Download or read book The Transnational Cult of Mount Wutai written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Transnational Cult of Mount Wutai explores the pan-East Asian significance of sacred Mount Wutai from the Northern Dynasties to the present.
Download or read book Mount Wutai written by Wen-shing Chou and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The northern Chinese mountain range of Mount Wutai has been a preeminent site of international pilgrimage for over a millennium. Home to more than one hundred temples, the entire range is considered a Buddhist paradise on earth, and has received visitors ranging from emperors to monastic and lay devotees. Mount Wutai explores how Qing Buddhist rulers and clerics from Inner Asia, including Manchus, Tibetans, and Mongols, reimagined the mountain as their own during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wen-Shing Chou examines a wealth of original source materials in multiple languages and media--many never before published or translated—such as temple replicas, pilgrimage guides, hagiographic representations, and panoramic maps. She shows how literary, artistic, and architectural depictions of the mountain permanently transformed the site's religious landscape and redefined Inner Asia's relations with China. Chou addresses the pivotal but previously unacknowledged history of artistic and intellectual exchange between the varying religious, linguistic, and cultural traditions of the region. The reimagining of Mount Wutai was a fluid endeavor that proved central to the cosmopolitanism of the Qing Empire, and the mountain range became a unique site of shared diplomacy, trade, and religious devotion between different constituents, as well as a spiritual bridge between China and Tibet. A compelling exploration of the changing meaning and significance of one of the world's great religious sites, Mount Wutai offers an important new framework for understanding Buddhist sacred geography.
Download or read book The Formation of Regional Religious Systems in Greater China written by Jiang Wu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of Spatial Humanities has spurred a digital revolution in the field of Chinese studies, especially in the study of religion. Based on years of data compilation and analysis of religious sites, this book explores the formation of Regional Religious Systems (RRS) in Greater China in unprecedented scope and depth. It addresses quantitatively the enduring historical and contemporary issues of China’s deep-rooted regionalism and spatially variegated cultural and religious landscape. A range of topics are explored: theoretical discussions of the concept of RRS; case studies of regional and local religious institutions; the formation of local cults and pilgrimage network; and the spread of religious networks to overseas Chinese communities and the Bon religion in Tibet. The book also considers long-standing challenges of researching with spatial data for humanities and social science research, such as data collection, integration, spatial analysis, and map creation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Chinese Studies, Digital Humanities, Human Geography and Sociology.
Download or read book A History of Uyghur Buddhism written by Johan Elverskog and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, most Uyghurs are Muslims. For centuries, however, Uyghurs were Buddhists. By around 1000 CE, they, like many of their neighbors, had decisively turned toward the Dharma, and a golden age of Uyghur Buddhism flourished under the Mongol empire. Dwelling along the Silk Road in what is now northwestern China, they stood at the center of Buddhist Eurasia, linking far-flung regions and traditions. But as Muslim power grew, Uyghur Buddhists converted to Islam, rewriting their past and erasing their Buddhist history. This book presents the first comprehensive history of Buddhism among the Uyghurs from the ninth to the seventeenth century. Johan Elverskog traces how the Uyghurs forged their distinctive tradition, considering a variety of social, political, cultural, and religious contexts. He argues that the religious history of the Uyghurs challenges conventional narratives of the meeting of Buddhism and Islam, showing that conversion took place gradually and was driven by factors such as geopolitics, climate change, and technological innovation. Elverskog also provides a nuanced understanding of lived Buddhism, focusing on ritual practices and materiality as well as the religion’s entanglements with economics, politics, and violence. A groundbreaking history of Uyghur Buddhism, this book makes a compelling case for the importance of the Uyghurs in shaping the course of both Buddhist and Asian history.