Download or read book Early Chinese Religion Part Two The Period of Division 220 589 AD 2 vols written by John Lagerwey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-11-23 with total page 1584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Warring States, treated in Part One of this set, there is no more fecund era in Chinese religious and cultural history than the period of division (220-589 AD). During it, Buddhism conquered China, Daoism grew into a mature religion with independent institutions, and, together with Confucianism, these three teachings, having each won its share of state recognition and support, formed a united front against shamanism. While all four religions are covered, Buddhism and Daoism receive special attention in a series of parallel chapters on their pantheons, rituals, sacred geography, community organization, canon formation, impact on literature, and recent archaeological discoveries. This multi-disciplinary approach, without ignoring philosophical and theological issues, brings into sharp focus the social and historical matrices of Chinese religion.
Download or read book Early Chinese Religion written by John Lagerwey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-10-30 with total page 1584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Warring States, treated in Part One of this set, there is no more fecund era in Chinese religious and cultural history than the period of division (220-589 AD). During it, Buddhism conquered China, Daoism grew into a mature religion with independent institutions, and, together with Confucianism, these three teachings, having each won its share of state recognition and support, formed a united front against shamanism. While all four religions are covered, Buddhism and Daoism receive special attention in a series of parallel chapters on their pantheons, rituals, sacred geography, community organization, canon formation, impact on literature, and recent archaeological discoveries. This multi-disciplinary approach, without ignoring philosophical and theological issues, brings into sharp focus the social and historical matrices of Chinese religion.
Download or read book Modern Chinese Religion I 2 vols written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-12-04 with total page 1713 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A follow-up to Early Chinese Religion (Brill, 2009-10), Modern Chinese Religion focuses on the third period of paradigm shift in Chinese cultural and religious history, from the Song to the Yuan (960-1368 AD). As in the earlier periods, political division gave urgency to the invention of new models that would then remain dominant for six centuries. Defining religion as “value systems in practice”, this multi-disciplinary work shows the processes of rationalization and interiorization at work in the rituals, self-cultivation practices, thought, and iconography of elite forms of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, as well as in medicine. At the same time, lay Buddhism, Daoist exorcism, and medium-based local religion contributed each in its own way to the creation of modern popular religion. With contributions by Juhn Ahn, Bai Bin, Chen Shuguo, Patricia Ebrey, Michael Fuller, Mark Halperin, Susan Huang, Dieter Kuhn, Nap-yin Lau, Fu-shih Lin, Pierre Marsone, Matsumoto Kôichi, Joseph McDermott, Tracy Miller, Julia Murray, Ong Chang Woei, Fabien Simonis, Dan Stevenson, Curie Virag, Michael Walsh, Linda Walton, Yokote Yutaka, Zhang Zong
Download or read book Declarations of the Perfected PART ONE written by Thomas E. Smith and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2013 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first four books of Tao Hongjing's compilation of Shangqing or Higher Clarity Taoism, complete and annotated.
Download or read book Signs from the Unseen Realm written by Robert Ford Campany and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early medieval China hundreds of Buddhist miracle texts were circulated, inaugurating a trend that would continue for centuries. Each tale recounted extraordinary events involving Chinese persons and places—events seen as verifying claims made in Buddhist scriptures, demonstrating the reality of karmic retribution, or confirming the efficacy of Buddhist devotional practices. Robert Ford Campany, one of North America’s preeminent scholars of Chinese religion, presents in this volume the first complete, annotated translation, with in-depth commentary, of the largest extant collection of miracle tales from the early medieval period, Wang Yan’s Records of Signs from the Unseen Realm, compiled around 490 C.E. In addition to the translation, Campany provides a substantial study of the text and its author in their historical and religious settings. He shows how these lively tales helped integrate Buddhism into Chinese society at the same time that they served as platforms for religious contestation and persuasion. Campany offers a nuanced, clear methodological discussion of how such narratives, being products of social memory, may be read as valuable evidence for the history of religion and culture. Readers interested in Buddhism; historians of Chinese religions, culture, society, and literature; scholars of comparative religion: All will find Signs from the Unseen Realm a stimulating and rich contribution to scholarship.
Download or read book Dreaming and Self Cultivation in China 300 BCE 800 CE written by Robert Ford Campany and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-09-09 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience? In Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE, Robert Ford Campany examines how dreaming was addressed in texts produced and circulated by practitioners of Daoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and other self-cultivational disciplines. Working through a wide range of scriptures, essays, treatises, biographies, commentaries, fictive dialogues, diary records, interpretive keys, and ritual instructions, Campany uncovers a set of discrete paradigms by which dreams were viewed and responded to by practitioners. He shows how these paradigms underlay texts of diverse religious and ideological persuasions that are usually treated in mutual isolation. The result is a provocative meditation on the relationship between individuals’ nocturnal experiences and one culture’s persistent attempts to discipline, interpret, and incorporate them into waking practice.
