Download or read book Daoist Priests of the Li Family written by Stephen Jones and published by Three Pine Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complementing the author's moving film Li Manshan: Portrait of a Folk Daoist, this engaging and original book describes a hereditary family of household Daoist priests based in a poor village in north China. It traces the vicissitudes of their lives--and ritual practices--over the turbulent last century through the experiences of two main characters: Li Manshan (b.1946), and his grandfather Li Qing (1926-99).
Download or read book In Search of the Folk Daoists in North China written by Stephen Jones and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Largely unstudied by scholars of religion, folk Daoist ritual in north China has been a constant theme of Chinese music scholars. Stephen Jones places lay Daoists within the wider context of folk religious practices - including those of lay Buddhists, sectarians, and spirit mediums. Jones describes ritual sequences within funerals and temple fairs, offering details on occupational hereditary lay Daoists, temple-dwelling priests, and even amateur ritual groups. Stressing performance, Jones observes the changing ritual scene in this poor countryside, both since the 1980s and through all the tribulations of 20th-century warfare and political campaigns.
Download or read book The Souls of China written by Ian Johnson and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2017 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist: a revelatory portrait of religion in China today, its history, the spiritual traditions of its Eastern and Western faiths, and the ways in which it is influencing China's future. Following a century of violent antireligious campaigns, China is now awash with new temples, churches, and mosques as well as cults, sects, and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty over what it means to be Chinese, and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago and is still searching for new guideposts. Ian Johnson lived for extended periods with underground church members, rural Daoists, and Buddhist pilgrims. He has distilled these experiences into a cycle of festivals, births, deaths, detentions, and struggle a great awakening of faith that is shaping the soul of the world s newest superpower. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout).
Download or read book Chinese Religion in Malaysia written by Chee-Beng Tan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-02-12 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on long-term ethnographic study, this is the first comprehensive work on the Chinese popular religion in Malaysia. It analyses temples and communities in historical and contemporary perspective, the diversity of deities and Chinese speech groups, religious specialists and temple services, the communal significance of the Hungry Ghosts Festival, the relationship between religion and philanthropy as seen through the lens of such Chinese religious organization as shantang (benevolent halls) and Dejiao (Moral Uplifting Societies), as well as the development and transformation of Taoist Religion. Highly informative, this concise book contributes to an understanding of Chinese migration and settlement, political economy and religion, religion and identity politics as well the significance of religion to both individuals and communities.
Download or read book Oedipal God written by Meir Shahar and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oedipal God offers the most comprehensive account in any language of the prodigal deity Nezha. Celebrated for over a millennium, Nezha is among the most formidable and enigmatic of all Chinese gods. In this theoretically informed study Meir Shahar recounts Nezha’s riveting tale—which culminates in suicide and attempted patricide—and uncovers hidden tensions in the Chinese family system. In deploying the Freudian hypothesis, Shahar does not imply the Chinese legend’s identity with the Greek story of Oedipus. For one, in Nezha’s story the erotic attraction to the mother is not explicitly acknowledged. More generally, Chinese oedipal tales differ from Freud’s Greek prototype by the high degree of repression that is applied to them. Shahar argues that, despite a disastrous father-son relationship, Confucian ethics require that the oedipal drive masquerade as filial piety in Nezha’s story, dictating that the child-god kill himself before trying to avenge himself upon his father. Combining impeccable scholarship with an eminently readable style, the book covers a vast terrain: It surveys the image of the endearing child-god across varied genres from oral and written fiction, through theater, cinema, and television serials, to Japanese manga cartoons. It combines literary analysis with Shahar’s own anthropological field work, providing a thorough ethnography of Nezha’s flourishing cult. Crossing the boundaries between China’s diverse religious traditions, it tracks the rebellious infant in the many ways he has been venerated by Buddhist monks, Daoist priests, and possessed spirit mediums, whose dramatic performances have served to negotiate individual, familial, and collective tensions. Finally, the book offers a detailed history of the legend and the cult reaching back over two thousand years to its origins in India, where Nezha began as a mythological being named Nalakūbara, whose sexual misadventures were celebrated in the Sanskrit epics as early as the first centuries BCE. Here Shahar reveals the long-term impact that Indian mythology has exerted—through the medium of esoteric Buddhism—upon the Chinese imagination of divinity. A tour de force of literary analysis, ethnographic research, psychological insight, and cross-cultural investigation, Oedipal God is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese studies and the historical connection between India and China. Shahar’s broad reach and engaging approach will appeal to specialists and students in a variety of disciplines including Chinese religion, Chinese literature, anthropology, Buddhist studies, psychology, Indian studies, and cross-cultural history.
