Download or read book Efficacious Underworld written by Cheeyun Lilian Kwon and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ten Kings hanging scrolls at Tokyo’s Seikadō Bunko Art Museum are among the most resplendent renderings of the Buddhist purgatory extant, but their origin and significance have yet to be fully explored. Cheeyun Kwon unfurls this exquisite set of scrolls within the existing Ten Kings painting tradition while investigating textual, scriptural, archaeological, and visual materials from East Asia to shed light on its possible provenance. She constructs a model scheme of the paintings’ evolution based on more than five hundred works and reveals channels of popularization, mass production, and agglomeration. The earliest images of the Ten Kings are found in the tenth-century sūtra The Scripture on the Ten Kings, known to be the work of the monk Zangchuan. By the mid-twelfth century, typological conventions associated with the Ten Kings were widely established, and paintings depicting them, primarily large-scale and stand-alone, became popular export commodities, spreading via land and sea routes to the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. An examination of materials in Korea suggests a unique development path for Ten Kings subject matter, and this—in conjunction with a close analysis of the Seikadō paintings—forms the core of Kwon’s book. Among the Korean works discussed is a woodblock edition of The Scripture on the Ten Kings from 1246. It is markedly different from its Chinese counterparts and provides strong evidence of the subject’s permutations during the Koryŏ period (918–1392), when Northern Song (960–1127) visual art and culture were avidly imported. In the Seikadō paintings, Northern Song figural, architectural, landscape, and decorative elements were acculturated to the Koryŏ milieu, situating them in the twelfth to early thirteenth centuries and among the oldest and most significant surviving examples of Koryŏ Buddhist painting. Efficacious Underworld fills major lacunae in Korean, East Asian, and Ten Kings painting traditions while illuminating Korea’s contribution to the evolution of a Buddhist theme on its trajectory across East Asia. With its rich set of color reproductions and detailed analysis of textual and visual materials, this volume will invite significant revision to previously held notions on Koryŏ painting.
Download or read book Voices from the Underworld written by Fabian Graham and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Singapore and Malaysia, the inversion of Chinese Underworld traditions has meant that Underworld demons are now amongst the most commonly venerated deities in statue form, channelled through their spirit mediums, tang-ki. The Chinese Underworld and its sub-hells are populated by a bureaucracy drawn from the Buddhist, Taoist and vernacular pantheons. Under the watchful eye of Hell’s ‘enforcers’, the lower echelons of demon soldiers impose post-mortal punishments on the souls of the recently deceased for moral transgressions committed during their prior incarnations. Voices from the Underworld offers an ethnography of contemporary Chinese Underworld traditions, where night-time cemetery rituals assist the souls of the dead, exorcised spirits are imprisoned in Guinness bottles, and malicious foetus ghosts are enlisted to strengthen a temple’s spirit army. Understanding the religious divergences between Singapore and Malaysia through an analysis of socio-political and historical events, Fabian Graham challenges common assumptions on the nature and scope of Chinese vernacular religious beliefs and practices. Graham’s innovative approach to alterity allows the reader to listen to first-person dialogues between the author and channelled Underworld deities. Through its alternative methodological and narrative stance, the book intervenes in debates on the interrelation between sociocultural and spiritual worlds, and promotes the de-stigmatisation of spirit possession and discarnate phenomena in the future study of mystical and religious traditions.
Download or read book The Myth of Sisyphus And Other Essays written by Albert Camus and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most influential works of this century, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide; the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.
Download or read book Diamond Sutra Narratives written by Chiew Hui Ho and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contextualizing the sutra within a milieu of intense religious and cultural experimentation, this volume unravels the sudden rise of Diamond Sutra devotion in the Tang dynasty against the backdrop of a range of social, political, and literary activities. Through the translation and exploration of a substantial body of narratives extolling the efficacy of the sutra, it explores the complex social history of lay Buddhism by focusing on how the laity might have conceived of the sutra and devoted themselves to it. Corroborated by various sources, it reveals the cult’s effect on medieval Chinese religiosity in the activities of an empowered laity, who modified and produced parasutraic texts, prompting the monastic establishment to accommodate to the changes they brought about.
