Burton book online
Comment on Hinduism in quotation marks
mybrainisafleamarket said,
10.11.09 at 10:47 am ·
Dear Nemo and friends:
I found some study material that might be of use:
First.. Googlebooks has scanned Burton’s book, Sindh and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (first published in the mid 19th century)
So..you can read his entire chapter on Tassawuf/Sufism online. The URL given here will plunge you right into Burton’s description of Sindhi Sufism as a political force. But if you start at the beginning and perservere, you can learn some information from Burton about some of the spiritual pratices. One such required visualizing the Pir (a Sufi equivalent of a guru) and then internalizing the image of one’s Pir. This resembles guru visualization practices used in Himalayan Buddhism.
One can see how hazardous such practices can be if used by an unethical and ego driven person who attracts disciples, claiming to be Sufi–and slips in covert use of the potent modern techniques for trance induction..which work far more deeply and rapidly than these older practices described Burton.
Source two: A book on Mumbai entitled Maximum City by Suketu Mehta.
Its a stunning book, both beautiful and horrifying. Mehta interviewed gangsters dancers, movie producers, slum dwellers and his decription of living in Mumbai, and by extension, India, is harrowing.
But..at the end he describes a Jain diamond merchant who decided to become a renunciate and included his whole family in the process. Their renunciation ritual (complex and which lasted for days) and the description of their lives in one of the Jain monastic orders is….words fail me.
I wont say more.
You have to read this book for yourself. It is one book (yet another)
that I am planning to purchase and add to my library.
mybrainisafleamarket said,
10.11.09 at 10:48 am ·
I goofed. Here is the URL for the Burton chapter on Sufism in Sindh
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 