Download or read book Religions of Tibet in Practice written by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1997, Religions of Tibet in Practice is a landmark work--the first major anthology on the topic ever produced. This new edition--abridged to further facilitate course use--presents a stunning array of works that together offer an unparalleled view of the Tibetan religious landscape over the centuries. Organized thematically, the twenty-eight chapters are testimony to the vast scope of religious practice in the Tibetan world, past and present. Religions of Tibet in Practice remains a work of great value to scholars, students, and general readers.
Download or read book A Daoist Practice Journal Come Laugh with Me written by Michael Rinaldini and published by . This book was released on 2013-05-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Qigong Teacher and Daoist Priest Michael Rinaldini has written a book on the modern day practices of a Daoist. His book, A Daoist Practice Journal: Come Laugh With Me offers the cultivation methods for walking the Daoist path. The entries cover topics like zuowang meditation, scriptures, qigong, the value of silence and solitude, and Daoist, Buddhist and Catholic mysticism, tea drinking and more. Here are some samples of his entries, which provide a glimpse into the heart of his writings.2012 January 14Sky Farm HermitageSolitary RetreatIn silence and solitude I begin another retreat on Saturday afternoon, January 14, 2012. The rest of Saturday afternoon was spent un-packing and settling into a 6-day retreat. 6:15pm What does a Daoist eat while on retreat? Tonight, I made a soup with soba noodles and assorted vegetables. I forgot to bring ginger root.9:40pmI vow to practice ... in silence and solitude, until I realize Complete Perfection.January 158:30pmOne of my goals for this retreat is to write about the common practices between the Daoist and the Christian paths. I am specifically interested in the Daoist zuowang meditation method of sitting in forgetfulness or oblivion, and the Christian fourteenth-century mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing. Both of these ways of meditation or contemplation feature an emphasis on placing the mind's activities into a state of forgetting or the cloud of forgetting. The Cloud, was written by an anonymous author, and it is speculated that the author was a Carthusian monk, and if not, possibly a Catholic priest living a hermetic lifestyle. And so what are the similarities, the common practices between zuowang meditation, and the contemplative practices as presented in The Cloud of Unknowing?January 162pmSitting in silence outside on the porch,The only sounds-birds singing,An occasional movement of the wind,And very faint voices from neighbors down the valley.Odd at how sound travels.And right now, there was the sound of a car, actually,What I heard was the sound of the road,A gritty gravel sound.My mind filled in the blanks,And I instantly labeled it, "a car driving nearby,"Though it could have been a truck.And now my sneezes and coughing,And blowing my nose, all disrupt the silenceA large crow just landed in my valley,Returning me to silence.January 17Sitting on the porch, all bundled up.Drinking Scottish Christmas tea and a banana, and one cookie.A large part of being in silence and solitude is simply listening.Even the wind down the valley.You can hear it as it makes it way up the hills,And now, I feel it against my body,It flaps the page of this journal book.And before you know it-It's gone, and the silence returns.Except for the birds, sound of distant dogs, chickens,And that same sound that cars/trucks make on the gravel road.12:30pmThe Cloud's author says:Forget what you know. Forget everything God made and everybody who exists and everything that's going on in the world, until your thoughts and emotions aren't focused on or reaching toward anything, not in a general way and not in any particular way. Let them be. For the moment, don't care about anything (11).And finally, why even bother to think? From the zuowang tradition:I forget the vastness even of Heaven and Earth,Never mind the minuteness of the hair in autumn.Resting in serenity and silence,I listen to Pure Harmony.Still, I am free, away from it all!Movement stilled, language silenced-Why ever think? (212).January 184:30 pmInspired from yesterday's research, and last full day of retreat.Forget everything,Put nothing, between myself,And the Great Emptiness of Ultimate Stillness.That's the nameless Dao!End of Retreat
Download or read book Plucking the Winds written by Stephen Jones and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of 20th-century China through the eyes of local village musicians in North China, and shows the resilience of their ritual traditions under all kinds of onslaughts. The book portrays the lives of members of a village "music association," an amateur group performing solemn music for wind and percussion instruments as well as mantric vocal liturgy, serving funerals and the rituals of the Chinese New Year. The villagers remain determined to preserve their heritage even as they participate in the constant transformation of their social environment.
