Singing The Body Of God: The Hymns Of Vedāntadeśika In Their South Indian Tradition

Steven Paul Hopkins here offers a comparative study of the Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Tamil poems composed by Vedantadesika in praise of important Vaisnava shrines and their icons - poems that are considered to be the apogee of South Indian devotional literature. He examines the varied ways in which Vedantadesika the philosopher and logician works his thought through the distinctive - at times antithetical - medium of the poem. He also gives particular attention to the poems\u27 emotional and visionary center of gravity: the different temple icons of Lord Vishnu, referred to by the poet simply as the various lovely bodies of God. In Singing the Body of God Hopkins brings to light a unique example of the creative synthesis of the Sanskrit and Tamil tradition in Medieval Tamil Nadu, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of intellectual and religious cosmopolitanism in South Asia. --BOOK JACKE