Conferences & workshops by Liwen Liu
Mantras: Sound, Materiality, and the Body (Workshop Programme), 2022
For the last three thousand years, mantras in Sanskrit and other Indic languages have profoundly ... more For the last three thousand years, mantras in Sanskrit and other Indic languages have profoundly influenced religions in South Asia and around the world. Mantras take many forms, materializing in the sound of the human voice, the silence of thought, the script of writing and diagrams, the space of shrines and temples. In spite of the ubiquity and relevance of mantras, academic scholarship on mantras has proceeded in fits and starts, impelled by research on specific texts, traditions, and contexts-but only rarely through the systematic investigation of mantra as a category in its own right. While some studies of mantra in terms of language, sound, and ritual have gained wide attention, the intersections of mantra and other important scholarly categoriesthe body, performance, media, materiality, religious authority and identity-are relatively unexplored.
Papers by Liwen Liu
Journal of Indian Philosophy
Deeply rooted in the Vedic tradition, animal sacrifice is a controversial issue associated with a... more Deeply rooted in the Vedic tradition, animal sacrifice is a controversial issue associated with a larger discourse of violence and non-violence in South Asia. Most existent studies on Vedic killing focus on the polemics of ritual violence in six schools of Indian philosophy. However, insufficient attention has been paid to killing in Dharmaśāstric literature, the killing that is an indispensable element of a Vedic householder's life. To fill in the gap, this paper analyzes the animal sacrifice in the Manubhāṣya of Medhātithi, perhaps the most influential exegesis of the Mānavadharmaśāstra. As an important but understudied Dharmaśāstric exegesis, the Manubhāṣya provides insights on how dharmaśāstrins as protagonists of Vedic tradition understand ritual killing while dialoguing with other traditions in the complex religious landscape of the ninth century Kashmir. By investigating Medhātithi's commentary on Mānavadharmaśāstra 5.22-56, this paper interrogates how Medhatithi interprets sacrificial killing, and how his interpretation assists to buttress the authority of the Vedic tradition represented by the root text. I argue that Medhātithi's exegesis of killing serves as apologetics that re-establishes the Vedic sacrificial tradition, which is challenged by popular non-Vedic practices. This study intends to contribute to a better understanding of animal sacrifice situated at the intersection of Vedic, Purānic and Tantric strands, and the way in which Dharmaśāstric exegesis as apologetics engages in the negotiation of violence.
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Conferences & workshops by Liwen Liu
Papers by Liwen Liu