Bhutan is today renowned for its rich cultural traditions of Buddhism and a variety of local knowledge and practices, which have thrived and developed for centuries. However, Bhutanese culture is now under severe pressures from the combined forces of modernization and globalization, just as its equally famed pristine natural environment faces new challenges. The Bhutan Cultural Library seeks to use new digital technologies to deploy the tools of modernization for documenting these suddenly fragile traditions to support their continued growth and vitality.
Conqueror and king of Macedonia, Alexander the Great was born on July 20, 356 B.C., in Pella, in the Ancient Greek kingdom of Macedonia. During his leadership, from 336 to 323 B.C., he united the Greek city-states and led the Corinthian League. He also became the king of Persia, Babylon and Asia, and created Macedonian colonies in the region. While he had a short, albeit eventful, life, he wide-ranging conquests served to spread Greek culture throughout Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Western Asia, so that it could be claimed that his reign marked the advent of Hellenism.
This book argues for the central role played by absorption in the functioning of the human mind. The importance of absorption makes itself felt in different ways; the two studies combined in this book concentrate on two of them. The first study, 'The Symbolic Mind', argues that, largely as a result of language acquisition, humans have two levels of cognition, which in normal circumstances are simultaneously active. Absorption is a (or the) means to circumvent some, perhaps all, of the associations that characterize one of these two levels of cognition, resulting in what is sometimes referred to as mysitcal experience, but which is not confined to mysticism and plays a role in various "religious" phenomena, and elsewhere. In the second st...
The Popol Vuh is a Colonial period K'iche' Mayan text that is considered to be the bible of Mayan civilization. It was transscribed by the Dominican priest Francisco Ximénez in or near 1701. It chronicles the creation of humankind, the actions of the gods, the origin and history of the K’iche’ people, and the chronology of their kings to 1550. Although written during the period of Chistianization, it is considered by scholars to be an invaluable source of knowledge about Preclassic and Classic period Mayan mythology and culture. The text itself appears to be based on an earlier but now lost version, written in K’iche’ by a Mayan author (or authors) sometime between 1554 and 1558....
Established in 1965, the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) is a contemporary administrative unit of China that includes the cultural regions of Western and Central Tibet, as well as parts of Eastern Tibet, and spans an area of more than 1,200,000 km2. As part of the Tibetan Plateau, the TAR contains several of the world’s highest mountains (Mount Everest), lakes (Yamdrok Yumtso), and rivers (Yarlung Tsangpo). With its capital of Lhasa the region supports a population of over 3 million.
Lhasa is the most important city in modern and historical Tibet, both religiously and politically; located in the geographical center of central Tibet, it is home to the sacred center of Tibet in the Jokhang Temple and the famed Potala Palace, from which the Dalai Lamas ruled over Tibet.
