This paper deals with accounts of miraculous and auspicious signs and events as an aspect of the secret level in life stories (rnam thar) of Tibetan Buddhist masters and traces these patterns back to the life story of Buddha Śākyamuni, as well as to Vajrayana symbolism. An annotated translation, analysis, and edition of a so-far untranslated section of the rnam thar of the Seventh Karma pa from the Chos ‘byung mkhas pa’i dga’ ston are provided.

The aim of this article is to look at the reinterpretations of the classic tale of Princess Chitrangada in Bengali culture, based on the works of Rabindranath Tagore and Rituparno Ghosh. According to Mahabharata Chitrangada was a passive woman, who allowed her father to decide about her body. Rabindranath Tagore, in the dance drama from 1892, presents her story in a different manner. His Chitrangada becomes a woman consciously shaping her biological sex and going beyond the rigid framework of femininity formulated by the traditions of Hinduism. Director Rituparno Ghosh went even further in reinterpretation of this story. By moving the story of the princess from the palace to the operating room, Ghosh entered not only into the feminist discourse, but also into the narrative of transgenderism and the place of representatives of the so-called the third sex in modern Indian society. Reinterpretations of the Chitrangada history are the result of replacing the narrative created from the perspective of men from socially privileged classes with the voice of the so-called Others: women and non-heteronormative people.

The present essay draws from historical sources as well as ethnographies on the contemporary riverine culture of Central Kerala. It wider context connects to the problem of method and scale in representing Hinduism as a conglomerate of a multitude of regional religious cultures. It touches among else on the regional concept of Kṛṣṇa hidden within the body of one of the boatmen or oarsmen involved in spectacular events making part of the life of the river temple of Pārthasarathi in Āṟanmuḷa. The long snake boats (called paḷḷiyōṭaṃ or temple vessels) used for the big shows on the water in front of the temple appear to enjoy the status of sacred objects. Their performance on the river Pampā makes a part of a bigger ritual structure of the temple festivals but, nonetheless, it remains a remarkable spectacle in its own. It remains inscribed within an original cultural formation with its specific economy and social relations. The essay attempts to track and map historical change in the social construction of the symbolic representation of space focused on the Kr̥ṣṇa temple of Āṟanmuḷa by the river Pampā.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Niniejszy artykuł powstał w wyniku badań objętych projektem badawczym Narodowego Centrum Nauki nr 2015/17/B/HS2/01910-UMO-2015/17/B/HS2/01910.

Persisting in a binary relationship with honor, shame was an important element of the pre-Islamic Arabic social evaluation system. In my study, I analyzed the two most important EPA concepts parallel to English shame – ˁayb and ˁār – applying the Cultural Linguistic approach. Based on the analyses on corpus of Early Arabic poetry and Classical Arabic dictionaries, I represented cultural schemata encoding the knowledge shared by pre-Islamic Arabs about those phenomena. The paper presents also metaphoric, metonymic, and image-schematic models, which account for the specifics of associated linguistic frames. Moreover, I posit a hypothesis on the existence of a schema subsuming the honor- and shame-dishonor-related schemata in form of social evaluation of usefulness, which seems to correspond to the historical and linguistic data.

The text analyses Sukhāvatī – Amitābha’s purified buddha field, also known as the Pure Land. The vision of Sukhāvatī became immensely popular in Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism, and in East Asia it started a new Buddhist tradition. Some of its features – at least on the surface – differ from standard ideas about what Buddhism is. The descriptions of the activity of the Buddha Amitābha, who brings salvation to all beings, by enabling them to be reborn and live a blissful and virtually endless existence in his paradise land of Sukhāvatī, where achieving the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice is quick and easy, led to attempts to show the structural similarities of this tradition with, for example, Christianity. There were also attempts to prove direct borrowings from other religions and cultures, which was supposed to explain the source of the name, location and characteristics of this land. These characteristics, however, can be more convincingly explained by analysing the process of evolution of Buddhism itself, which is the main focus of this work.

Due to its volume, the text is divided into two parts. The first part defends the assumption about the intra-Buddhist origins of Sukhāvatī and the justification for this choice in the context of various other theories about the origin of that land. Then the evolution of the Buddhist cosmological vision that eventually led to the concept of purified buddha fields, including Sukhāvatī, will be discussed. The second part is devoted to an analysis of the characteristics of this land in the light of the Short and Long Sukhāvatīvyūha sutras, and in the context of other Buddhist texts, to show that Sukhāvatī combines the following Buddhist themes: (a) in the visual layer, the presentation of a paradise, an ideal land, that lacks any existential ills, (b) in the non-material aspect, the activity of nirvāṇa, (c) in the dimension of the Buddhist path, the easy practices that characterise the conditions of rebirth for the lower heavens. 

Jan Jakub Kolskifilmed The Burial of Potato just after the year of 1989 – he have decided to tell the full-length story based in rural and postwar Polish reality. The movie reconstructed the story of non-Jew coming back to his family home after being held in the concentration camp. The storyreferred biographically to Kolski’s grandfather – hence personal and historical narrations merged together, creating visual after-images based inchthoniccarnality and recurring,stigmatizedexperience. The (foreign) body after the camp – subjected to exclusion, dread and disgust – creates the Möbius strip, event impossible to untangle and understand for the Polish rural society. Left with the redundant body, the group of neighbors and used to be friends decides to burry the memory, identity and subject himself.