Two thousand years ago in northern India, artisans fabricated beautiful diminutive terracotta female figurines in great abundance, sculptors carved colossal stone deities they called yakshas (male) and yakshis (female), and Buddhists began to decorate the burial mounds holding the relics of their founding teachers with exuberant narrative and symbolic sculptures. These material remains open a window into the flourishing popular religious cultures of India in the centuries from 200 B.C.E. to the year 100.
Drawing on his new book, professor emeritus of religion Richard Davis delves into the world of popular religions in early India. Developing alongside the better-known religious traditions found in the Vedas, Upanishads, and Buddhist and Jain teachings, which were maintained by elite classes and monastic specialists, the little goddesses and other icons reveal a different side of Indic religiosity: modest, domestic, devotional, earthly, and oriented to this world. Davis also examines the early Buddhist monument at Sanchi, in Madhya Pradesh, where artisans mixed Buddhist themes with myriad popular religious figures and symbols to create a dazzling, complex world in a burial mound.
Davis is the author of Religions of Early India: A Cultural History (Princeton University Press), which is available for purchase.
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