Browsing by Author "Thavapraba, S."

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Environmental Conservation through Yoga Practice and its Relevance to Contemporary Society
(Research Centre for Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Sachithanantham, P.; Thavapraba, S.
Environmental conservation is being discussed in various platforms in the 21st century. Every religion in society has many environmental concerns and ecofriendly philosophies in their doctrine related to describing cosmology, creation theories, the interconnectedness of gods and the nature, creatures and human. Yoga has eight ethical principles to stimulate human activities and safeguard the environment. In this way, religions and yoga help produce ideas that can lead to the protection of the natural environment. Humankind is spiritual, and their negligence or failure to follow the religious faith properly due to their busyness in their day to day activities leads them to exploit and pollute the natural environment. Yoga is an ancient religious wisdom. Practicing yoga is becoming a viable means to consoling the human mind, physical fitness and happy life in contemporary society. Protecting the environment through the philosophy of yoga has not been communicated to the present world by the researchers even though much research is carried out on environmental protection from various angles. Therefore, this research aims to demonstrate the yogic perspective of environmental conservation and recommend basic principles emphasing the importance of observing yoga. Thus, yoga practices will lead the individual towards attitudinal and behavioral change and control the adverse effects of human activities on the environment. This research analyzed data related to the literature on yoga sutra, textbooks, journals, research articles on environmental issues, and reached the conclusion that practicing yoga would be a useful way to minimize the environmental hazards due to human activities and optimizing environmental conservation through changing the individual mindset.
Environmental Conservation Through Yoga Practice and Its Relevance to Contemporary Society– A Study
(Research Centre for Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2017) Sachithanantha, P.; Thavapraba, S.
In the 21st century, environmental conservation is being discussed in various platform considering the endanger of environmental pollution and hazards to the human community and other beings. Environmental impact is increasing by natural disaster as well as human activities in the contemporary society. Every religion in the society has very much environmental concerns and ecofriendly philosophy in their doctrine through describing cosmology, creation theories, interconnectedness of the gods and the nature, creatures and human. Moreover, yoga has eight ethical principles to stimulate human activities and safeguard the environment. By this means religions and yoga preserve the natural environment. Humankind is spiritual, their negligence, failure of following the religious faith rightly and busy with their day to day activities also triggers them to exploit and pollute the natural environment. The yoga is one of the ancient religious wisdom. now practicing yoga has been becoming viable means to console human mind, physical fitness and happy life in the busy society. Protecting environment, in the sense of yoga, has not been communicated to the present world by the researchers even many research carried out regarding the environmental conservation in various dimensions. Therefore, this research aims at identifying the yoga practice and demonstrating the yogic perspective of the environmental conservation and recommending the basic principle of yoga to stimulate and to simply observe the yoga in their life. Thus yoga practices will lead the individual for the attitude and behavioral change and control the adverse effect of human activities on environment. This research hypothetically analyzed data related to the literature on yoga sutra, textbooks, journals, research articles on environmental issues, and reached the conclusion that practicing yoga comparatively would be a useful mean to minimize the environmental hazards due to the human activities and optimizing the environmental conservation through changing the individual mind set.
Pursuing environmental protection through religious doctrine and its relevance to the Sri Lankan context
(Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Sachithanantham, P.; Thavapraba, S.
Environmental protection is one of the important global issues in the contemporary word. Considering the emergence of the environmental pollution and effect, environmental protection has got a status as a burning topic among the researchers and several types of research and forums have been conducted in this connection internationally as well as locally. Religion is one of the social institutions. All the major religions, which are followed in Sri Lanka are very much concerned about the environmental protection based on the theories of cosmology, creation, immanence of god in creatures, relationship of nature, human, admiration of nature, worship of nature. Hence, religions encourage the environmental protection. Religion, nature and humans, are interconnected as one family. In the modern era, science and technology exploit nature for human consumption and human activities. This is widening the gap between the interconnectedness of the god, nature, and human and even venerate the nature. Religious doctrine has not been adopted in the human characteristics and value formation. As a result man looks at nature as alien and he has failed to protect the environment. Religions give a sound eco-friendly background to human community through doctrine. But it does not reflect on their life. At this point, this research analysed data and extracted from the literature on religious Holy Scriptures, textbooks, encyclopaedia, journals, and research articles on environmental issues and try to communicate the findings. Sri Lanka is a religious country. The role of religions in influencing the decision making of every issue in Sri Lanka is inevitable since the independence. The objective of the research was to introduce the interaction of religions and environment, identify the environmental protection principles in the religious texts, and propose religious ideas for environmental protection. Therefore, the research explores and reiterates the environmental protection ideas from the religious doctrine and suggests to incorporate and implement those ideas in the environmental protection endeavour in Sri Lanka.