The wonder of <i>darshan</i> : Going beyond the local and the national
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Darshan is a classical theme in studies on Hinduism. Recent studies have called for a retheorization, pointing to diverse forms of darshan or similar practices in other religions. However, such critiques do not adequately explore darshan in transnational guru-led movements where both gurus and devotees cross religious, social and cultural boundaries to inhabit and create new devotional lineages in unfamiliar lands. Based on fieldwork among a transnational spiritual community in India, this article shows how darshan in the community is shaped by the intersections of interpretations of neo-Vedantic and western esoteric thought. Thus, it is argued that darshan needs to be understood as historically and discursively shaped. The article also considers the wonder-ful nature of the experiences and politics of darshan. The inner transformation of devotees, it is argued, is paralleled by the exterior transformation of the abstract imaginary of ‘spiritual India’ into the concrete place of achieving spiritual communion with the guru and realizing oneself. The wonder of darshan in this context lies in the traversing of the multiple axes of interiority and exteriority.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".