The Body of God

This remarkable book is the crowning achievement of the great scholar of Hinduism D. Dennis Hudson. Although Hudson died without completing it, the work has been brought to fruition by editor Margaret Case. The book is a finely detailed study of a renowned Tamil Hindu temple, the Vaikuntha Perumal (ca. 770 C.E.). Hudson uses this temple as an illustration of one major current and historical stage in South Indian Vaisnava religion. He offers a sustained reading of the temple as a coherent, organized, minutely conceptualized mandala whose code can be cracked by close analysis of the temple iconography and structure in the light of major literary and religious texts.

About the author: D. Dennis Hudson (1938-2006) was Professor Emeritus of World Religions at Smith College from 1970 until his retirement in 2000. He published numerous articles, most related to his lifelong study of Vaikintha Perumal Temple in Kanchipuram. In addition, he published Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706-1835 in 2000.

About the editor: Margaret Case was for many years Asian Studies editor at Princeton University Press. She is the editor of Govindadeva: A Dialogue in Stone (1996) and author of Seeing Krishna: The Religious World of a Brahman Family in Vrindaban (2000). She organized this volume from virtually complete but differently structured chapters, and compiled the glossary with diacritical marks.

"Dennis Hudson's multidimensional 'decoding' of the 'Emperor's Palace' temple of Lord Vishnu in Kanchipuram is remarkable. He enables us to visualize a three-dimensional vision of God and God's cosmic body in which the central square of the temple symbolizes horizontally a cosmic day and night, and the four levels represent vertically God's transformations in creation and redemption... Dennis Hudson's crowning achievement, almost completed before his death, has been skillfully edited by Margaret Case. It is a gift to his many friends and to all readers who seek a deeper level of understanding of a central Hindu tradition of theology and worship." --John B. Carman, author of The Theology of Ramanuja: An Essay in Interreligious Understanding and Majesty and Meekness: A Comparative Study of Contrast and Harmony in the Concept of God
"In his insightful analysis of the relationship between an eighth-century sacred poem and a Pallava temple, both of which celebrate Vishnu and the temple's royal patron, Dennis Hudson has compelled the monument to reveal its mysteries. Never again will one be able to read temple sculptures as a simple celebration of myth. An interpretive tour de force!" --Vidya Dehejia, author of The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South India
"The Body of God is a magnum opus in every sense -- the product of decades of thought and research; huge in its physical and mental bulk; and a new sort of fulcrum for balancing architectural and textual studies in India. It is a daring work. If Hudson is right, the magnificent and mysterious temple of Vaikuntha Perumal affords a vision of how the Bhagavata tradition -- the worship of Vishnu -- stayed vibrant over the course of centuries, through its intellectual sophistication and its engagement with royal power. Fittingly, Hudson's findings have already had an impact on how that temple is revered today." --John Stratton Hawley, Professor of Religion, Barnard College, Columbia University a