As part of the Southern Asia Seminar of the University of Chicago, our PI Florinda de Simini delivered the talk “Gifts of Dharma: Shaping śaiva Communities Between Tradition and Innovation”. In her talk, she focused on the rules regulating the relationships between the lay and the monastic communities of the…
The Shivadharma group has opened the New Year with a full immersion in the “Old Text about the Future” (Bhaviṣyapurāṇa)! Our guest for this workshop was prof. Peter Bisschop from Leiden University, who guided us in the reading of the text during the last week of January. During our reading,…
As part of our reading workshops, starting from October 18th, 2021, the Śivadharma project hosted prof. Judit Törzsök for three weeks in Naples to read together her edition-in-progress of the Haracaritacintāmaṇi.Judit Törzsök teaches Sanskrit and Indian Religions at EPHE (École Pratique des Hautes Études) in Paris, where she studies the…
On October 1st, in the stunning location of Naples’ seafront promenade at Palazzo du Mesnil, L’Orientale University hosted the conference “Moving Texts: Filologie e Digital Humanities”. Organized by the department of Italian studies, the conference sought to offer an interdisciplinary platform to debate new methods of research in the field…
In the picture, from left to right: Florinda De Simini, Coline Lefrancq, and Lucas den Boer On October 7th–8th, 2021, Florinda De Simini and Lucas den Boer participated in the Regional History of South Asia workshop, organised at the University of Lausanne. Here, along with members of the Dharma Project,…
On October 7th–8th Kengo Harimoto travelled to Paris to participate as an auditor and discussant in the workshop of the ANR/DFG-sponsored project 'Texts Surrounding Texts". The project aims at cataloguing the imposing collections of South Asian manuscripts held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)—where we discovered three more manuscripts of…
Spring 2021 has been a particularly busy time for the Śivadharma Project team members and friends: besides the usual reading sessions happening three times per week, we have organized a series of online seminars around our research topics, open to all team members and invited guests. This series of fourteen…
Post by Nirajan Kafle, team member of the Śivadharma Project since June 2019My work primarily focuses on the study of the Umāmāheśvarasaṃvāda in its historical context. The Umāmāheśvarasaṃvāda, ‘the dialogue between Umā and Maheśvara’, is part of a textual cluster of Śaiva texts written in Sanskrit under anonymous authorship. The Śivadharma texts…
Maṟaiñāṉa-campantar was a Tamil poet and a prominent śaiva-siddhānta scholar, who lived in Chidambaram in the sixteenth century. His magnum opus is the Civatarumottaram, a translation into Tamil of the Śivadharmottara, which makes him a central figure in the South Indian branching of the Śivadharma tradition. Yet, in addition, Maṟaiñāṉa also composed two large-scale temple mythologies (tāla-purāṇam), dedicated to the…
Temple 2, Nālandā During the Śivadharma Seminar on the 23rd of March, I will talk about my current research on the presence of Śiva at Nālandā. Even though this large monastic site in Bihar is primarily associated with Buddhism, a significant amount of Śaiva images have also been found.The reliefs…