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Religious Space written by Jeanne Halgren Kilde and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Thinking about religious space : an introduction to approaches / Jeanne Halgren Kilde -- Conceptualizing space and place : genealogies of change in the study of religion / Juan E. Campo -- Hermeneutics of space : sacred space / Michael J. Crosbie -- Urbanism and religious space / Paul-François Tremlett -- Shared space, or mixed? / Robert M. Hayden -- Decommissioning and reuse of liturgical architectures : historical processes and temporal dimensions / Andrea Longhi -- The impermanence of religious space : three approaches to change in the American religioscape / Jeanne Halgren Kilde -- Planetary identities : globalization, climate change and meaning-making practices / Whitney A. Bauman -- Whose place is it? Layers of community and meaning in the land of Shinto and power spots / Caleb Carter -- Religious place/space in premodern China / Wei-Cheng Lin -- National treasures vs. alien species : religious spaces, raccoons, and national identity in contemporary Japan / Barbara R. Ambros -- Visualizing Himalayan Buddhist sacred sites in 3D/VR : pedagogy and partnership / Lauren Leve and Bradley Erickson -- Form and function in the ancient synagogue : evidence from the second to seventh centuries in Palestine and the diaspora / Marilyn J. Chiat -- A little bit of evil : Masjid Kufa in Early Twelver Shi'ism / Najam Haider -- Mediated spaces of collective ritual : sacred selfies at the Hajj / Nadia Caidi and Mariam Karim -- (In)visible priorities : epigraphic power and identity at a Jordanian state mosque / David Simonowitz -- Exploration of religious spaces in Western Africa : combining approaches to understand spaces / Daniel Dei -- Religious spaces as tourist sites in Ghana / Alice Matilda Nsiah -- Sacred space in 19th century Cape Town : mosque, city, landscape and a radical empiricism of the spatial / Ozayr Saloojee -- Mapping the spiritual Baptist universe : black Atlantic cosmography and the spatiality of spirit in Trinidad and Tobago / Brendan Jamal Thornton -- The spaces of Roman religion and Christianity in late antiquity / Béatrice Caseau Chevallier -- Presence and performance : Orthodox spaces of the Eastern Roman Empire / Amy Papalexandrou -- Remnants of Israel : Jewish spaces and landscapes in medieval and early modern Europe / Jessica Renee Streit and Barry L. Stiefel -- the religious landscape and its architecture in contemporary Europe / Esteban Fernández-Cobián -- Pre-Columbian and indigenous religious spaces in Mesoamerica / Brent K.S. Woodfill -- Protestant architecture in Latin America / Rodrigo Vidal Rojas -- Roman Catholic sacred space / Leonard Norman Primiano -- Protestant spaces in North America / David R. Bains -- Eastern Orthodox spaces in America / Nicholas Denysenko -- Diasporic sacred spaces : the case of boundary making at an American Sufi shrine / Merin Shobhana Xavier -- Women's mosques : spaces to rethink gender and religious authority / Irum Shiekh -- Sites of miracles and other holy places : the Santuario de Chimayó as case study / Brett Hendrickson -- Situating the dead : cemeteries as material, symbolic, and relational space / Avril Madrell and Brenda Mathijssen -- Fundament and abyss : public religion at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial / David Lê.
Download or read book Buddhism in Central Asia II written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-07-11 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ERC-funded research project BuddhistRoad aims to create a new framework to enable understanding of the complexities in the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia. Buddhism was one major factor in this exchange: for the first time the multi-layered relationships between the trans-regional Buddhist traditions (Chinese, Indian, Tibetan) and those based on local Buddhist cultures (Khotanese, Uyghur, Tangut) will be explored in a systematic way. The second volume Buddhism in Central Asia II—Practice and Rituals, Visual and Materials Transfer based on the mid-project conference held on September 16th–18th, 2019, at CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) focuses on two of the six thematic topics addressed by the project, namely on "practices and rituals", exploring material culture in religious context such as mandalas and talismans, as well as “visual and material transfer”, including shared iconographies and the spread of ‘Khotanese’ themes.
Download or read book Carving Status at K mgangsan written by Maya K. H. Stiller and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: North Korea’s Kŭmgangsan is one of Asia’s most celebrated sacred mountain ranges, comparable in fame to Mount Tai in China and Mount Fuji in Japan. Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan marks a paradigm shift in the research about East Asian mountains by introducing an entirely new field: autographic rock graffiti. The book details how late Chosŏn (ca. 1600–1900 CE) Korean elite travelers used Kŭmgangsan to demonstrate their high social status by carving inscriptions, naming sites, and joining the literary pedigree of visitors to renowned locales. Such travel practices show how social competition emerged in the spatial context of a landscape. Hence, Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan argues for an expansion of accepted historical narratives on travel and mountain space in premodern East Asia. Rather than interpreting pilgrimage routes as exclusively religious or tourist, in Kŭmgangsan’s case they were also an important site of collective memory. Embarking on a journey to Kŭmgangsan to view and contribute to its sites of memory was an endeavor that late Chosŏn Koreans hoped to achieve in their lives. Based on multidisciplinary research drawing on literary writings, court records, gazetteers, maps, songs, calligraphy, and paintings, Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan is the first historical study of this practice. It will appeal to scholars in fields ranging from East Asian history, literature, and geography, to pilgrimage studies and art history.
