Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 23

Sowa-Rigpa, the science of healing, is the Amchi system of medicine practised in the Himalayan belt of Ladakh, Lahaul and Spiti, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and the Darjeeling hills, and its foundational text is the Gyud-Zhi or Four Tantras.

In Ujjayi the throat is slightly narrowed while breathing through the nose, so the air makes a soft continuous hiss that is commonly compared with the sound of the sea or of waves; for that reason it is called the ocean breath, and the name itself means victorious.

Indian tradition, and the Bhagavad Gita in particular, sets out three classical paths by which a seeker may reach the spirit: jnana yoga, the path of knowledge and discrimination; bhakti yoga, the path of devotion and surrender; and karma yoga, the path of selfless action performed without attachment to its…

Samatvam means equanimity or evenness, the steadiness of mind that is not shaken by success or failure, and the Bhagavad Gita uses the expression samatvam yoga uchyate, evenness of mind is called yoga.

The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yuj, to join or to yoke, and the classical tradition treats it as a discipline that unites the individual self with the higher self.

The Nyaya Sutra was composed by the sage Gautama, also called Akshapada Gautama, who founded the Nyaya school of Indian philosophy.

Mopin is the harvest and agricultural festival of the Galo people of Arunachal Pradesh, held in early April. It is a prayer to the goddess Mopin Ane for a good crop, for health and for prosperity, and for the driving away of evil and illness.

The Sheesh Mahal, or palace of mirrors, inside the Agra Fort was built in Shah Jahan's reign as a bath and dressing chamber for the royal household.

Tamil was the first language to be given classical language status in India, in 2004. Sanskrit was declared classical in 2005, Kannada and Telugu together in 2008, Malayalam in 2013 and Odia in 2014.

A stupa rises as a hemispherical dome, the anda, above which sits the harmika, a small railed square that holds the mast or yashti carrying the tiers of stone umbrellas, the chhatras.

Also called Mahabalipuram, the site on the Coromandel coast of Tamil Nadu was developed by the Pallavas, and its five rathas, named after the Pandavas and Draupadi, are each cut from a single boulder in a different temple form, which makes them a stone catalogue of early southern architecture.

The Hathigumpha or Elephant Cave inscription, cut in the Udayagiri hill near Bhubaneswar in Odisha, is a Prakrit record in the Brahmi script listing the campaigns and public works of Kharavela, the Chedi or Cheti king of Kalinga in the first century BCE, who was a patron of Jainism; the…

The great three-headed bust in the main cave on Elephanta island in Mumbai harbour shows Shiva in three aspects, the calm, the fierce and the gentle, and the Elephanta group as a whole is Shaiva in character.

It stands at Bodh Gaya in Bihar beside the Bodhi tree under which Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment, and the teaching he then carried to the world is tied to this spot; a shrine was first raised here in Ashoka's time and the tall brick temple that survives belongs to the…

Cave 16 at Ellora, the Kailasa temple, was cut out of a single mass of rock from the top downwards in the eighth century during the reign of the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I, and it is the largest monolithic excavation in the world.

The Ajanta caves in the Aurangabad district of Maharashtra are excavated in the curved cliff of a gorge cut by the small Waghora river, and it was on this cliff that a British hunting party led by John Smith came upon the caves in 1819.

The chaitya at Karle, near Lonavala in Maharashtra, is the largest such hall in the country: an apsidal prayer chamber with a high barrel-vaulted roof still carrying its wooden ribs, a screen wall pierced by a great horseshoe window, a rock-cut stupa at the far end and rows of pillars…

The Great Stupa, Stupa 1 at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, began as a brick mound raised in Ashoka's reign in the third century BCE, beside which he also set up a pillar with a lion capital; the Shungas later encased the mound in stone and added the railings, and the…

The abacus of the Sarnath capital carries four animals, not a cow: an elephant, a horse, a bull and a lion, and in the usual reading the horse stands for the south while the bull stands for the west.

Its doorway copies in stone the curved wooden arch and lattice of a real chaitya hall, and above it runs a band of elephants moving towards a stupa; this carved arch is the ancestor of the horseshoe-shaped chaitya window, the gavaksha, seen later at Bhaja, Karle and Ajanta.