Download or read book Record of Miraculous Events in Japan written by and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nihon ryoiki, a collection of setsuwa, or "anecdotal" tales, compiled by a monk in late-eighth- or early-ninth-century Japan, records the spread of Buddhist ideas in Japan and the ways in which Buddhism's principles were adapted to the conditions of Japanese society. Beginning in the time before Buddhism was introduced to Japan, the text captures the effects of the nation's initial contact with Buddhism—brought by emissaries from the king of the Korean state of Paekche—and the subsequent adoption and dissemination of these new teachings in Japanese towns and cities. The Nihon ryoiki provides a crucial window into the ways in which Japanese Buddhists began to make sense of the teachings and texts of their religion, incorporate religious observances and materials from Korea and China, and articulate a popularized form of Buddhist practice and belief that could extend beyond monastic centers. The setsuwa genre would become one of the major textual projects of classical and medieval Buddhism, with nearly two dozen collections appearing over the next five centuries. The Nihon ryoiki serves as a vital reference for these later works, with the tales it contains finding their way into folkloric traditions and becoming a major source for Japanese authors well into the modern period.
Download or read book Record of Miraculous Events in Japan written by and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classic setsuwa tales describing Buddhism's emergence in eighth-century Japan.
Download or read book Traditional Japanese Literature written by Haruo Shirane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haruo Shirane's critically acclaimed Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600, contains key examples of both high and low styles of poetry, drama, prose fiction, and essays. For this abridged edition, Shirane retains substantial excerpts from such masterworks as The Tale of Genji, The Tales of the Heike, The Pillow Book, the Man'yoshu, and the Kokinshu. He preserves his comprehensive survey of secular and religious anecdotes (setsuwa) as well as classical poems with extensive commentary. He features no drama; selections from influential war epics; and notable essays on poetry, fiction, history, and religion. Texts are interwoven to bring into focus common themes, styles, and allusions while inviting comparison and debate. The result is a rich encounter with ancient and medieval Japanese culture and history. Each text and genre is enhanced by extensive introductions that provide sociopolitical and cultural context. The anthology is organized by period, genre, and topic—an instructor-friendly structure—and a comprehensive bibliography guides readers toward further study. Praise for Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1600 "Haruo Shirane has done a splendid job at this herculean task."—Joshua Mostow, University of British Columbia "A comprehensive and innovative anthology.... All of the introductions are excellent."—Journal of Asian Studies "One of those impressive, erudite, must-have titles for anyone interested in Asian literature."—Bloomsbury Review "An anthology that comprises superb translations of an exceptionally wide range of texts.... Highly recommended."—Choice "A wealth of material."—Monumenta Nipponica
Download or read book Record of Miraculous Events in Japan written by and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classic setsuwa tales describing Buddhism's emergence in eighth-century Japan.
Download or read book Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition written by Keikai and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we read about the profundity and complexity of the Buddhist tradition, we are hard pressed to imagine how the earliest Japanese priests propagated this tradition and how the common people accepted it. Kyokai's collection of 'miraculous stories throw much light on this.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature written by Haruo Shirane and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature provides, for the first time, a history of Japanese literature with comprehensive coverage of the premodern and modern eras in a single volume. The book is arranged topically in a series of short, accessible chapters for easy access and reference, giving insight into both canonical texts and many lesser known, popular genres, from centuries-old folk literature to the detective fiction of modern times. The various period introductions provide an overview of recurrent issues that span many decades, if not centuries. The book also places Japanese literature in a wider East Asian tradition of Sinitic writing and provides comprehensive coverage of women's literature as well as new popular literary forms, including manga (comic books). An extensive bibliography of works in English enables readers to continue to explore this rich tradition through translations and secondary reading.
Download or read book Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons written by Haruo Shirane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Shirane discusses textual, cultivated, material, performative, and gastronomic representations of nature. He reveals how this kind of 'secondary nature, ' which flourished in Japan's urban environment, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment when it began to recede from view. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane also clarifies the use of natural and seasonal topics as well as the changes in their cultural associations and functions across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world."--Back cover.