Download or read book Letters Without Capitals Text and Practice in Kim Mun Yao Culture written by Jacob Cawthorne and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Letters without Capitals: Texts and Practices in Kim Mun (Yao) Culture, Jacob Cawthorne demonstrates how the Chinese script is not only central to Kim Mun (Yao) cultural and religious practices, but also that it is an active vehicle for Kim Mun self-expression and community representation.
Download or read book Chinese Medicine and Healing written by TJ Hinrichs and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In covering the subject of Chinese medicine, this book addresses topics such as oracle bones, the treatment of women, fertility and childbirth, nutrition, acupuncture, and Qi as well as examining Chinese medicine as practiced globally in places such as Africa, Australia, Vietnam, Korea, and the United States.
Download or read book Cultivating Perfection written by Louis Komjathy and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007-09-30 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important work focuses on early Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) Daoism, a twelfth-century Daoist religious movement and subsequent monastic order. Emphasis in this first study to approach Quanzhen from a comparative religious studies perspective is placed on the complex interplay among views of self, specific training regimens, and the types of experiences that were expected to follow from dedicated praxis. On the basis of historical contextualization and textual analysis it is demonstrated that in its formative and incipient organized phases Quanzhen was a Daoist religious community consisting of a few renunciants dedicated to religious praxis. The study proper is followed by a complete annotated translation of a text attributed to the founder, which represents one of only two early Quanzhen texts translated to date. Subsequent appendices address issues of dating and contents of the early textual corpus as well as technical Quanzhen religious terminology.
Download or read book Daoist China Governance Economy Culture written by Livia Kohn and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traveling in China today and walking about in various cities, it is easy to observe the continued unbridled construction of huge, megalithic high-rise complexes in vast stretches of the country, complete with the untrammeled despoiling of nature and intensification of pollution, as well as the ever increasing vibrancy of the Chinese people, glued to their cell phones and actively connected online, always moving about and hustling for yet another deal. At the same time, using the internet without a VPN and talking to academics at various universities, it becomes obvious that there is a massive increase in repressive measures by the state, the tightening of the intellectual control of both content and expression, the fluctuating inaccessibility of information sources that used to be perfectly fine. What, the question arises, is going on here? Where China stands today and where is it headed from here? And what, in all of this, is the role and place of Daoism? These sixty vignettes on "Daoist China" present different aspects of life in China, in each case describing the current situation and connecting it to the role and changing facets of Daoism today, focusing in turn on dimensions of governance, economics, and culture.
