India
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The Taj Mahal of Agra- Labor of Love
The Taj Mahal has become a symbol of India, and most tourist know it as a beautiful building. However, there is a love story behind its construction that is famous. Sir Edwin Arnold best describes the Taj Mahal as “Not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are, but the proud passion of an emperor’s love wrought in living stones.” Shah Jahan was the son of Jehangir, the fourth Mughal emperor of India, and was born in 1592. He was raised by his grandfather Akbar the Great and his wife Ruqaiya Sultan Begum. There was a prophesy that the prince was going to be a great emperor, which was why…
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The Role of Religion in Empire Building
Although Empires began and subsequently expanded for a variety of reasons, religion and culture played an important part, both as a catalyst and subsequently in the shaping of newly established Empires regardless of the initial motive for conquer. Examples of trade, security, lack of resources in the core nation, financial gain, religion and exploration demonstrate this, from various periods of their history covering expansion in similar areas, I will show how these motives affected the conquered nations as well as the settlers and associated parties involved. I have chosen to concentrate on non-contiguous Empires for my examples. Spain’s successful overthrowing of their Moorish conquerors from the eleventh century onwards gave…
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On Buddhism: Two men, one Buddha
Two images come to mind when someone mentions a Buddhist Idol, such as a statue or a piece of jewelry; one man is seen as skinny and somber, while the other is depicted as a fat, jolly man. What is less known is who these Idols are and what each one represents, both of whom were prominent men in the Buddhist religion but only one was actually a Buddha. The fat Buddha, or The Laughing Buddha, is known by different names in different regions, Budai in China and Hotei or Qici in Japan, but he was not a Buddha at all. In China, Budai was a monk from Chinese folklore…
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Rabindranath Tagore
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” – Tagore Rabindranath Tagore (nicknamed Rabi) was born the youngest of thirteen children on May 7, 1861 in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta to Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi. He was a Bengali polymath that helped reshape Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism. He would become the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. He also introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing the best…