Download or read book Forms of the Body in Contemporary Japanese Society Literature and Culture written by Irina Holca and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together fifteen chapters written by scholars specializing in disciplines ranging from anthropology and sociology to literature, film, and performance studies. These scholars analyze complex questions about how the body is lived and imagined as a locus of meaning-making in contemporary Japan. Exploring such topics as mind-body dualism, aging and illness, spirit possession, beauty, performance, and gender, this collection addresses the wide array of socio-cultural and literary contexts in which the body is interpreted in Japanese culture and thought.
Download or read book The Demon at Agi Bridge and Other Japanese Tales written by Haruo Shirane and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haruo Shirane and Burton Watson, renowned translators and scholars, introduce English-speaking readers to the vivid tradition of early and medieval Japanese folktales. These dramatic and often amusing stories offer a major view of the foundations of Japanese culture.
Download or read book What Happened After Ma ju r Migrated to China written by Jinhua Chen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-02-23 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chapters in this book explore the transcultural, multi-ethnic, and cross-regional contexts and connections between the Buddhāvataṃsaka-sūtra, Mount Wutai and the veneration of Mañjuśrī that contributed to the establishment and successive transformations of the cult centered on Mount Wutai – and reduplications elsewhere. The contributions reflect on the literature, architecture, iconography, medicine, society, philosophy and several other aspects of the Wutai cult and its significant influence across several Asian cultures, such as Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, Mongolian and Korean. This book is a significant new contribution to the study of the Wutai cult, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Religion, Philosophy, History, Architecture, Literature and Art. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Studies in Chinese Religions.
Download or read book Ecocriticism in Japan written by Hisaaki Wake and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can ecocriticism do when engaging with Japanese literature and culture? This edited volume Ecocriticism in Japan attempts to answer this question. The contributors place themselves inside the domestic fields of production of works of art and express their concerns and ideas for the English-speaking spheres of the world. Taking up subjects ranging from the eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji, an early twentieth-century writer Taoka Reiun, the post-WWII atomic bombing literature by women, the internationally-renowned Abe Kōbō, the Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō, the world-widely popular writer Murakami Haruki, the Minamata writer Ishimure Michiko, and the anime artist Miyazaki Hayao to the recent TV anime Coppelion, a production that foresaw a devastating nuclear disaster after the Great East Japan Earthquake, this volume extricates and discusses innate, complex values of Japanese people and culture in terms of nature and environment.
Download or read book Reflecting the Past written by Erin L Brightwell and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting the Past is the first English-language study to address the role of historiography in medieval Japan, an age at the time widely believed to be one of irreversible decline. Drawing on a decade of research, including work with medieval manuscripts, it analyzes a set of texts—eight Mirrors—that recount the past in an effort to order the world around them. They confront rebellions, civil war, “China,” attempted invasions, and even the fracturing of the court into two lines. To interrogate the significance for medieval writers of narrating such pasts as a Mirror, Erin Brightwell traces a series of innovations across these and related texts that emerge in the face of disorder. In so doing, she uncovers how a dynamic web of evolving concepts of time, place, language use, and cosmological forces was deployed to order the past in an age of unprecedented social movement and upheaval. Despite the Mirrors’ common concerns and commitments, traditional linguistic and disciplinary boundaries have downplayed or obscured their significance for medieval thinkers. Through their treatment here as a multilingual, multi-structured genre, the Mirrors are revealed, however, as the dominant mode for reading and writing the past over almost three centuries of Japanese history.
