Download or read book An Anthology of Poetry by Buddhist Nuns of Late Imperial China written by and published by Hsu-Tang Library of Classi. This book was released on 2023-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hsu-Tang Library presents authoritative and eminently readable translations of classical Chinese literature, in bilingual editions, ranging across three millennia and the entire Sinitic world. This anthology opens up new religious and poetic worlds for readers. It consists of translations of poems written by Buddhist nuns from China's late imperial period (1368-1911). Appreciation of these poems is enhanced by individual biographical accounts for each of the sixty-five nun-poets and an Introduction to the historical, religious, and literary context of these poems, including a concise discussion of Chinese Buddhism and Chinese Buddhist poetry. The nuns in this anthology come from a range of backgrounds: some were placed in convents when very young; others were former palace ladies or courtesans who found refuge in the religious life; others were women left widowed or destitute in the wake of the various political and social upheavals of the times, especially the violent transition between the Ming and Qing dynasties in the mid-seventeenth century. This period was also marked by a flourishing of women's culture, as more and more women from the gentry-class began not only to receive the classical education required to write poetry, but also to have their works printed and circulated. Most of the poet-nuns in this volume were from this gentry class, and almost all of them had at least one collection of writings, usually poetry, printed in their names. Although most of these collections are now lost, some of their poems have fortunately been preserved in various anthologies from this period, including anthologies dedicated exclusively to women's poetry, as well as in collections of Buddhist records.
Download or read book Daughters of Emptiness written by Beata Grant and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-06-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women played major roles in the history of Buddhist China, but given the paucity of the remaining records, their voices have all but faded. In Daughters of Emptiness, Beata Grant renders a great service by recovering and translating the enchanting verse - by turns assertive, observant, devout - of forty-eight nuns from sixteen centuries of imperial China. This selection of poems, along with the brief biographical accounts that accompany them, affords readers a glimpse into the extraordinary diversity and sometimes startling richness of these women's lives. A sample poem for this stunning collection: The sequence of seasons naturally pushes forward, Suddenly I am startled by the ending of the year. Lifting my eyes I catch sight of the winter crows, Calling mournfully as if wanting to complain. The sunlight is cold rather than gentle, Spreading over the four corners like a cloud. A cold wind blows fitfully in from the north, Its sad whistling filling courtyards and houses. Head raised, I gaze in the direction of Spring, But Spring pays no attention to me at all. Time a galloping colt glimpsed through a crack, The tap [of Death] at the door has its predestined time. How should I not know, one who has left the world, And for whom floating clouds are already familiar? In the garden there grows a rosary-plum tree: Whose sworn friendship makes it possible to endure. - Chan Master Jingnuo
Download or read book The Red Brush written by Wilt L. Idema and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 958 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of the most exciting recent developments in the study of Chinese literature has been the rediscovery of an extremely rich and diverse tradition of women’s writing of the imperial period (221 B.C.E.–1911 C.E.). Many of these writings are of considerable literary quality. Others provide us with moving insights into the lives and feelings of a surprisingly diverse group of women living in Confucian China, a society that perhaps more than any other is known for its patriarchal tradition.Because of the burgeoning interest in the study of both premodern and modern women in China, several scholarly books, articles, and even anthologies of women’s poetry have been published in the last two decades. This anthology differs from previous works by offering a glimpse of women’s writings not only in poetry but in other genres as well, including essays and letters, drama, religious writing, and narrative fiction.The authors have presented the selections within their respective biographical and historical contexts. This comprehensive approach helps to clarify traditional Chinese ideas on the nature and function of literature as well as on the role of the woman writer."
Download or read book The Inner Quarters and Beyond written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-07-14 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a library of newly digitized resources, this volume's eleven chapters describe, analyze, and theorize the enormous literary output of women writers of the Ming and Qing periods (1368-1911) that have only recently been rediscovered.
Download or read book Women Writers of Traditional China written by Kang-i Sun Chang and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 932 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book also includes an extended section of criticism by and about women writers.
Download or read book Reverie and Reality written by Yanning Wang and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-12-18 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of Chinese gentry women’s poems on the theme of travel written during the late imperial period (ca.1600–1911), when Chinese women’s literature and culture flourished as never before. It challenges the clichéd image of completely secluded and immobile women anxiously waiting inside their prescribed feminine space, the so-called inner quarters, for the return of traveling husbands or other male kin. The travel poems discussed in this book, while not necessarily representative of all of the women writers of this period, point to the fact that many of them longed to explore the world through travel as did so many of their male counterparts. Sometimes they were able to actualize this desire for travel and sometimes they were forced to resort to imaginary “armchair travel.” In either case, women writers often used poetry as a means of recording their experiences or delineating their dreams of traveling outside the inner quarters, and indeed sometimes far away from the inner quarters. With its promise of adventure and fulfillment and, above all, a broadening of one’s intellectual and emotional horizons, travel was an important, and until now understudied, theme of late imperial women’s poetry.
