Philosophy

The word  satī  has three basic meanings: 1. a proper name, Satī, the goddess, a previous incarnation of  Pārvatī ; 2. an honorific term for a married or saintly woman; and 3. from the British colonial period onward, a wife who dies by immolation on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband, or the ritual thereof (see below). This article will briefly note the narratives around Satī and related deities, review the cultural and ethical values around the married woman, and examine historically and textually the phenomenon of  satī  immolations.  Stories and Shrines   The story of Satī, a previous incarnation of Pārvatī and wife of  Śiva , is told with some variation in many  Purāṇas . Briefly,  Viṣṇu  and  Brahmā  approach the Great Goddess  Umā  and ask her to incarnate herself as Satī, the daughter of the patriarch ( prajāpati ) Dakṣa, and marry the ascetic god Śiva in the hope that marriage would anchor him w...

Of all the categories of religious practitioners in India, none has attracted the interest of outsiders more, and yet is understood by them less, than Hindu renunciants and ascetics. Today, they are typically referred to by a variety of names:  svāmī, saṃnyāsī, mahātma, bābā, vairāgī, yogī , and so on, the most common being  sādhu  and  saṃnyāsī. Yogī , although less used, traditionally refers to those renunciants whose lives and practices are fashioned to a large degree by the observation and performance of the various elements of  yoga   (see explanation below). Although the renunciant life is a part of all the major indigenous religions of India, especially Buddhism,Jainism, and Hinduism, the greatest diversity is found in Hinduism, where it has gone hand in hand with the practices of asceticism and  yoga  throughout its long history. This chapter will look at the concept of renunciation (   saṃnyāsa   ) within the Hindu tradi...