Showing all 2 books
Coburn provides a fresh and careful translation from the Sanskrit of this fifteen hundred year old text. Drawing on field work and literary evidence, he illuminates the process by which the Devi-Mahatmya has attracted a vast number of commentaries and has become the best known Goddess text in modern India, deeply embedded in the ritual of Goddess worship (especially in Tantra). Coburn answers the following questions among others: Is this document ...
The Devi-Mahatmya is well-known to both devotees and scholars of the Great Indian Goddess. Composed some 1500 years ago, it is the first comprehensive account of the Goddess in Sanskrit, and it has maintained its centrality in the Goddess (Sakta) tradition to the present day. Like so much in that tradition, however, the text has until now resisted careful study from an historical perspective. It is this study that the present volume accomplishes. The central task ...