Download or read book Eminent Nuns written by Beata Grant and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-07-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventeenth century is generally acknowledged as one of the most politically tumultuous but culturally creative periods of late imperial Chinese history. Scholars have noted the profound effect on, and literary responses to, the fall of the Ming on the male literati elite. Also of great interest is the remarkable emergence beginning in the late Ming of educated women as readers and, more importantly, writers. Only recently beginning to be explored, however, are such seventeenth-century religious phenomena as "the reinvention" of Chan Buddhism—a concerted effort to revive what were believed to be the traditional teachings, texts, and practices of "classical" Chan. And, until now, the role played by women in these religious developments has hardly been noted at all. Eminent Nuns is an innovative interdisciplinary work that brings together several of these important seventeenth-century trends. Although Buddhist nuns have been a continuous presence in Chinese culture since early medieval times and the subject of numerous scholarly studies, this book is one of the first not only to provide a detailed view of their activities at one particular moment in time, but also to be based largely on the writings and self-representations of Buddhist nuns themselves. This perspective is made possible by the preservation of collections of "discourse records" (yulu) of seven officially designated female Chan masters in a seventeenth-century printing of the Chinese Buddhist Canon rarely used in English-language scholarship. The collections contain records of religious sermons and exchanges, letters, prose pieces, and poems, as well as biographical and autobiographical accounts of various kinds. Supplemental sources by Chan monks and male literati from the same region and period make a detailed re-creation of the lives of these eminent nuns possible. Beata Grant brings to her study background in Chinese literature, Chinese Buddhism, and Chinese women’s studies. She is able to place the seven women, all of whom were active in Jiangnan, in their historical, religious, and cultural contexts, while allowing them, through her skillful translations, to speak in their own voices. Together these women offer an important, but until now virtually unexplored, perspective on seventeenth-century China, the history of female monasticism in China, and the contributionof Buddhist nuns to the history of Chinese women’s writing.
Download or read book Women Gender and Sexuality in China written by Ping Yao and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women, Gender and Sexuality in China: A Brief History serves as a focal textbook for undergraduate courses on women, gender, and sexuality in Chinese history. Thematically structured, it surveys important aspects of gender systems and gender practices throughout Chinese history, from the earliest period to the modern era. Topics include the concept of yin-yang, life course and gender roles, kinship systems and family structure, marriage practices, sexuality, women’s work and daily life, as well as gender in Chinese mythology, religions, medicine, art, and literature. In narrating how various traditions and practices were formed and evolved throughout Chinese history, this textbook draws heavily on personal stories and historical records. Features in this textbook include: Primary source sections for each chapter, introducing students to types of documents that have been used by scholars in conducting research Thirty-three translated texts of various genres, including epitaph, bronze inscription, medical text, imperial edict, legal case, family letter, ghost story, divorce paper, poetry, autobiography, etc. Dedicated biography sections for five distinguished women Offering richly layered accounts of women, gender, and sexuality, this textbook is essential reading for students of Chinese history, gender in world history, or the comparative history of gender.
Download or read book Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China Korea and Japan written by Dorothy Ko and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-08-28 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book rewrites the history of East Asia by rethinking the contentious relationship between "Confucianisms" and "women."
Download or read book The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature written by and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gender Power and Talent written by Jinhua Jia and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Tang dynasty (618–907), changes in political policies, the religious landscape, and gender relations opened the possibility for Daoist women to play an unprecedented role in religious and public life. Women, from imperial princesses to the daughters of commoner families, could be ordained as Daoist priestesses and become religious leaders, teachers, and practitioners in their own right. Some achieved remarkable accomplishments: one wrote and transmitted texts on meditation and inner cultivation; another, a physician, authored a treatise on therapeutic methods, medical theory, and longevity techniques. Priestess-poets composed major works, and talented priestess-artists produced stunning calligraphy. In Gender, Power, and Talent, Jinhua Jia draws on a wealth of previously untapped sources to explain how Daoist priestesses distinguished themselves as a distinct gendered religious and social group. She describes the life journey of priestesses from palace women to abbesses and ordinary practitioners, touching on their varied reasons for entering the Daoist orders, the role of social and religious institutions, forms of spiritual experience, and the relationships between gendered identities and cultural representations. Jia takes the reader inside convents and cloisters, demonstrating how they functioned both as a female space for self-determination and as a public platform for both religious and social spheres. The first comprehensive study of the lives and roles of Daoist priestesses in Tang China, Gender, Power, and Talent restores women to the landscape of Chinese religion and literature and proposes new methodologies for the growing field of gender and religion.