Download or read book Graffiti Scratched Scrawled Sprayed written by Ondřej Skrabal and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-12-04 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last two decades, the study of graffiti has emerged as a bustling field, invigorated by increased appreciation for their historical, linguistic, sociological, and anthropological value and propelled by ambitious documentation projects. The growing understanding of graffiti as a perennial, universal phenomenon is spurring holistic consideration of this mode of graphic expression across time and space. Graffiti Scratched, Scrawled, Sprayed: Towards a Cross-Cultural Understanding complements recent efforts to showcase the diversity in creation, reception, and curation of graffiti around the globe, throughout history and up to the present day. reflecting on methodology, concepts, and terminology as well as spatial, social, and historical contexts of graffiti, the book's fourteen chapters cover ancient Egypt, Rome, Northern Arabia, Persia, India, and the Maya; medieval Eastern Mediterranean, Turfan, and Dunhuang; and contemporary Tanzania, Brazil, China, and Germany. As a whole, the collection provides a comprehensive toolkit for newcomers to the field of graffiti studies and appeals to specialists interested in viewing these materials in a cross-cultural perspective.
Download or read book The Awakening of the Hinterland The Formation of Regional Vinaya Traditions in Tang China written by Anna Sokolova and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-01-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the dissemination of the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya tradition in Tang China (618–907) in the context of the dispersal of the state bureaucracy throughout the empire and the changing centre–periphery dynamics. The tradition’s development in China during the Tang Dynasty has traditionally been associated with northern China, particularly the capital city of Chang’an, where Daoxuan (596–667), the de facto founder of the “vinaya school” in China, resided. This book explores the dissemination of Daoxuan’s followers and the subsequent growth of interrelated regional vinaya movements across the Tang regional landscape.
Download or read book Sino Tibetan Buddhism across the Ages written by Ester Bianchi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sino-Tibetan Buddhism implies cross-cultural contacts and exchanges between China and Tibet. The ten case-studies collected in this book focus on the spread of Chinese Buddhism within a mainly Tibetan environment and the adaptation of Tibetan Buddhism among a Chinese-speaking audience throughout the ages.
Download or read book Readings of the Gateless Barrier written by Jimmy Yu and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2025-01-07 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gateless Barrier is one of the most cherished yet also one of the most enigmatic Chan or Zen texts of East Asian Buddhism. Compiled by the Chinese Chan master Wumen Huikai in 1228, it contains forty-eight Zen stories of spiritual awakening called “public cases” or gong’ans (known as kōans in Japanese and kongans in Korean). This book presents a new English translation with close readings and creative analyses of the Gateless Barrier from both scholarly and practitioner perspectives, allowing a range of readers to venture into the rich world of Chan and Zen. Specialist contributors offer insights on historical context, literary structure, philosophical implications, and gendered dimensions, as well as the embodied practice and contemporary experience of the stories in the Gateless Barrier. By bringing together academic expertise with experiential insight from Zen teachers, this book provides a grounded and nuanced account of how the Gateless Barrier has been—and continues to be—practiced and lived in China, Korea, Japan, and the West. An innovative and sophisticated study, this book is ideal for university classroom use, and it also makes the Gateless Barrier accessible to other first-time readers, Buddhist practitioners, and scholars.
