Download or read book Dong Zhongshu a Confucian Heritage and the Chunqiu fanlu written by Michael Loewe and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intellectual developments of the Western Han dynasty (202 BCE – 9 CE) have been studied hitherto on the assumptions that a system described as ‘Confucianism’ acquired paramount importance and that Dong Zhongshu (ca. 198 to ca. 107 BCE) had been responsible for formulating its principles. In challenging these assumptions, this book examines Dong’ career and reputation, and his supposed authorship of the Chunqiu fanlu, for long subject to question. It is concluded that while some parts of that text may well represent the teachings that Dong Zhongshu promoted, some may perhaps date from as late as 79 CE; still others bear an affinity to writings which, banned as being suspect or potentially subversive, survive in no more than fragmentary form.

Download or read book Dong Zhongshu a Confucian Heritage and the Chunqiu Fanlu written by Michael Loewe and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The assumption that a system described as ‘Confucianism’ formulated by Dong Zhongshu became accepted as the norm during the Western Han dynasty (202 BCE – 9 CE) is challenged and his supposed authorship of the Chunqiu fanlu examined.

Download or read book Chinese Philosophy of History written by Dawid Rogacz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the Eurocentric misconception that the philosophy of history is a Western invention, this book reconstructs Chinese thought and offers the first systematic treatment of classical Chinese philosophy of history. Dawid Rogacz charts the development from pre-imperial Confucian philosophy of history, the Warring States period and the Han dynasty through to the neo-Confucian philosophy of the Tang and Song era and finally to the Ming and Qing dynasties. Revealing underexplored areas of Chinese thought, he provides Western readers with new insight into original texts and the ideas of over 40 Chinese philosophers, including Mencius, Shang Yang, Dong Zhongshu, Wang Chong, Liu Zongyuan, Shao Yong, Li Zhi, Wang Fuzhi and Zhang Xuecheng. This vast interpretive body is compared with the main premises of Western philosophy of history in order to open new lines of inquiry and directions for comparative study. Clarifying key ideas in the Chinese tradition that have been misrepresented or shoehorned to fit Western definitions, Rogacz offers an important reconsideration of how Chinese philosophers have understood history.

Download or read book In Pursuit of the Great Peace written by Zhao Lu and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the Great Peace (taiping), one of the first utopian visions in Chinese history, and its impact on literati lives in Han China. Through an examination of the Great Peace (taiping), one of the first utopian visions in Chinese history, Zhao Lu describes the transformation of literati culture that occurred during the Han Dynasty. Driven by anxiety over losing the mandate of Heaven, the imperial court encouraged classicism in order to establish the Great Peace and follow Heaven’s will. But instead of treating the literati as puppets of competing and imagined lineages, Zhao uses sociological methods to reconstruct their daily lives and to show how they created their own thought by adopting, modifying, and opposing the work of their contemporaries and predecessors. The literati who served as bureaucrats in the first century BCE gradually became classicists who depended on social networking as they traveled to study the classics. By the second century CE, classicism had dissolved in this traveling culture and the literati began to expand the corpus of knowledge beyond the accepted canon. Thus, far from being static, classicism in Han China was full of innovation, and ultimately gave birth to both literary writing and religious Daoism. “Zhao’s study presents a model of intellectual history. Smartly written, it excels in connecting the analysis of specific texts and concepts with broader trends in the social-political realm. His work helps demythologize Chinese thought and makes it legible to scholars around the world.” — Miranda Brown, University of Michigan