Download or read book Chinese Love Poetry written by Jane (ed.) Portal and published by Interlink Books. This book was released on 2014-09-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CLASSICAL AND MODERN CHINESE LOVE POEMS, ILLUSTRATED WITH BRUSHWORK CALLIGRAPHY AND SCENES FROM RARELY EXHIBITED PAINTINGS The three arts of poetry, calligraphy and painting are regarded in China as the Triple Excellence, and they are brought together here in a beautifully presented anthology of forty Chinese love poems ranging from the earliest known works in the famous Book of Songs to the work of Chairman Mao and other twentieth-century poets, including poignant examples from the high point of Chinese poetry in the Tang dynasty (618–906). The subject of all the poems and extracts is love, in all its variations: the love of husbands and wives, family and friends, times and places as well as courtship, passion and parting. Selected English translations are each illustrated with a scene from a Chinese painting and are illuminated by the artistic brushwork calligraphy of Qu Lei Lei. Jane Portal’s introduction summarizes the history and development of Chinese poetry and provides brief biographical notes on the poets.
Download or read book Rereading the Stone written by Anthony C. Yu and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth-century Hongloumeng, known in English as Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone, is generally considered to be the greatest of Chinese novels--one that masterfully blends realism and romance, psychological motivation and fate, daily life and mythical occurrences, as it narrates the decline of a powerful Chinese family. In this path-breaking study, Anthony Yu goes beyond the customary view of Hongloumeng as a vivid reflection of late imperial Chinese culture by examining the novel as a story about fictive representation. Through a maze of literary devices, the novel challenges the authority of history as well as referential biases in reading. At the heart of Hongloumeng, Yu argues, is the narration of desire. Desire appears in this tale as the defining trait and problem of human beings and at the same time shapes the novel's literary invention and effect. According to Yu, this focalizing treatment of desire may well be Hongloumeng's most distinctive accomplishment. Through close readings of selected episodes, Yu analyzes principal motifs of the narrative, such as dream, mirror, literature, religious enlightenment, and rhetorical reflexivity in relation to fictive representation. He contextualizes his discussions with a comprehensive genealogy of qing--desire, disposition, sentiment, feeling--a concept of fundamental importance in historical Chinese culture, and shows how the text ingeniously exploits its multiple meanings. Spanning a wide range of comparative literary sources, Yu creates a new conceptual framework in which to reevaluate this masterpiece.
Download or read book A Drifting Boat written by Jerome P. Seaton and published by White Pine Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. This anthology gathers together over 1500 years of Chinese Zen (Ch'an) poetry from the earliest writing, including the Hsin Hsin Ming written by the 3rd Patriarch, to the poetry of monks in this century. Poets include Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Yuan Mei, the crazy hermits Han-shan and Shih-te, as well as many anonymous monks and hermits.
Download or read book Sex Gender and the Sacred written by Joanna de Groot and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sex, Gender and the Sacred presents a multi-faith, multi-disciplinary collection of essays that explore the interlocking narratives of religion and gender encompassing 4,000 years of history. Contains readings relating to sex and religion that encompass 4,000 years of gender history Features new research in religion and gender across diverse cultures, periods, and religious traditions Presents multi-faith and multi-disciplinary perspectives with significant comparative potential Offers original theories and concepts relating to gender, religion, and sexuality Includes innovative interpretations of the connections between visual, verbal, and material aspects of particular religious traditions
Download or read book Chinese Communication Studies written by Xing Lu and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-06-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many varying factors contribute to the dynamics of Chinese communication, which both resembles and differs from its Western counterparts. In this provocative new collection of essays, an international group of scholars challenges the conventional notion of Chinese culture as static, recognizing the causes of cultural change and strategies of resistance. Examining communication contexts in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Chinese Communication Studies: Context and Comparisons considers the relationship between culture and communication in Chinese political, gender, family, and media contexts, providing the reader with insight both into how enduring Chinese cultural values are, and how they are being appropriated to meet political and economic goals. Moreover, comparisons and distinctions are made between Chinese and Western communication concepts and practices on the issues of human rights, world opinions, pedagogical approaches, and instruction of rhetoric. In a work sure to be of value to many disciplines, the authors trace the historical development of ideas and value systems of both cultures, rendering an understanding of similarities and differences in both communication and cultural mindsets.
Download or read book The Country of First Boys and Other Essays written by Amartya Sen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time and again Amartya Sen, one of the polymaths of our times, has stirred our thoughts and world-views through his writings and speeches. Intrigued by the questions of social justice and welfare, he argues, in this work, some of the fundamental issues--poverty, hunger, education, globalization, freedom of speech, injustice, inequality, exclusion, exploitation--that we negotiate with in our day to day lives. With a passion and conviction masked by a gently persuasive style and characterised by an undogmatic engagement with differing points of view, Sen's The Country of First Boys asserts that public policy should swing sharply towards the poor, the illiterate, and those suffering from ill health and malnourishment. Written in non-technical and easy to understand language while at the same time relying on rigorous intellectual and academic analysis, this volume would open a window to the ideas of an internationally renowned Nobel laureate to a wide spectrum of readers.