Download or read book Efficacious Underworld written by Cheeyun Lilian Kwon and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ten Kings hanging scrolls at Tokyo’s Seikadō Bunko Art Museum are among the most resplendent renderings of the Buddhist purgatory extant, but their origin and significance have yet to be fully explored. Cheeyun Kwon unfurls this exquisite set of scrolls within the existing Ten Kings painting tradition while investigating textual, scriptural, archaeological, and visual materials from East Asia to shed light on its possible provenance. She constructs a model scheme of the paintings’ evolution based on more than five hundred works and reveals channels of popularization, mass production, and agglomeration. The earliest images of the Ten Kings are found in the tenth-century sūtra The Scripture on the Ten Kings, known to be the work of the monk Zangchuan. By the mid-twelfth century, typological conventions associated with the Ten Kings were widely established, and paintings depicting them, primarily large-scale and stand-alone, became popular export commodities, spreading via land and sea routes to the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. An examination of materials in Korea suggests a unique development path for Ten Kings subject matter, and this—in conjunction with a close analysis of the Seikadō paintings—forms the core of Kwon’s book. Among the Korean works discussed is a woodblock edition of The Scripture on the Ten Kings from 1246. It is markedly different from its Chinese counterparts and provides strong evidence of the subject’s permutations during the Koryŏ period (918–1392), when Northern Song (960–1127) visual art and culture were avidly imported. In the Seikadō paintings, Northern Song figural, architectural, landscape, and decorative elements were acculturated to the Koryŏ milieu, situating them in the twelfth to early thirteenth centuries and among the oldest and most significant surviving examples of Koryŏ Buddhist painting. Efficacious Underworld fills major lacunae in Korean, East Asian, and Ten Kings painting traditions while illuminating Korea’s contribution to the evolution of a Buddhist theme on its trajectory across East Asia. With its rich set of color reproductions and detailed analysis of textual and visual materials, this volume will invite significant revision to previously held notions on Koryŏ painting.
Download or read book Jesus the Magician written by Smith, Morton and published by Hampton Roads Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-27 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A twentieth-century classic, uncannily smart, incredibly learned."--from the foreword by Bart Ehrman This book challenges traditional Christian teaching about Jesus. While his followers may have seen him as a man from heaven, preaching the good news and working miracles, Smith asserts that the truth about Jesus is more interesting and rather unsettling. The real Jesus, only barely glimpsed because of a campaign of disinformation, obfuscation, and censorship by religious authorities, was not Jesus the Son of God. In actuality he was Jesus the Magician. Smith marshals all the available evidence including, but not limited to, the Gospels. He succeeds in describing just what was said of Jesus by "outsiders," those who did not believe him. He deals in fascinating detail with the inevitable questions. What was the nature of magic? What did people at that time mean by the term "magician"? Who were the other magicians, and how did their magic compare with Jesus' works? What facts led to the general assumption that Jesus practiced magic? And, most important, was that assumption correct? The ramifications of Jesus the Magician give new meaning to the word controversial. This book recovers a vision of Jesus that two thousand years of suppression and polemic could not erase. And--what may be the central point of the debate--Jesus the Magician strips away the myths and legends that have obscured Jesus, the man who lived.
Download or read book The Double Screen written by Wu Hung and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 1996-11-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first exploration of Chinese paintings as both material products and pictorial representations, The Double Screen shows how the collaboration and tension between material form and image gives life to a painting. A Chinese painting is often reduced to the image it bears; its material form is dismissed; its intimate connection with social activities and cultural conventions neglected. A screen occupies a space and divides it, supplies an ideal surface for painting, and has been a favorite pictorial image in Chinese art since antiquity. Wu Hung undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the screen, which can be an object, an art medium, a pictorial motif, or all three at once. With its diverse roles, the screen has provided Chinese painters with endless opportunities to reinvent their art. The Double Screen provides a powerful non-Western perspective on issues from portraiture and pictorial narrative to voyeurism, masquerade, and political rhetoric. It will be invaluable to anyone interested in the history of art and Asian studies.