Download or read book Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn written by Zhongshu Dong and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu) is a chronicle kept by the dukes of the state of Lu from 722 to 481 B.C.E. Luxuriant Gems of the "Spring and Autumn" (Chunqiu fanlu) follows the interpretations of the Gongyang Commentary, whose transmitters sought to explicate the special language of the Spring and Autumn. The work is often ascribed to the Han scholar and court official Dong Zhongshu, but, as this study reveals, the text is in fact a compendium of writings by a variety of authors spanning several generations. It depicts a utopian vision of a flourishing humanity that they believed to be Confucius's legacy to the world. The Gongyang masters thought that Confucius had written the Spring and Autumn, employing subtle phrasing to indicate approval or disapproval of important events and personages. Luxuriant Gems therefore augments Confucian ethical and philosophical teachings with chapters on cosmology, statecraft, and other topics drawn from contemporary non-Confucian traditions. A major resource, this book features the first complete English-language translation of Luxuriant Gems, divided into eight thematic sections with introductions that address dating, authorship, authenticity, and the relationship between the Spring and Autumn and the Gongyang approach. Critically illuminating early Chinese philosophy, religion, literature, and politics, this book conveys the brilliance of intellectual life in the Han dynasty during the formative decades of the Chinese imperial state.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Chinese History written by Michael Dillon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 1223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has become accessible to the west in the last twenty years in a way that was not possible in the previous thirty. The number of westerners travelling to China to study, for business or for tourism has increased dramatically and there has been a corresponding increase in interest in Chinese culture, society and economy and increasing coverage of contemporary China in the media. Our understanding of China’s history has also been evolving. The study of history in the People’s Republic of China during the Mao Zedong period was strictly regulated and primary sources were rarely available to westerners or even to most Chinese historians. Now that the Chinese archives are open to researchers, there is a growing body of academic expertise on history in China that is open to western analysis and historical methods. This has in many ways changed the way that Chinese history, particularly the modern period, is viewed. The Encyclopedia of Chinese History covers the entire span of Chinese history from the period known primarily through archaeology to the present day. Treating Chinese history in the broadest sense, the Encyclopedia includes coverage of the frontier regions of Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet that have played such an important role in the history of China Proper and will also include material on Taiwan, and on the Chinese diaspora. In A-Z format with entries written by experts in the field of Chinese Studies, the Encyclopedia will be an invaluable resource for students of Chinese history, politics and culture.

Download or read book Military Thought in Early China written by Christopher C. Rand and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2017-05-11 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a systematic and comprehensive survey of writings on military philosophy in early China. This study of the philosophy of war in early China examines the recurring debate, from antiquity through the Western Han period (202 BCE–8 CE), about how to achieve a proper balance between martial (wu) force and civil (wen) governance in the pursuit of a peaceful state. Rather than focusing solely on Sunzi’s Art of War and other military treatises from the Warring States era (ca. 475–221 BCE), Christopher C. Rand analyzes the evolution of this debate by examining a broad corpus of early Han and pre-Han texts, including works uncovered in archeological excavations during recent decades. What emerges is a framework for understanding early China’s military philosophy as an ongoing negotiation between three major alternatives: militarism, compartmentalism, and syncretism. Military Thought in Early China offers a look into China’s historical experience with a perennial issue that is not only of continuing relevance to modern-day China but also pertinent to other world states seeking to sustain strong and harmonious societies. “With its close engagement with and nuanced interpretation of a truly impressive range of sources, this book illuminates a field that gets too little serious attention.” — Charles Sanft, author of Communication and Cooperation in Early Imperial China: Publicizing the Qin Dynasty

Download or read book The Philosophical Thought of Wang Chong written by Alexus McLeod and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the methodological, metaphysical, and epistemological work of the Eastern Han Dynasty period scholar Wang Chong. It presents Wang’s philosophical thought as a unique and syncretic culmination of a number of ideas developed in earlier Han and Warring States philosophy. Wang’s philosophical methodology and his theories of truth, knowledge, and will and determinism offer solutions to a number of problems in the early Chinese tradition. His views also have much to offer contemporary philosophy, suggesting new ways of thinking about familiar problems. While Wang is best known as a critic and skeptic, Alexus McLeod argues that these aspects of his thought form only a part of a larger positive project, aimed at discerning truth in a variety of senses.