Download or read book Ritual and Music of North China written by Stephen Jones and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rich local traditions of musical life in rural China are still little known. Music-making in village society is largely ceremonial, and shawm bands account for a major part of such music. This is the first major ethnographic study of Chinese shawm bands in their ceremonial and social context. Based in a poor county in Shanxi province in northwest China, Stephen Jones describes the painful maintenance of ceremonial and its music there under Maoism, its revival with the market reforms of the 1980s and its modification under the assault of pop music since the 1990s. The book is accompanied by a 47-minute DVD and will appeal to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists and all those interested in modern Chinese history and society.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Daoism written by Ronnie L. Littlejohn and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-11-29 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daoism is the oldest indigenous philosophic-spiritual tradition of China and one of the most ancient of the world’s spiritual structures. The name Daoism comes from the term dao, which meansa “way” or a “road” through the field or woods to one’s village. It is also means the “way” to do something, such as how a master craftsman carves wood, makes a bell, or even butchers an ox. But dao is also a nominative in the history of Daoism, referring to the energizing process that permeates and animates all of reality and moves it along. However, both text and practice in this tradition insist that dao itself cannot be described in words; itis not God in the sense of Western philosophy or religion. Daoism has no supreme being, even if there is an extensive grammar about nominally self-conscious entities and powers for which the Chinese use the word “spirit” (shen). For example, the highest powers of Daoism are variously called Taishang Laojun (the deified Laozi), the Celestial Worthy of Primordial Beginning (Yuanshi tianzun), the Jade Emperor (Yuhuang Shangdi), or the Perfected Warrior (Zhenwu). But these are expressions of dao in specific shen; they are not identical to Dao, except in the most unique case—when Laozi, the putative founder of Daoism and author of its major work, Daodejing, is said to be one with the dao. Historical Dictionary of Daoism contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, an extensive bibliography, and more than 400 cross-referenced entries related to the Chinese belief and worldview known as Daoism, including dozens of Daoist terms, names, and practices. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Daoism.
Download or read book The Paradox of Being written by Poul Andersen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of truth has never been more urgent than today, when the distortion of facts and the imposition of pseudo-realities in the service of the powerful have become the order of the day. In The Paradox of Being Poul Andersen addresses the concept of truth in Chinese Daoist philosophy and ritual. His approach is unapologetically universalist, and the book may be read as a call for a new way of studying Chinese culture, one that does not shy away from approaching “the other” in terms of an engagement with “our own” philosophical heritage. The basic Chinese word for truth is zhen, which means both true and real, and it bypasses the separation of the two ideas insisted on in much of the Western philosophical tradition. Through wide-ranging research into Daoist ritual, both in history and as it survives in the present day, Andersen shows that the concept of true reality that informs this tradition posits being as a paradox anchored in the inexistent Way (Dao). The preferred way of life suggested by this insight consists in seeking to be an exception to ordinary norms and rules of behavior which nonetheless engages what is common to us all.
Download or read book The Girl with Ghost Eyes written by M. H. Boroson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Girl with Ghost Eyes is a fun, fun read. Martial arts and Asian magic set in Old San Francisco make for a fresh take on urban fantasy, a wonderful story that kept me up late to finish.” —#1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Briggs It’s the end of the nineteenth century in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and ghost hunters from the Maoshan traditions of Daoism keep malevolent spiritual forces at bay. Li-lin, the daughter of a renowned Daoshi exorcist, is a young widow burdened with yin eyes—the unique ability to see the spirit world. Her spiritual visions and the death of her husband bring shame to Li-lin and her father—and shame is not something this immigrant family can afford. When a sorcerer cripples her father, terrible plans are set in motion, and only Li-lin can stop them. To aid her are her martial arts and a peachwood sword, her burning paper talismans, and a wisecracking spirit in the form of a human eyeball tucked away in her pocket. Navigating the dangerous alleys and backrooms of a male-dominated Chinatown, Li-lin must confront evil spirits, gangsters, and soulstealers before the sorcerer’s ritual summons an ancient evil that could burn Chinatown to the ground. With a rich and inventive historical setting, nonstop martial arts action, authentic Chinese magic, and bizarre monsters from Asian folklore, The Girl with Ghost Eyes is also the poignant story of a young immigrant searching to find her place beside the long shadow of a demanding father and the stigma of widowhood. In a Chinatown caught between tradition and modernity, one woman may be the key to holding everything together. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
