This book is about devotion to holy names-names such as Rama, Krishna or Devi-in India, especially in the Kaveri delta from 1650-1850 A.D. During that time leaders such as Venkatesa Ayyaval, Dodhendra, Sadasiva Brahmendra, Narayana Tirtha and Sadgurusvami sang, repeated and taught about the holy names as a Hindu way of religious life leading ultimately to the moksa. These Namasiddhanta leaders practised revolving the name in their minds and singing holy names aloud as ways to keep to hold on the ultimate amid an ever-changing world of disturbance and confusion. They saw the name as a simple direct way to taste bhakti, to plunge the individual into contact with the holy through evocative utterance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR William J. Jackson
University-Purdue University at Indian Polis where he has taught courses in Asian traditions and in the Comparative Religion since 1985. He received his B.A. at Lynodon State College in Vermont in 1975, and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in the Comparative Study of Religion in 1984. He lived in India for about four years, if you add up all his stays there, especially doing research in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. He studies culturally creative figures of South India and has published several books about them, including Tyagaraja, Life and Lyrics, and Songs of Three Great South Indian Saints (Oxford University Press). He is publishing a novel about America (Diving for Carlos) with Creative Arts Publishing in Barkeley, California. Jackson has a passion for the arts, and a strong interest in recent developments in science including fractal geometry and dynamical systems theory in relation to the humanities. He was a research fellow at the Bellagio Research Center in Italy in 2000, working on his fractals in the humanities project. He has published poetry and fiction in “the Northeast Kingdom†of Vermont, where he worked as a forest fire tower watchman for the State of Vermont of Bald Mountain. He still owns and regularly returns to the house he built in the mountains in Vermont.
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