Download or read book Heaven Is Empty written by Filippo Marsili and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heaven Is Empty offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China's early empires (221 BCE–9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The cohesive function of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Rome's empire across geographical and social boundaries. Eventually reelaborated in Christian terms, it came to embody the timelessness and universality of Western conceptions of legitimate authority, while representing an analytical template for studying other ancient empires. Filippo Marsili challenges such approaches in his examination of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han (141–87 BCE). Wu purposely drew from regional traditions and tried to gain the support of local communities through his patronage of local cults. He was interested in rituals that envisioned the monarch as a military leader, who directly controlled the land and its resources, as a means for legitimizing radical administrative and economic centralization. In reconstructing this imperial model, Marsili reinterprets fragmentary official accounts in light of material evidence and noncanonical and recently excavated texts. In bringing to life the courts, battlefields, markets, shrines, and pleasure quarters of early imperial China, Heaven Is Empty provides a postmodern and postcolonial reassessment of "religion" before the arrival of Buddhism and challenges the application of Greco-Roman and Abrahamic systemic, identitary, and exclusionary notions of the "sacred" to the analysis of pre-Christian and non-Western realities.

Download or read book Zhipan s Account of the History of Buddhism in China written by Thomas Jülch and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-09-14 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fozu tongji by Zhipan (ca. 1220–1275) is a key text of Chinese Buddhist historiography. The core of the work is formed by the “Fayun tongsai zhi,” an annalistic history of Buddhism in China, which extends through Fozu tongji, juan 34–48. Thomas Jülch now presents a translation of the “Fayun tongsai zhi” in three volumes. This third volume covers the annalistic display concerning the Song dynasty. Offering elaborate annotations, Jülch succeeds in clarifying the backgrounds to the historiographic contents, which Zhipan presents in highly essentialized style. Regarding the historical matters addressed in the material translated for the present volume, the Fozu tongji is often the earliest source. In several cases, inaccuracies in Zhipan’s account can however still be discerned, and Jülch succeeds in employing other sources to reveal and correct those errors.

Download or read book Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire written by Liang Cai and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contests long-standing claims that Confucianism came to prominence under China’s Emperor Wu. When did Confucianism become the reigning political ideology of imperial China? A pervasive narrative holds it was during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty (141–87 BCE). In this book, Liang Cai maintains that such a date would have been too early and provides a new account of this transformation. A hidden narrative in Sima Qian’s The Grand Scribe’s Records (Shi ji) shows that Confucians were a powerless minority in the political realm of this period. Cai argues that the notorious witchcraft scandal of 91–87 BCE reshuffled the power structure of the Western Han bureaucracy and provided Confucians an opportune moment to seize power, evolve into a new elite class, and set the tenor of political discourse for centuries to come.

Download or read book Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography written by Kerry Brown and published by Berkshire Publishing Group. This book was released on 2017-12-27 with total page 1735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography, the first publication of its kind since 1898, is the work of more than one hundred internationally recognized experts from nearly a dozen countries. It has been designed to satisfy the growing thirst of students, researchers, professionals, and general readers for knowledge about China. It makes the entire span of Chinese history manageable by introducing the reader to emperors, politicians, poets, writers, artists, scientists, explorers, and philosophers who have shaped and transformed China over the course of five thousand years. In 135 entries, ranging from 1,000 to 8,000 words and written by some of the world's leading China scholars, the Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography takes the reader from the important (even if possibly mythological) figures of ancient China to Communist leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. The in-depth essays provide rich historical context, and create a compelling narrative that weaves abstract concepts and disparate events into a coherent story. Cross-references between the articles show the connections between times, places, movements, events, and individuals.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Confucianism written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-03 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A vast and complex tradition foundational to East Asian civilizations, Confucianism continues to be a cultural force of global significance. The Oxford Handbook of Confucianism is a collection of 38 essays that explore the variety, complexity, and richness of Confucianism over time and across regions. These essays are written to be of value to the educated public while presenting new scholarship and fresh perspectives from leading scholars in Confucian studies. Using a range of critical approaches, the volume is divided into four parts. Confucianism presents unique problems to study and interpretation, and the introductory section offers three essays exploring the history and criticism of East Asian and Western constructions of the tradition. The bulk of the volume's essays are divided into three parts. The first part considers Confucianism's development within the Chinese context, centering on historical moments, key figures, and formative texts. The second part analyzes the development, impact, and reach of Confucianism in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, and "Boston" Confucianism. The final part offers topical studies of the impact of Confucianism in culture, politics and government, social structures, and ideology, exploring topics as wide-ranging as family, social structure, gender, visual and literary arts, government, ethics, religion, and ritual. Expansive in scope and sophisticated in approach, the Oxford Handbook of Confucianism presents a superb resource for study of this ancient, and still vibrant tradition"--

