[Reader-list] `The Buddha's Spiritual Awakening: Thoughts on the Phenomenology of the Visionary Experience'

[Rajesh Ramakrishnan]

*Thursday, 5th March, 2009*


You are invited to a talk on:



*THE BUDDHA'S SPIRITUAL AWAKENING: THOUGHTS ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE
VISIONARY EXPERIENCE*



By *Professor* *Gananath Obeyesekere***


at *5 PM* in the *Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi – 110 054*



Gananath Obeyesekere is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton
University, and currently holds the Rajni Kothari Chair at CSDS.    He has
taught for twenty years in Princeton till he retired in 2000.  He was twice
Chairman of the Department of Anthropology there.  Prior to that he was
Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, and
earlier Professor of Sociology at Peradeniya.  He has given major public
lectures all over the US, Europe and Australia and is the recipient of many
awards, among them the Guggenheim Fellowship, Visiting Distinguished Scholar
at the London School of Economics, Mellon Fellow at the National Humanities
Center in the US and Harold White Fellow at the Australian National Library
in Canberra.   He is most interested in psychoanalysis and anthropology and
the ways in which personal symbolism is related to religious experience. He
has recently become interested in European voyages of discovery to Polynesia
in the 18th century and after, and the implications of these voyages for the
development of ethnography. He is the author of six books and over a hundred
scholarly articles.  His books are: *Land Tenure in Village Ceylon: A
Sociological and Historical Study*, Cambridge University Press (1966);
*Medusa's
Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience*, University of
Chicago Press, 1981; *The Cult of the Goddess Pattini*, University of
Chicago Press, 1984; *Buddhism Transformed* (with Richard Gombrich),
Princeton University Press, 1988; *Medusa's Hair*, (Japanese trans. by
Shibuya Toshio), Tokyo, 1988; *The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation
in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology*, University of Chicago Press, 1990; *The
Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific*, Princeton
University Press, 1992, and  *Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in
Amerindian, Buddhist and Greek Rebirth*, University of California Press, to
appear July 2002.  Several of his books are being currently translated into
Japanese. He is currently working on a book, *The Awakened Ones*, on the
phenomenology of the visionary experience.