From Matter to Spirit: Metaphors of Enlightenment in Bhagavad-gītā

Rajandran, Kumaran

doi:10.17576/gema-2017-1702-10

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…The role of multi-word expressions (MWE) could be a way to better understand the metaphorical and lyrical style of the Bhagavad Gita. Rajendran [ 65 ] presented a study on metaphors in Bhagavad Gita using text analysis based on conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). The analysis identified the source and target domains for the metaphors, and traced the choice of metaphors to physical and cultural experiences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial intelligence for topic modelling in Hindu philosophy: Mapping themes between the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita

Chandra

Ranjan

2022

PLoS ONE

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The Upanishads are known as one of the oldest philosophical texts in the world that form the foundation of Hindu philosophy. The Bhagavad Gita is the core text of Hindu philosophy and is known as a text that summarises the key philosophies of the Upanishads with a major focus on the philosophy of karma. These texts have been translated into many languages and there exist studies about themes and topics that are prominent; however, there is not much done using language models which are powered by deep learning. In this paper, we use advanced language models such as BERT to provide topic modelling of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. We then map those topics of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads since it is well known that Bhagavad Gita summarizes the key messages in the Upanishads. We also analyse the distinct and overlapping topics amongst the texts and visualise the link of selected texts of the Upanishads with the Bhagavad Gita. Our results show very high similarity between the topics of these two texts with the mean cosine similarity of 73%. We find that out of the fourteen topics extracted from the Bhagavad Gita, nine of them have a cosine similarity of more than 70% with the topics of the Upanishads. We also find that topics generated by the BERT-based models show very high coherence when compared to the conventional models. Our best-performing model gives a coherence score of 73% on the Bhagavad Gita and 69% on the Upanishads. The visualization of the low-dimensional embeddings of these texts shows very clear overlapping themes among their topics adding another level of validation to our results.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artificial intelligence for topic modelling in Hindu philosophy: Mapping themes between the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita

Chandra

Ranjan

2022

PLoS ONE

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“…A study of discourse can complement studies in other disciplines that intend to understand the virus. One notable feature of discourse is metaphors (Rajandran, 2017). Metaphors are a cognitive heuristic because their use reifies mental representations of entities and events.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Long Battle Ahead’: Malaysian and Singaporean Prime Ministers Employ War Metaphors for COVID-19

Rajandran

2020

gema

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The short article reports a preliminary exploration about how the Prime Ministers of Malaysia and Singapore frame COVID-19 through metaphors. The framing can shape our understanding of the virus. The Prime Ministers gave public broadcasts on or to the media in March, April and May 2020. The analysis of the broadcasts is comprised of metaphor identification using the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP), and metaphor interpretation. COVID-19 in the Prime Ministers' broadcasts is conceptualized by a few metaphors. The Prime Ministers utilize similar metaphors about the virus because metaphors of direction, journey, liquid and war are noted. COVID-19 IS WAR is selected because war metaphors have been recognized for other diseases and they have been commonly deployed during this pandemic. War metaphors frame several aspects of the virus, which cover its description, impact on multiple areas, the actors involved and their reactions. The war scenario can evoke a sense of alarm regarding the threat and severity of COVID-19.

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“…These studies highlight the importance of metaphor to facilitate understanding and communication about the abstract diversity of concepts and practices related to meditation. For example, studies focussing on Buddhist and Hindu religious discourse (Rajandran, 2017;Richardson & Muller, 2019;Silvestre-López & Navarro, 2017) emphasise the use of metaphorical source domains (SDs) related to the realms of nature (including bucolic landscapes and all sorts of creatures), light/darkness, and motion to refer to mental and emotional processes and spiritual development, including meditation and enlightenment. In contrast, the analysis of discourse in secular contexts has provided initial evidence of less 'vivid' or 'pictorial' metaphorical images to represent the experience (Silvestre-López, 2016), most of which qualify as superficial elaborations of the Event Structure Metaphor (Lakoff, 1993).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptual Metaphor in Meditation Discourse: An Analysis of the Spiritual Perspective

Silvestre-López

2020

gema

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Meditation has spread beyond the frontiers of religion to go global in other areas of social practice, including secular and spiritual-but-not-religious contexts. Conceptual metaphor, as proposed by Lakoff (1993) has been described as a powerful mechanism to facilitate the communication of first-person experiences connected to religious and lay contemplative practice, including meditation and enlightenment, as reported in several studies. Despite the detachment of the spiritual-but-not-religious movement from other areas of practice, the question of how metaphor is used in discourse about meditation within this perspective has not been addressed. This paper investigates the role of conceptual metaphor in spiritual-but-notreligious meditation discourse through a bottom-up qualitative analysis of a corpus of talks about meditation given by three highly-recognized spiritual teachers. Results chart the topics that are addressed more frequently through metaphor in the corpus (metaphor target domains), describe the range of areas of experience (source domains) used to characterise metaphorically the three most frequent target domains (THOUGHT, THE PRESENT MOMENT, MEDITATOR), and discuss fundamental differences in non-deliberate and deliberate conceptual metaphor use with the help of a selection of examples from the corpus. The findings provide evidence of relevant metaphors used to model the experience and practice of meditation in spiritual-but-notreligious settings and how they are rendered in discourse. Comparisons with metaphorical models already identified in religious and secular discourse contexts are also established, with a special focus on the models that have been transferred from traditional religious meditation spheres to current contexts of social practice.

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From Matter to Spirit: Metaphors of Enlightenment in Bhagavad-gītā

Cited by 6 publications

References 16 publications

Artificial intelligence for topic modelling in Hindu philosophy: Mapping themes between the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita

Artificial intelligence for topic modelling in Hindu philosophy: Mapping themes between the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita

‘A Long Battle Ahead’: Malaysian and Singaporean Prime Ministers Employ War Metaphors for COVID-19

Conceptual Metaphor in Meditation Discourse: An Analysis of the Spiritual Perspective

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