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612-822-4611
Feeding the Dead: Ancestor Worship in Ancient India

Feeding the Dead: Ancestor Worship in Ancient India

Hardcover

BuddhismHinduismIndian & South Asian History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0199917477
ISBN13: 9780199917471
Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr
Published: Aug 5 2013
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.90 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
Feeding the Dead outlines the early history of ancestor worship in South Asia, from the earliest sources available, the Vedas, up to the descriptions found in the Dharmshastra tradition. Most prior works on ancestor worship have done little to address the question of how shraddha, the paradigmatic ritual of ancestor worship up to the present day, came to be. Matthew R. Sayers argues that the development of shraddha is central to understanding the shift from Vedic to Classical Hindu modes of religious behavior. Central to this transition is the discursive construction of the role of the religious expert in mediating between the divine and the human actor. Both Hindu and Buddhist traditions draw upon popular religious practices to construct a new tradition. Sayers argues that the definition of a religious expert that informs religiosity in the Common Era is grounded in the redefinition of ancestral rites in the Grhyasutras. Beyond making more clear the much misunderstood history of

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