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The Queensland Atlas of Religion investigates, documents, and in... more [https://qareligion.com.au]
The Queensland Atlas of Religion investigates, documents, and interprets the diversity of religion and religious practices in Queensland’s past and present. Using an inter-disciplinary approach, this public reference website is the first major scholarly treatment of religions and religious life in the Queensland setting.
Led by Geoff Ginn and Adam Bowles, the project is a partnership between the State Library of Queensland and researchers at the University of Queensland, and commenced in 2019. It was supported in 2019–24 by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant (LP180100341), and by generous funding from the State Library of Queensland and the UQ Faculty of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences.
Visions and Revisions in Sanskrit Narrative: Studies in the Sanskrit Epics and Purāṇas, 2023
The opening chapters of the Ādiparvan of the Mahābhārata present an intricate weaving together of... more The opening chapters of the Ādiparvan of the Mahābhārata present an intricate weaving together of stories and thematic motifs. This chapter will analyse the opposing, yet complementary, motifs of violent brahmins and peacemaking brahmins in various stories of the Ādiparvan, which culminate in Āstīka's halting of Janamejaya's snake sacrifice. It will further analyse the semiotics of aspects of the ritual setting that play with motifs deriving from the ritual tradition of the Atharvaveda. In the process, it will propose an explanation for the peculiar morphology of 'Āstīka' and Āstīka's 'meaning'.
Gṛhastha: The Householder in Ancient Indian Religious Culture, edited by Patrick Olivelle, 2019
The present chapter offers a survey of terms and concepts relating to the ‘householder’ in the Ma... more The present chapter offers a survey of terms and concepts relating to the ‘householder’ in the Mahābhārata (MBh). The two most significant terms for this survey are gṛhastha and its derivative gārhasthya, but others fall within its ambit as well, such as the roughly coterminous gṛhāśrama, gṛhin, and kuṭumbin, and the sometimes synonymous gṛhamedhin (‘performer of the domestic sacrifices’). In many cases these terms are used interchangeably, though by far the most common is gṛhastha, as we shall see below. The gṛhapati (literally, ‘lord of the house’) is relevant too, though its register is by now quite distinct from the other terms.
The Churning of the Epics and Purāṇas: Proceedings of the Epics and Purāṇas Section at the 15th World Sanskrit Conference, edited by Simon Brodbeck, Adam Bowles and Alf Hiltebeitel, 2018
The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Law. A New History of Dharmaśāstra, 2018
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxfo... more Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
One could scarcely draw together two larger topics than the Mahābhārata (Mbh) and dharma. The for... more One could scarcely draw together two larger topics than the Mahābhārata (Mbh) and dharma. The former, a tale of a fratricidal and internecine battle interspersed with theme-expanding stories, moral tales, fables, and didactic tracts, claims to be 100,000 stanzas long; the text constituted in the Critical Edition in the mid 20th century by a team of scholars comes to some 75,000. The Mbh has arguably been the most influential and significant cultural product to emerge from South Asia in the last two millennia. The word dharma, on the other hand, has, since perhaps the 5th century BCE (or a little later), been the preeminent term of ideological expression in South Asian thought, and lent itself to the collective name for one of South Asia's most enduring genres, dharmaśāstra. The word is, as has often been noted, of central importance to the Mbh; indeed, in many respects, the Mbh both marks a significant moment in the semantic development of dharma (Hiltebeitel 2011: 20-29) and demonstrates its emergence as a term encoding cultural and ideological legitimacy.
This article does three things. First, it argues that the usage of dharma in the sense of 'custom... more This article does three things. First, it argues that the usage of dharma in the sense of 'customary practice', which is found in compounds such as deśadharma and kuladharma, can be traced back to the Atharvaveda. Second, it argues that in the Dharmaśāstra tradition this usage of the word dharma as 'custom' ought to be distinguished from ācāra, which is also often taken in the sense of 'custom', because ācāra frequently implies a hieratic sense of 'customary behaviour', especially in its association with the cultured practices of particular elites (the sat, sādhu, or śiṣṭa). Therefore, dharma in the usage this article is concerned with is a broader term for 'custom' than ācāra. And, third, it suggests that when the Dharmaśāstra writers restricted the currency of such customary dharmas to cases where existing sacred texts (śruti or smṛti) could not be called upon, they were reaffirming that such dharmas were worldly rather than transcendent, and not to be confused with the transcendent dharma the principled few now identified with these sacred texts—a development attributable to other changes that shifted the word dharma to the very centre of brahmanic ideology.
In Petteri Koskikallio (ed.), Parallels and Comparisons: Proceedings of the 4th Dubrovnik Interna... more In Petteri Koskikallio (ed.), Parallels and Comparisons: Proceedings of the 4th Dubrovnik International Conference of the Sanskrit Epic and Purāṇas. Zagreb: Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2009, pp.121-135.
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Papers by Adam Bowles
The Queensland Atlas of Religion investigates, documents, and interprets the diversity of religion and religious practices in Queensland’s past and present. Using an inter-disciplinary approach, this public reference website is the first major scholarly treatment of religions and religious life in the Queensland setting.
Led by Geoff Ginn and Adam Bowles, the project is a partnership between the State Library of Queensland and researchers at the University of Queensland, and commenced in 2019. It was supported in 2019–24 by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant (LP180100341), and by generous funding from the State Library of Queensland and the UQ Faculty of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences.