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 Nomads on Pilgrimage written by Isabelle Charleux and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nomads on Pilgrimage: Mongols on Wutaishan (China), 1800-1940 is a social history of the Mongols’ pilgrimages to Wutaishan in late imperial and Republican times. In this period of economic crisis and rise of nationalism and anticlericalism in Mongolia and China, this great Buddhist mountain of China became a unique place of intercultural exchanges, mutual borrowings, and competition between different ethnic groups. Based on a variety of written and visual sources, including a rich corpus of more than 340 Mongolian stone inscriptions, it documents why and how Wutaishan became one of the holiest sites for Mongols, who eventually reshaped its physical and spiritual landscape by their rites and strategies of appropriation.
Download or read book Wutai Shan Pilgrimage China written by Wayne Jex and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is meant to be a short personal visual impression of a pilgrimage to Wutai Shan, China. It is not meant in any way to be a guide to, or give a comprehensive look at, Wutai Shan. This pilgrimage was part of a longer pilgrimage including other areas of China that was a total of 34 days that I took from the very end of June to early August of 2012. I was part of a group of nearly 100 Western Buddhist students of Khentrul Lodro Thaye Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist lama of the Katog lineage of the Nyingma School of Buddhism.
Download or read book Building a Sacred Mountain written by Wei-Cheng Lin and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the tenth century CE, Mount Wutai had become a major pilgrimage site within the emerging culture of a distinctively Chinese Buddhism. Famous as the abode of the bodhisattva Ma�ju r (known for his habit of riding around the mountain on a lion), the site in northeastern China�s Shanxi Province was transformed from a wild area, long believed by Daoists to be sacred, into an elaborate complex of Buddhist monasteries. In Building a Sacred Mountain, Wei-Cheng Lin traces the confluence of factors that produced this transformation and argues that monastic architecture, more than texts, icons, relics, or pilgrimages, was the key to Mount Wutai�s emergence as a sacred site. Departing from traditional architectural scholarship, Lin�s interdisciplinary approach goes beyond the analysis of forms and structures to show how the built environment can work in tandem with practices and discourses to provide a space for encountering the divine. For more information: http://arthistorypi.org/books/building-a-sacred-mountain
Download or read book Pilgrimage and Ambiguity written by Angela Hobart and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This books reflects on sites such as shrines, monasteries or a revered mountain, cave or tree, shared by more than one religion in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Brazil. It explores how their multiple meanings, inherent ambiguity and shared rituals, transcending the confines of orthodoxy, may contribute to their power for the pilgrim.
Download or read book The Instrumental Music of Wutaishan s Buddhist Monasteries written by Dr Beth Szczepanski and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-01-28 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beth Szczepanski examines how traditional and modern elements interact in the current practice, reception and functions of wind music, or shengguan, at monasteries in Wutaishan, one of China's four holy mountains of Buddhism. The book provides an invaluable insight into the political and economic history of Wutaishan and its music, as well as the instrumentation, notation, repertoires, transmission and ritual function of monastic music at Wutaishan, and how that music has adapted to China's current economic, political and religious climate. The book is based on extensive field research at Wutaishan from 2005 to 2007, including interviews with monks, nuns, pilgrims and tourists. The author learned to play the sheng mouth organ and guanzi double-reed pipe, and recorded dozens of performances of monastic and lay music. The first extensive examination of Wutaishan's music by a Western scholar, the book brings a new perspective to a topic long favored by Chinese musicologists. At the same time, the book provides the non-musical scholar with an engaging exploration of the historical, political, economic and cultural forces that shape musical and religious practices in China.
Download or read book China s Holy Mountain written by Christoph Baumer and published by I.B. Tauris. This book was released on 2011-10-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rising from Shanxi Province like a three-dimensional mandala, the soaring peaks of Wutai Shan ('Five-terrace Mountain') have inspired pilgrims and travellers for almost two millennia. A striking terrain of towering emerald forests, wraith-like mists and crenellated ridges, this consecrated and secluded site is said to be the spiritual home of Wenshu Pusa, Bodhisattva of Wisdom. It is one of the most venerable and important Buddhist sanctuaries in China, yet still remains relatively little known in the West. Christoph Baumer has travelled extensively in the Wutai Shan region, and here offers the first comprehensive account of the cradle of Chinese Buddhism. In his remarkable new travelogue, 300 luminous photographs capture the unique spirituality of the 60 monasteries which straddle the complex. Charting festivals, rituals, pilgrimages and the daily life of the monks, abbots and abbesses, 'China's Holy Mountain' is both a splendid introduction to the history of Buddhism in East Asia and an evocative and lavishly-illustrated gazetteer of the monasteries and sacred artefacts themselves. It will be an indispensable resource for students of Asian religion and philosophy, with further appeal to general readers.
Download or read book The Five Colored Clouds of Mount Wutai Poems from Dunhuang written by Mary Anne Cartelli and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-12-07 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Five-Colored Clouds of Mount Wutai: Poems from Dunhuang, Mary Anne Cartelli introduces a significant corpus of Chinese Buddhist poems from the Dunhuang manuscripts celebrating Mount Wutai. They offer important literary evidence for the transformation of the mountain into the earthly paradise of the bodhisattva Mañju?r? by the Tang dynasty.????
Download or read book Buddhist Tourism in Asia written by Courtney Bruntz and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative collaborative work—the first to focus on Buddhist tourism—explores how Buddhists, government organizations, business corporations, and individuals in Asia participate in re-imaginings of Buddhism through tourism. Contributors from religious studies, anthropology, and art history examine sacred places and religious monuments as they have been shaped and reshaped by socioeconomic and cultural trends in the region. Following an introduction that offers the first theoretical understanding of tourism from a Buddhist studies’ perspective, early chapters discuss the ways Buddhists and non-Buddhists imagine concepts and places related to the religion. Case studies highlight Buddhist peace in India, Buddhist heavens and hells in Singapore, Thai temple space, and the future Buddha Maitreya in China. Buddhist tourism’s connections to the state, market, and new technologies are explored in chapters on Indian package tours for pilgrims, thematic Buddhist tourism in Cambodia, the technological innovations of Buddhist temples in China, and the promotion of pilgrimage sites in Japan. Contributors then situate the financial concerns of Chinese temples, speed dating in temples in Japan, and the diffuse and pervasive nature of Buddhism for tourism promotion in Ladakh, India. How have tourist routes, groups, sites, and practices associated with Buddhism come to be possible and what are the effects? In what ways do travelers derive meaning from Buddhist places? How do Buddhist sites fortify national, cultural, or religious identities? The comparative research in South, Southeast, and East Asia presented here draws attention to the intertwining of the sacred and the financial and how local and national sites are situated within global networks. Together these findings generate a compelling comparative investigation of Buddhist spaces, identities, and practices.
Download or read book My Journey in Mystic China written by John Blofeld and published by Inner Traditions. This book was released on 2008-03-18 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only English translation of John Blofeld’s memoirs as a Westerner living in China prior to the Communist Revolution • Paints an intimate portrait of the grace and refinement of ancient Chinese civilization • Originally written in Chinese for Chinese readers, revealing a rare glimpse of Blofeld’s private Chinese side and uncensored views • The last book by the great English sinologist, translator of the I Ching and author of Taoist Mystery and Magic The reveries and remembrances contained in the travel diaries of John Blofeld cover every aspect of his life in China--from visits to opium dens and sing-song houses to sojourns in the Buddhist monasteries and Taoist hermitages of China’s sacred mountains. Here is a vivid glimpse of “old” China as it existed in elegance and grace for three thousand years before China’s Communist Revolution. Originally written in Chinese for a Chinese audience, Blofeld’s travel diary reveals a rare, uncensored view of pre-communist China to which few westerners have been exposed.
Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell companion to East and inner Asian Buddhism written by Mario Poceski and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wiley Blackwell Companion to East and Inner Asian Buddhism combines outstanding contributions covering Buddhism as it developed and is practiced in this region. These newly-commissioned essays provide fresh scholarly perspectives on a wide range of concepts, texts, and practices. Offers a comprehensive and balanced survey of Buddhism within East and Central Asia, from the time of the Buddha through to the present day Provides fresh perspectives on a wide range of concepts, texts, traditions, doctrines, practices, and institutions - on topics spanning gender roles, tantric rituals, and the spread of Zen into Europe Brings together cutting-edge research by an interdisciplinary and international contributor team, including historians, literature scholars, and historians, as well as those from religious studies Presents a panoramic view of the extraordinary richness and variety of local Buddhist expressions and practices within Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Tibetan, cultures.
