Harivamsha

Rajasuya is famous Yajnya in Vedic Sacrifice System , done by Emperors. This sacrifice is done by Chakravartin Kings i.e. Emperors only. Here we will review ancient mentions of this sacrifice in Vedic & Puranic Sanskrit texts and analyse its given negative impacts on the world .

In this article certain established scholarly views about religious life in early Mathurā are put to the scrutiny of material and textual evidence brought together here in a new interpretive relationship. Maintaining that texts construct sacred geography by overlaying narrative and mythic associations on the physical features and spread of the terrain, this article first turns to the Harivam. śa Purān · a for its mythic depiction of Mathurā and the Vraja region and compares it with the scant references from the Divyāvadāna and Paumacariya, for their putatively Brahmanical and Buddhist–Jaina treatments of Mathurā, respectively. The article then draws attention to the paradox that while Buddhism and Jainism had a strong presence in the archaeological remains from early Mathurā, there does not appear to have been textual involvement with the city in these traditions like there is in the cult of Kr · s · n · a worship which, though relatively late in making an appearance among Mathurā's ruins, comes to textually identify itself with the city and its environs. Is this paradox a function of different literary genres and their worldviews? Relatedly, is early Kr · s · n · ite Mathurā to be understood as merely a literary figment, with no connection to ground realities, as some suggest? Or did texts contract complex relationships with sacred spaces, re-fashioning their local histories and multiple traditions of belief and worship to articulate new identities that were yet founded on continuities? This article correlates art and archaeological remains from early Mathurā with textual imaginaries to suggest ways in which to reinterpret the relationship between sacred site, text and practice.

Note critique à propos de Edwin F. Bryant (ed.), Krishna : A Sourcebook, New York, Oxford University Press, 2007, 575 p., bibliographies, et d’André Couture et Christine Chojnacki, Krishna et ses métamorphoses dans les traditions indiennes. Récits d’enfance autour du Harivamsha, Paris, Presses de l’Université Paris Sorbonne, 2014, 453 p., bibliographie, index. – La note montre comment ces deux anthologies très riches, érudites, mettent à la disposition des chercheurs un impressionnant corpus de sources provenant de l’océan de la littérature kr̥ṣṇaïte, certaines traduites pour la première fois dans une langue européenne. Ensemble, elles racontent l’histoire de la formation de ce corpus, l’articulation entre les textes fondateurs que furent le Mahābhārata et son khila (« complément ») le Harivaṃśa d’une part, et le Bhāgavata Purāṇa d’autre part, et elles suivent la diffusion de ces textes matriciels, jusqu’au début du premier millénaire pour le premier et jusqu’à nos jours pour le second. Elles donnent aussi une image de la « fluidité » qui existe entre l’hindouisme et les religions nées en son sein et offrent diverses pistes permettant d’explorer le foisonnant univers du fait sectaire hindou.

Ujjayinī, one of the most important Hindu pilgrimage sites, is widely known as Śiva’s city. The great deity of the famous Mahākāla temple has been worshipped as its main patron until the present day. However, Phyllis Granoff has demonstrated that some early sources such as the Harivaṃśa (112.125–26) as well as the Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha (1.4.) regard Mahākāla as Śiva’s gaṇa, and therefore she concluded that Mahākāla was originally a local god whom the Śaivas step by step adopted at first as Śiva’s gaṇa, then as the hypostasis of the great deity himself. This article attempts to develop further Granoff’s hypothesis and tries to reconstruct, as far as possible, the figure of the so-called pre-Śaiva Mahākāla . In this way, it analyses the myths of the region, such as the Jaina tale of Kālaka, the Bāṇa legends as well as the Kārtavīrya legends, and searches for common motives which may help to define the main characteristics of the local cult before Śaivism became dominant.