Download or read book Architects of Buddhist Leisure written by Justin Thomas McDaniel and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhism, often described as an austere religion that condemns desire, promotes denial, and idealizes the contemplative life, actually has a thriving leisure culture in Asia. Creative religious improvisations designed by Buddhists have been produced both within and outside of monasteries across the region—in Nepal, Japan, Korea, Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Justin McDaniel looks at the growth of Asia’s culture of Buddhist leisure—what he calls “socially disengaged Buddhism”—through a study of architects responsible for monuments, museums, amusement parks, and other sites. In conversation with noted theorists of material and visual culture and anthropologists of art, McDaniel argues that such sites highlight the importance of public, leisure, and spectacle culture from a Buddhist perspective and illustrate how “secular” and “religious,” “public” and “private,” are in many ways false binaries. Moreover, places like Lek Wiriyaphan’s Sanctuary of Truth in Thailand, Suối Tiên Amusement Park in Saigon, and Shi Fa Zhao’s multilevel museum/ritual space/tea house in Singapore reflect a growing Buddhist ecumenism built through repetitive affective encounters instead of didactic sermons and sectarian developments. They present different Buddhist traditions, images, and aesthetic expressions as united but not uniform, collected but not concise: Together they form a gathering, not a movement. Despite the ingenuity of lay and ordained visionaries like Wiriyaphan and Zhao and their colleagues Kenzo Tange, Chan-soo Park, Tadao Ando, and others discussed in this book, creators of Buddhist leisure sites often face problems along the way. Parks and museums are complex adaptive systems that are changed and influenced by budgets, available materials, local and global economic conditions, and visitors. Architects must often compromise and settle at local optima, and no matter what they intend, their buildings will develop lives of their own. Provocative and theoretically innovative, Architects of Buddhist Leisure asks readers to question the very category of “religious” architecture. It challenges current methodological approaches in religious studies and speaks to a broad audience interested in modern art, architecture, religion, anthropology, and material culture.
Download or read book Our Great Qing written by Johan Elverskog and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although it is generally believed that the Manchus controlled the Mongols through their patronage of Tibetan Buddhism, scant attention has been paid to the Mongol view of the Qing imperial project. In contrast to other accounts of Manchu rule, Our Great Qing focuses not only on what images the metropole wished to project into Mongolia, but also on what images the Mongols acknowledged themselves. Rather than accepting the Manchu's use of Buddhism, Johan Elverskog begins by questioning the static, unhistorical, and hegemonic view of political life implicit in the Buddhist explanation. By stressing instead the fluidity of identity and Buddhist practice as processes continually developing in relation to state formations, this work explores how Qing policies were understood by Mongols and how they came to see themselves as Qing subjects.
Download or read book Inscribing Jingju Peking Opera written by David Rolston and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-09 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the most influential mass medium in China before the internet reaching both literate and illiterate audiences? The answer may surprise you...it’s Jingju (Peking opera). This book traces the tradition’s increasing textualization and the changes in authorship, copyright, performance rights, and textual fixation that accompanied those changes.
Download or read book Public Zen Personal Zen written by Peter D. Hershock and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among Buddhist traditions, Zen has been remarkably successful in garnering and sustaining interest outside the Buddhist homelands of Asia, and “zen” is now part of the global cultural lexicon. This deeply informed book explores the history of this enduring Japanese tradition—from its beginnings as a form of Buddhist thought and practice imported from China to its reinvention in medieval Japan as a force for religious, political, and cultural change to its role in Japan’s embrace of modernity. Going deeper, it also explores Zen through the experiences and teachings of key individuals who shaped Zen as a tradition committed to the embodiment of enlightenment by all. By bringing together Zen’s institutional and personal dimensions, Peter D. Hershock offers readers a nuanced yet accessible introduction to Zen as well as distinctive insights into issues that remain relevant today, including the creative tensions between globalization and localization, the interplay of politics and religion, and the possibilities for integrating social transformation with personal liberation. Including an introduction to the basic teachings and practices of Buddhism and an account of their spread across Asia, Public Zen, Personal Zen deftly blends historical detail with the felt experiences of Zen practitioners grappling with the meaning of human suffering, personal freedom, and the integration of social and spiritual progress.
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 Transforming Monkey written by Hongmei Sun and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Able to shape-shift and ride the clouds, wielding a magic cudgel and playing tricks, Sun Wukong (aka Monkey or the Monkey King) first attained superstar status as the protagonist of the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West (Xiyou ji) and lives on in literature and popular culture internationally. In this far-ranging study Hongmei Sun discusses the thousand-year evolution of this figure in imperial China and multimedia adaptations in Republican, Maoist, and post-socialist China and the United States, including the film Princess Iron Fan (1941), Maoist revolutionary operas, online creative writings influenced by Hong Kong film A Chinese Odyssey (1995), and Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese. At the intersection of Chinese studies, Asian American studies, film studies, and translation and adaptation studies, Transforming Monkey provides a renewed understanding of the Monkey King character as a rebel and trickster, and demonstrates his impact on the Chinese self-conception of national identity as he travels through time and across borders.