Religious Therapeutics, livre ebook

Explores the relationship between health and religion based on the model offered by the Hindu traditions of Yoga, Ayurveda, and Tantra.

Explores the relationship between health and religion based on the model offered by the Hindu traditions of Yoga, Ayurveda, and Tantra.

Religious Therapeutics explores the relationship between psychophysical health and spiritual health and presents a model for interpreting connections between religion and medicine in world traditions. This model emerges from the work's investigation of health and religiousness in classical Yoga, Āyurveda, and Tantra—three Hindu traditions noteworthy for the central role they accord the body. Author Gregory P. Fields compares Anglo-European and Indian philosophies of body and health and uses fifteen determinants of health excavated from texts of ancient Hindu medicine to show that health concerns the person, not the body or body/mind alone. This book elucidates multifaceted views of health, and—in the context of spirituality and healing—explores themes such as mental health, meditation, and music.

List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Symbols and Notes on Sources
Abbreviations

Introduction
THE IDEA OF RELIGIOUS THERAPEUTICS
Religion and Medicine
A Model of Religious Therapeutics
Chapter One
BODY AND PHILOSOPHIES OF HEALING
Body in Western Philosophy of Medicine
Presuppositions about the Body
Descartes on Body and Medicine
Body in the History of Western Medicine
Iconoclastic Concepts of Body in Yoga, Tantra, and Ayurveda
Traditional Indian Views of Person and Body
Yoga's Use of the Body to Transcend Itself
Tantra's Enlightenable Body
Body as the Ground of Well-being in Ayurveda
Chapter Two
MEANINGS OF HEALTH IN AYURVEDA
Inquiry into Health

Determinants of Health
Biological and Ecological Determinants

Life, Development, and Longevity
Equilibrium
Adaptation
Non-susceptibility
Vitality, Endurance, and Relaxation