Download or read book The Ghost Festival in Medieval China written by Stephen F. Teiser and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Largely unstudied until now, the religious festivals that attracted Chinese people from all walks of life provide the most instructive examples of the interaction between Chinese forms of social life and the Indian tradition of Buddhism. Stephen Teiser examines one of the most important of such annual celebrations. He provides a comprehensive interpretation of the festivities of the seventh lunar month, in which laypeople presented offerings to Buddhist monks to gain salvation for their ancestors. Teiser uncovers a wide range of sources, many translated or analyzed for the first time in any language, to demonstrate how the symbolism, rituals, and mythology of the ghost festival pervaded the social landscape of medieval China.
Download or read book The Big Book of Magical Incense written by Sara L. Mastros and published by Red Wheel/Weiser. This book was released on 2021 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is for practicing magicians and Pagans who want to learn to formulate their own magical incenses. While the book requires no prerequisite knowledge, it is also appropriate for experienced magicians and learned Pagans. Presented in a paradigm-agnostic way, the book should appeal to people on numerous paths"--
Download or read book The Doctrine of Endless Punishment written by William Greenough Thayer Shedd and published by . This book was released on 1886 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the request of the editor of the North American Review, the author of this book prepared an argument in defense of the doctrine of Endless Punishment, which was published in the number of that periodical for February, 1885. It was agreed that the writer should have the right to republish it at a future time. Only the rational argument was presented in the article. The author now reproduces it, adding the biblical argument, and a brief historical sketch. Every doctrine has its day to be attacked, and defended. Just now, that of Eternal Retribution is strenuously combated, not only outside of the church, but to some extent within it. Whoever preaches it is said, by some, not "to preach to the times"--As if the sin of this time were privileged, and stood in a different relation to the law and judgment of God, from that of other times. Neither the Christian ministry, nor the Christian church, are responsible for the doctrine of Eternal Perdition. It is given in charge to the ministry, and to the church, by the Lord Christ himself, in his last commission, as a truth to be preached to every creature. Speaking generally, those who believe that there is a hell, and intelligently fear it, as they are commanded to do by Christ himself, will escape it; and those who deny that there is a hell, and ridicule it, will fall into it. Hence the minister of Christ must be as plain as Christ, as solemn as Christ, and as tender as Christ, in the announcement of this fearful truth. - Preface
Download or read book The Police and the Public written by Albert J. Reiss and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1971-01-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ways we can make our society more civil, our police more humane, our population more responsible. Sociology. Cuts closer to the bone of truth about the police in America than any book I have read.--NY Times Book Review
Download or read book Imagining the Medieval Afterlife written by Richard Matthew Pollard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, innovative study of how medieval people envisioned heaven, hell, and purgatory - images and imaginings that endure today.
Download or read book Virgil Aeneid 4 1 299 written by Ingo Gildenhard and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2012 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love and tragedy dominate book four of Virgil's most powerful work, building on the violent emotions invoked by the storms, battles, warring gods, and monster-plagued wanderings of the epic's opening. Destined to be the founder of Roman culture, Aeneas, nudged by the gods, decides to leave his beloved Dido, causing her suicide in pursuit of his historical destiny. A dark plot, in which erotic passion culminates in sex, and sex leads to tragedy and death in the human realm, unfolds within the larger horizon of a supernatural sphere, dominated by power-conscious divinities. Dido is Aeneas' most significant other, and in their encounter Virgil explores timeless themes of love and loyalty, fate and fortune, the justice of the gods, imperial ambition and its victims, and ethnic differences. This course book offers a portion of the original Latin text, study questions, a commentary, and interpretative essays. Designed to stretch and stimulate readers, Ingo Gildenhard's incisive commentary will be of particular interest to students of Latin at both A2 and undergraduate level. It extends beyond detailed linguistic analysis to encourage critical engagement with Virgil's poetry and discussion of the most recent scholarly thought.
