India

Westerners have often assumed that creating images is about mimesis–realistically imitating what people see in the physical world. But other cultures have created images according

I’ve recently written several articles here on Gothic cathedrals and Khmer temples. What was happening in India at the same time?   Indians were also

Ancient Greeks had a knack for describing concrete events that were bound to specific locations, even when the Odyssey described Odysseus’s travels through the western

Reading Sanskrit can feel like swimming in an ocean.   Indians and Greeks were asking questions about the most basic reality by 500 BCE. The

The above photo sure doesn’t look like an ancient Greek temple. Nor does it look like a Romanesque cathedral. Instead of focusing on the simplest

.   Ancient Indians came up with a unique way of thinking about and classifying emotions.   Absorption in the larger environment became central in

The gods in the Rigveda were a colorful lot, and they made up a group that was uniquely Indian. The most frequently honored was Indra,

Ideas of geography in ancient India kept getting bigger and bigger. Most ancient cultures imagined a cosmic mountain, that’s either the home of the gods,