Download or read book Eminent Nuns written by Beata Grant and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-07-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The seventeenth century is generally acknowledged as one of the most politically tumultuous but culturally creative periods of late imperial Chinese history. Scholars have noted the profound effect on, and literary responses to, the fall of the Ming on the male literati elite. Also of great interest is the remarkable emergence beginning in the late Ming of educated women as readers and, more importantly, writers. Only recently beginning to be explored, however, are such seventeenth-century religious phenomena as "the reinvention" of Chan Buddhism—a concerted effort to revive what were believed to be the traditional teachings, texts, and practices of "classical" Chan. And, until now, the role played by women in these religious developments has hardly been noted at all. Eminent Nuns is an innovative interdisciplinary work that brings together several of these important seventeenth-century trends. Although Buddhist nuns have been a continuous presence in Chinese culture since early medieval times and the subject of numerous scholarly studies, this book is one of the first not only to provide a detailed view of their activities at one particular moment in time, but also to be based largely on the writings and self-representations of Buddhist nuns themselves. This perspective is made possible by the preservation of collections of "discourse records" (yulu) of seven officially designated female Chan masters in a seventeenth-century printing of the Chinese Buddhist Canon rarely used in English-language scholarship. The collections contain records of religious sermons and exchanges, letters, prose pieces, and poems, as well as biographical and autobiographical accounts of various kinds. Supplemental sources by Chan monks and male literati from the same region and period make a detailed re-creation of the lives of these eminent nuns possible. Beata Grant brings to her study background in Chinese literature, Chinese Buddhism, and Chinese women’s studies. She is able to place the seven women, all of whom were active in Jiangnan, in their historical, religious, and cultural contexts, while allowing them, through her skillful translations, to speak in their own voices. Together these women offer an important, but until now virtually unexplored, perspective on seventeenth-century China, the history of female monasticism in China, and the contributionof Buddhist nuns to the history of Chinese women’s writing.
Download or read book My Journey in This Life written by Elizabeth Kaye and published by Kechara Media & Publications. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tsem Rinpoche lived a fascinating and extraordinary life that took him, bizarrely, from Taiwan to New Jersey, then on to Los Angeles, India, and Malaysia. At times he seemed blessed and, at other times, he seemed cursed, yet he never wavered from his spiritual calling to bring Buddhist truth to the world. If you think you know what an incarnate lama is like, you'll be amazed by Tsem Rinpoche. In this revealing book, we tell his unique and intriguing story
Download or read book Liang and Lin written by Wilma Fairbank and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2009-01-21 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilma Fairbank documents, from both a historical and a uniquely personal perspective, the professional and personal achievements of Lin Whei-yin and Liang Sicheng. Liang and Lin were born in early twentieth-century China, a time when the influences of modernism were slowly bearing down on the traditional culture. In the 1920s, they traveled together to the Beaux Arts universe of Philadelphia, where they both graduated with honors from the architecture department of the University of Pennsylvania. Married in 1928, they returned to their native land and became the first two professors at the newly founded school of architecture in Shenyang's Tung Pei University. Wilma Fairbank and her husband, John King Fairbank, Harvard University's eminent historian of modern China, were lifelong friends of Liang and Lin. This relationship allows the author, herself a noted researcher of art and architecture, to paint a vivid picture of the couple within the context of China's turbulent past. Fairbank recounts how Liang and Lin used their Western training to initiate the study of China's architectural evolution. She also documents—as seen through the eyes of Liang and Lin—the tragic events that ravaged the Chinese homeland and its people: the 1937 invasion and bombings by the Japanese military and the ensuing illness and poverty; World War II and the civil war; the rise to power of the Communist government in 1949; and the victimization of the scholar class during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. Fairbank provides a highly readable, emotionally charged personal account of the couple's lives, and the numerous and sometimes horrific torments and humiliations they suffered. And, finally, when it was all too late, the posthumous praise and recognition.
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 2017-04-01 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. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.
Download or read book The Eminent Monk written by John Kieschnick and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1997-07-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an attempt to reconstruct an elusive aspect of the medieval Chinese imagination, The Eminent Monk examines biographies of Chinese Buddhist monks, from the uncompromising ascetic to the unfathomable wonder-worker. While analyzing images of the monk in medieval China, the author addresses some questions encountered along the way: What are we to make of accounts in “eminent monk” collections of deviant monks who violate monastic precepts? Who wrote biographies of monks and who read them? How did different segments of Chinese society contend for the image of the monk and which image prevailed? By placing biographies of monks in the context of Chinese political and religious rhetoric, The Eminent Monk explores both the role of Buddhist literature in Chinese history and the monastic imagination that inspired this literature.
Download or read book The Instrumental Music of Wutaishan s Buddhist Monasteries written by Beth Szczepanski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beth Szczepanski examines how traditional and modern elements interact in the current practice, reception and functions of wind music, or shengguan, at monasteries in Wutaishan, one of China's four holy mountains of Buddhism. The book provides an invaluable insight into the political and economic history of Wutaishan and its music, as well as the instrumentation, notation, repertoires, transmission and ritual function of monastic music at Wutaishan, and how that music has adapted to China's current economic, political and religious climate. The book is based on extensive field research at Wutaishan from 2005 to 2007, including interviews with monks, nuns, pilgrims and tourists. The author learned to play the sheng mouth organ and guanzi double-reed pipe, and recorded dozens of performances of monastic and lay music. The first extensive examination of Wutaishan's music by a Western scholar, the book brings a new perspective to a topic long favored by Chinese musicologists. At the same time, the book provides the non-musical scholar with an engaging exploration of the historical, political, economic and cultural forces that shape musical and religious practices in China.
