A visual exploration of the Buddhist stupa or reliquary mounds at one of ancient India’s most remarkable monuments at Amaravati. In this book, Jas Elsner presents a fresh perspective on the rich visual culture of ancient South Asia, connecting the stupa’s artistic innovations with advancements in Buddhist philosophy and practice. He offers new insights into early Buddhist art in South India, as well as a new understanding of the relationship between early Buddhism and its material culture. The photographs collected here, particularly those featuring objects from the British Museum in London, reveal in detail how the stupa communicated Buddhist teachings and practices to its followers, making this book an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.

"For Sunni Muslims, moral permissibility can be complicated when it concerns matters that fall outside the norms set by either the scriptural tradition of the Qur'an or the Hadith, the body of literature that compiles the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad and the prototypical Islamic community. The moral and religious acceptability of new media--film and popular music in particular--can vary widely. In a time of shifting public demand and a rapidly evolving media landscape, how do film distributors, video recorders, politicians, religious preachers, Islamic scholars, and ordinary people in Pakistan make decisions about the moral and social qualities of films and other forms of media? In Moral Atmospheres, Timothy P.A. Cooper argues that decisions about the moral acceptability of new media are made through the creation, interpretation, and public understanding of a moral "atmosphere" that surrounds them. Based on his extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted with sellers, buyers, and browsers in a large electronics market street in Lahore, Pakistan, Cooper makes the case that this sense of moral atmosphere and, importantly, how people encounter and access it, wields a powerful influence on local views of moral perception and reception. Public Demand is an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated analysis of how public morality is constructed through the interaction of the religious and the secular in everyday life"--

The children’s version of Mysteries of Prayer (from the Ihya Ulum al-Din) strives to show that the canonic prayer (al-salat), which in addition to being one of the Five Pillars of the religion, is first and foremost an opportunity for communion with the Divinity, for focusing and concentration, and for expressing gratitude to God through words, physical postures, and inward state.