to show that health concerns the person, not the body or body / mind alone. This book elucidates multifaceted views of health, and – in the context of spirituality and healing - explores themes such as mental health, meditation, and music.
This book renders the Indian traditions of Ayurveda, Yoga and Tantra with great vividness, in terms that Westerners can understand, yet without concealing the profound foreignness of Indian culture. The work is timely and important. Its massive scholarship presents a forceful case for recognizing the contemporary relevance of Indian religious therapeutics…fascinating and lucid.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Symbols and Notes on Sources
Abbreviations
INTRODUCTION
The Idea of religious therapeutics
CHAPTER ONE
Body and Philosophies of Healing
CHAPTER TWO
Meanings of Health in Ayurveda
CHAPTER THREE
Classical Yoga as a Religious Therapeutic
CHAPTER FOUR
Tantra and Aesthetic Therapeutics
CONCLUSION
Community: Relationality in Religious Therapeutics
Notes
Sources
Indices
Subject Index
Sanskrit Terms
Index of Names
Sanskrit Texts