Download or read book The Fairy faith in Celtic Countries written by Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 1911 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, which is first of all a folk-lore study, we pursue principally an anthropo-psychological method of interpreting the Celtic belief in fairies, though we do not hesitate now and then to call in the aid of philology; and we make good use of the evidence offered by mythologies, religions, metaphysics, and physical sciences.
Download or read book The Silk Road Trap written by Jonathan Holslag and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For almost two decades, China has claimed that its expanding economy benefits Europe, stimulating European growth, exports, and employment. But the reality is not so clear-cut. Whilst individual companies may have profited from China’s economic rise,unbalanced trade with China has actually cost Europe over 1.4 trillion euros in the last ten years as well as undermining its political influence. China’s monumental infrastructural project, the Belt And Road Initiative or New Silk Road as it has come to be known - is set to make this situation even worse. The Silk Road Trap is the first book to expose just how risky this uneven partnership is for Europe. In it, leading expert on Asian affairs Jonathan Holslag, argues that Europe must reduce its reliance on China and work on building a stronger and more sustainable European economic model. By revealing the political aspirations and economic strategy behind the new Silk Road, he lays out its implications for specific European industries, from steel over aircraft to robots. Holslag, though critical of China, does not, however, make the case for confrontational, Trumpian protectionism. Instead, he posits that the new Silk Road need not ensnare Europe; it offers the continent a unique opportunity to transition from a future "made in China" to one that is "made in Europe".
Download or read book Transgressive Devotion written by Natalie Wigg-Stevenson and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 2021-02-28 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academic theology is in need of a new genre. In "Transgressive Devotion" Natalie Wigg-Stevenson articulates a theological vision of that genre as performance art. She argues that theology done as performance art stops trying to describe who God is, and starts trying to make God appear. Recognising that the act of studying theology or practicing ministry is always a performance, where the boundaries between what we see, feel, experience and learn are not just blurred but potentially invisible, Wigg-Stevenson brings together ethnographic theological fieldwork, historical and contemporary Christian theological traditions, and performance artworks themselves. A daring vision of theology which will energise anybody feeling ‘boxed in’ by the discipline, Transgressive Devotion blurs borders between orthodoxy, heterodoxy and heresy to reveal how the very act of doing theology makes God and humanity vulnerable to each other. This is theology which is a liturgy of Divine incantation. In other words: this is theology which is also prayer.
Download or read book Holy Tears written by Kimberley Christine Patton and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What religion does not serve as a theater of tears? Holy Tears addresses this all but universal phenomenon with passion and precision, ranging from Mycenaean Greece up through the tragedy of 9/11. Sixteen authors, including many leading voices in the study of religion, offer essays on specific topics in religious weeping while also considering broader issues such as gender, memory, physiology, and spontaneity. A comprehensive, elegantly written introduction offers a key to these topics. Given the pervasiveness of its theme, it is remarkable that this book is the first of its kind--and it is long overdue. The essays ask such questions as: Is religious weeping primal or culturally constructed? Is it universal? Is it spontaneous? Does God ever cry? Is religious weeping altered by sexual or social roles? Is it, perhaps, at once scripted and spontaneous, private and communal? Is it, indeed, divine? The grief occasioned by 9/11 and violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and elsewhere offers a poignant context for this fascinating and richly detailed book. Holy Tears concludes with a compelling meditation on the theology of weeping that emerged from pastoral responses to 9/11, as described in the editors' interview with Reverend Betsee Parker, who became head chaplain for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City and leader of the multifaith chaplaincy team at Ground Zero. The contributors are Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Amy Bard, Herbert Basser, Santha Bhattacharji, William Chittick, Gary Ebersole, M. David Eckel, John Hawley, Gay Lynch, Jacob Olúpqnà (with Solá Ajíbádé), Betsee Parker, Kimberley Patton, Nehemia Polen, Kay Read, and Kallistos Ware.