Download or read book Yurei written by Zack Davisson and published by Chin Music Press Inc.. This book was released on 2015-07-13 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I lived in a haunted apartment." Zack Davisson opens this definitive work on Japan's ghosts, or yurei, with a personal tale about the spirit world. Eerie red marks on the apartment's ceiling kept Zack and his wife on edge. The landlord warned them not to open a door in the apartment that led to nowhere. "Our Japanese visitors had no problem putting a name to it . . . they would sense the vibes of the place, look around a bit and inevitably say 'Ahhh . . . yurei ga deteru.' There is a yurei here." Combining his lifelong interest in Japanese tradition and his personal experiences with these vengeful spirits, Davisson launches an investigation into the origin, popularization, and continued existence of yurei in Japan. Juxtaposing historical documents and legends against contemporary yurei-based horror films such as The Ring, Davisson explores the persistence of this paranormal phenomenon in modern day Japan and its continued spread throughout the West. Zack Davisson is a translator, writer, and scholar of Japanese folklore and ghosts. He is the translator of Mizuki Shigeru's Showa 1926–1939: A History of Japan and a translator and contributor to Kitaro. He also worked as a researcher and on-screen talent for National Geographic's TV special Japan: Lost Souls of Okinawa. He writes extensively about Japanese ghost stories at his website, hyakumonogatari.com.
Download or read book Critical Readings on Pure Land Buddhism in Japan written by Galen Amstutz and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-08 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pure Land was one of the main fields of mythopoesis and discourse among the Asian Buddhist traditions, and in Japan of central cultural importance from the Heian period right up to the present. The pieces reproduced in this set have been chosen as linchpin works accentuating the diversity and evolution of Pure Land Buddhism. These selections of previously published articles will serve as an essential starting-point for anyone interested in this perhaps underestimated area of Buddhist studies.
Download or read book Better Health through Spiritual Practices written by Dean D. VonDras Ph.D. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-08-18 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth examination of religious practices around the world and the fascinating science behind how they make us healthier. Many religious and spiritual beliefs promote wellness through their practices or stated objectives—for example, focusing on simple living, having compassion for others, vegetarianism, or meditation and mindfulness. This refreshing work provides a review of the world's spiritual perspectives and traditions, and explores how their guiding principles encourage healthy lifestyle choices. An examination of religious and nonreligious perspectives from around the world—from atheism, Confucianism, and Christianity to Islam, Judaism, Shamanism, and Zoroastrianism—reveals how faith beliefs and values influence behavior and inspire healthy living. With contributions from leading international scholars, the chapters include a discussion of Eastern and Western world religions and their practices—such as fasting or the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco—and how they may foster healthfulness. A contemporary analysis of current research findings suggests possible interventions that individuals and health providers may utilize to enhance healthfulness. A final chapter explores the connection between health, illness, and religious and nonreligious perspectives.
Download or read book Takamure Itsue Japanese Antiquity and Matricultural Paradigms that Address the Crisis of Modernity written by Yasuko Sato and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores Takamure Itsue’s (1894–1964) intellectual odyssey as Japan’s most notable pioneer in the study of women’s history. When she embarked on a series of scholarly projects that investigated marriage patterns and kinship systems in ancient Japan, it was a response to crisis-ridden modernity. Relentless in her quest to dismantle patriarchy, this “woman from the Land of Fire” (a nickname for her birthplace, Kumamoto Prefecture) locked herself away in 1931 and spent the rest of her life conducting research on female-friendly societies with matrilocal arrangements under kinship-based communal systems. While dissecting the patriarchal norms undergirding the capitalist nation-state, she embraced matricultural paradigms that embodied life-sustaining and life-enhancing values through communal childrearing and matrilineal inheritance. Takamure, a visionary thinker, asked big-picture questions and addressed multifarious issues of contemporary relevance, including beauty standards, human trafficking, gross disparities in wealth, war and imperialism, science and religion, and humanity’s relationship with nature.
Download or read book Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition written by Kyoko Motomuchi Nakamura and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first collection of Buddhist legends in Japan, and these stories form the repertoire of miraculous events and moral examples that later Buddhist priests used for preaching to the people. As Kyokai describes his own intentions, "By editing these stories of miraculous events I want to pull the people forward by the ears, offer my hand to lead them to good, and show them how to cleanse their feet of evil" (p.222). Nakamura's book is actually two works in one: first an introduction to the Nihon ryoiki, and then an annotated translation. The introduction analyzes the life of the author and the influence of earlier writings, and provides a valuable synthesis of the world view reflected in the work. The annotated translation renders the more than one hundred stories into English narrative, with copious notes. Difficult terms are identified in the text with the original Chinese characters, while historical matters and Buddhist technical terms are explained in the footnotes.
