Hindu Wedding Ceremony Analysis

While Gordon’s book seems to be about travel shaping the Asian world, it is actually about the impact of religion on everyday life and culture in Asia. This book highlights that religion shapes people’s destiny. Aside from travel, there is a main theme that connects most of these seemingly different stories. Although religion does not seem to be apparent in all the stories, it actually has an effect on many of the stories’ outcomes and decisions made in the story. For example, Xuanzang’s whole mission to India was to go to the birthplace of Buddhism and connect more with his religion which can be seen when he says, “I have visited and adored the sacred vestiges of our religion, and heard the profound expositions of the various schools.

As she notes that people cannot get a happy marriage if they do not know each other enough, or if there are no mutual love relationships. However, she carries out traveling more in India and figuring out deeply about the arranging marriage processes. In many points, she becomes agreeable and even she takes an essential part in the arranging a marriage of her friend’s son and succeeds so that she feels expert in this process and begins to think another "arranging a marriage" for her others friends ' beloved

Humans have a need to bond with other people, it’s psychological. This bond is expressed in many aspects of society exemplified through the idea of love and marriage. We celebrate marriage through wedding ceremonies; every country and religion has its own traditions, rituals, and laws for this grand celebration. America is distinctive in that it was founded on its rich history of immigration, creating a melting pot of cultures and religions. Whether happening in a church or a courthouse room, American wedding ceremonies are based on rituals, folklore, and superstitions; these ceremonies give insight to how history has influenced American society by maintaining and creating cultural and social needs, as well as expressing gender and evolving gender social roles.

Just like the American dream, Hmong have ideals on how the family should run. An entirely full family with both parents present with both sons and daughters in the family. If there were any families with any different situations, they would be viewed differently in the community. The issue of maintaining the perfect family correlates to a fear of a tarnished reputation. Reputations affect how Hmong interact with their clan and their family socially.

Han China and Mauryan India had many similarities. They were both bureaucracies, they both had emperors, and both empires established their laws on religious belief. They also had a lot of contrasting ideas for positioning their people, and they had contrasting ideas for their different religious standpoints. One empire put more weight on logic, and the other more on religion. Both Han China and Classical India used social structure systems as a method of political control.

Native Americans’ customs and religion relies on oral transmission rather than written texts. This allows for fluidity, as the customs can change and evolve over time along side with new technology and innovations. When Europeans first came to the Americas, they force the Natives to convert to a from of Christianity, thus, creating the long struggle as Native Americans battles with their beliefs and this new world religion. In modern times, the struggles still continue and Native Americans are still fighting to protect their customs. One such ritual that many Native Americans participates in is the sweat lodges.

The most dominant religion that derived off of Buddhism would have to be Zen Buddhism, other religions included most notably Shinto. Basing everyday life off of religion was the norm with the common individual in Japan, so much so that the government started placing rules for how to follow one 's religion. Hōjō Sōun, a Daimyo wrote a series of codes for his house sometime between 1500 and 1519. The text is a set of numbered rules that he wishes the people in his clan to follow, some of the more religious-focused points of the text that Sōun wrote are as

The reason Hinduism is so varied is due to the variety of texts and scriptures that makeup the Hindu belief system. Many of these beliefs were not originally written down, rather much like Buddhism; they were simply passed down generation to generation. The Rig Vedas, is known as the most important of the Hindu scriptures due to the account of the origin of the universe. (Molloy 2013) Although the Vedas are the primary scriptures, there are others including Agama, Tantra, etc. The Brahmans gave details about religious practices, ceremonies and rituals.

It is very common for one to acknowledge the differences between different religions, races, or social classes. One may compare Hinduism and Buddhism, or the different social classes of ancient Rome. It is almost unlikely that, unless learning about these cultures, one will compare,or even contrast, a religion, like Hinduism, to a city and empire, such as, ancient Rome. Within their many differences, there are plenty of similarities found in Hindu and ancient Roman cultures, including dutifulness, polytheistic and sacrificial religious practices, and social or religious classes. Dutifulness, or being motivated by a sense of duty, is one virtue associated with both Hindu and Roman cultures.

Furthermore, cultural synthesis is how things change over time because of culture. With these concepts in mind, the significance of these two “old worlds” encountering and being brought together demonstrates how, because of cultural synthesis, different people with different faiths/beliefs blended “together”. Cultural factors that cumulated into this cultural synthesis included aspects such as the blending of social forms, customary beliefs, social groups, or patterns of knowledge. While, of course, religion could take part in some of these various cultural factors, it would be presumptuous to assume religion was the main force behind all the “togetherness” in this region. To this extent, cultural synthesis as a whole, within these contact