Download or read book A Companion to Chinese History written by Michael Szonyi and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-02-06 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Chinese History presents a collection of essays offering a comprehensive overview of the latest intellectual developments in the study of China’s history from the ancient past up until the present day. Covers the major trends in the study of Chinese history from antiquity to the present day Considers the latest scholarship of historians working in China and around the world Explores a variety of long-range questions and themes which serves to bridge the conventional divide between China’s traditional and modern eras Addresses China’s connections with other nations and regions and enables non-specialists to make comparisons with their own fields Features discussion of traditional topics and chronological approaches as well as newer themes such as Chinese history in relation to sexuality, national identity, and the environment

Download or read book Transcendence and Non Naturalism in Early Chinese Thought written by Alexus McLeod and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary scholars of Chinese philosophy often presuppose that early China possessed a naturalistic worldview, devoid of any non-natural concepts, such as transcendence. Challenging this presupposition head-on, Joshua R. Brown and Alexus McLeod argue that non-naturalism and transcendence have a robust and significant place in early Chinese thought. This book reveals that non-naturalist positions can be found in early Chinese texts, in topics including conceptions of the divine, cosmogony, and apophatic philosophy. Moreover, by closely examining a range of early Chinese texts, and providing comparative readings of a number of Western texts and thinkers, the book offers a way of reading early Chinese Philosophy as consistent with the religious philosophy of the East and West, including the Abrahamic and the Brahmanistic religions. Co-written by a philosopher and theologian, this book draws out unique insights into early Chinese thought, highlighting in particular new ways to consider a range of Chinese concepts, including tian, dao, li, and you/wu.

Download or read book Handbook of Divination and Prognostication in China written by Michael Lackner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book that systematically explores the manifold aspects of divination and prognostication in traditional and modern China.

Download or read book Modeling Peace written by Jie Shi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among hundreds of thousands of ancient graves and tombs excavated to date in China, the Mancheng site stands out for its unparalleled complexity and richness. It features juxtaposed burials of the first king and queen of the Zhongshan kingdom (dated late second century BCE). The male tomb occupant, King Liu Sheng (d. 113 BCE), was sent by his father, Emperor Jing (r. 157–141 BCE), to rule the Zhongshan kingdom near the northern frontier of the Western Han Empire, neighboring the nomadic Xiongnu confederation. Modeling Peace interprets Western Han royal burial as a political ideology by closely reading the architecture and funerary content of this site and situating it in the historical context of imperialization in Western Han China. Through a study of both the archaeological materials and related received and excavated texts, Jie Shi demonstrates that the Mancheng site was planned and designed as a unity of religious, gender, and intercultural concerns. The site was built under the supervision of the future occupants of the royal tomb, who used these burials to assert their political ideology based on Huang-Lao and Confucian thought: a good ruler is one who pacifies himself, his family, and his country. This book is the first scholarly monograph on an undisturbed and fully excavated early Chinese royal burial site.