Download or read book Believing in Ghosts and Spirits written by Hu Baozhu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present book by Hu Baozhu explores the subject of ghosts and spirits and attempts to map the religious landscape of ancient China. The main focus of attention is the character gui 鬼, an essential key to the understanding of spiritual beings. The author analyses the character gui in various materials – lexicons and dictionaries, excavated manuscripts and inscriptions, and received classical texts. Gui is examined from the perspective of its linguistic root, literary interpretation, ritual practices, sociopolitical implication, and cosmological thinking. In the gradual process of coming to know the otherworld in terms of ghosts and spirits, Chinese people in ancient times attempted to identify and classify these spiritual entities. In their philosophical thinking, they connected the subject of gui with the movement of the universe. Thus the belief in ghosts and spirits in ancient China appeared to be a moral standard for all, not only providing a room for individual religiosity but also implementing the purpose of family-oriented social order, the legitimization of political operations, and the understanding of the way of Heaven and Earth.
Download or read book History of Religion written by Alexander Men and published by Nestyazhateli Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book, "In Search of the Way, the Truth, and the Life," explores the origins of religion and early beliefs—from prehistoric mysticism to the idea of a living God. The reader is invited on a fascinating journey of the human spirit highlighting the interconnectedness and a common vector of humanity’s religious search, which unraveled across continents spanning millennia: from Mesoamerica to the plains of Mesopotamia, from the emergence of the religious views of Egypt and India to the formation of ancient philosophies in China and Greece. The book recounts the emergence of the ancient Israel's religion that gave the world the liberating fire of Light and Truth culminating with the coming of the Messiah, His earthly life, and the victory over death. We learn that the spiritual quest of humanity was embodied in the person and teachings of Jesus Christ, and that His birth, for the most profound reasons, was the beginning of a new era—the era of the triumph of Truth.
Download or read book Poet Monks written by Thomas J. Mazanec and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-15 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Thomas J. Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the latter half of Tang-dynasty China, asserted a bold new vision of poetry that proclaimed the union of classical verse with Buddhist practices of repetition, incantation, and meditation. Mazanec traces the historical development of the poet-monk as a distinct actor in the Chinese literary world, arguing for the importance of religious practice in medieval literature. As they witnessed the collapse of the world around them, these monks wove together the frayed threads of their traditions to establish an elite-style Chinese Buddhist poetry. Poet-Monks shows that during the transformative period of the Tang-Song transition, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of poetic innovation.
Download or read book The Four Gods Figurines as Tomb Guardians written by Lok Man Yang and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-29 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book employs a biographical approach to comprehensively study a set of Tang era-tomb guardian figurines, known as the Four Gods (Sishen), comprising a pair of warriors (Dangkuang and Dangye) and a pair of hybrid beasts (Zuming and Dizhou). These objects were exclusively used by officials until 841 AD and were mainly found in capitals then. They disappeared in the 9th century AD. The book is divided into three sections. Part one focuses on their symbolism through names, images, burial contexts, associated ritual regulations, and the interplay of all of these, revealing their dual significance – apotropaic and political, tied to ritual propriety, nuo exorcism, yin-yang divination, and more. Part two explores their connection to other supernatural tomb figurines in the early and middle Tang periods, challenging previous theories and highlighting regional standardization. Additionally, this part delves into the Four Gods’ regulated production, government oversight, and role in funerary processions. Part three examines their disappearance due to shifting views on the afterlife and diminishing national power. It also explores changes in the usage of related tomb objects after the Tang era, focusing on protective functions and spatial concepts.
Download or read book Chinese Religion and Familism written by Jordan Paper and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting on over half a century of study on Chinese culture, Jordan Paper explores new ways of approaching religion in China. Moving away from using Christianity as a model for examination, which has led to considerable misunderstandings between China and the West, Paper instead applies the paradigm of Familism to Chinese religion. By looking through the lens of Familism, which emphasises the importance of the family unit, Paper argues that we can understand the basis of Chinese culture, society, government, and religion. In the book, Paper explains how, when and why Familism appears in the development of human culture in the Neolithic period, as well as its ramifications in more complex societies, using the imperial Chinese state as an example. The discussion in the book includes how the Chinese state can be understood as a religious institution; the role of spirit possession; the relationship of other religions in China to Chinese Religion, including Buddhism, Daoism and Judaism; and the issue of freedom of religion in contemporary China. Chinese Religion and Familism not only challenges the discipline's perception of Chinese religion, but all of the religions of East Asia, indigenous sub-Saharan African religions, Polynesian Religion, and elsewhere.
Download or read book Literary Information in China written by Bruce Rusk and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Information” has become a core concept across the disciplines, yet it is still often seen as a unique feature of the Western world that became central only in the digital age. In this book, leading experts turn to China’s textual tradition to show the significance of information for reconceptualizing the work of literary history, from its beginnings to the present moment. Contributors trace the organization of literary information across China’s three millennia of history, examining the forms and practices of information management that have evolved alongside the increasing scale and complexity of textual production. They reimagine literary history as information processing, detailing the many kinds of storage, encoding, sorting, and transmission that constitute and feed back into China’s long and ever-growing cultural tradition. The volume features state-of-the-field essays on all major forms of literary information management, from graphs to internet literature, and from commentaries to literary museums and archives. By shifting focus from individual works and their authors to the informatic schemata of literature, it identifies three scales of information management—the word, the document, and the collection—and surveys the forms that operate at each level, such as the dictionary, the anthology, and the library. Literary Information in China is a groundbreaking work that provides a systematic and innovative reassessment of literary history with implications that extend beyond the particular Chinese context, revealing how informatic practices shape literary tradition.
Download or read book Visualizing Dunhuang written by Jun Hu and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Located at the crossroads of the northern and southern routes of the ancient Silk Road on the edge of the Taklamakan desert in western China, Dunhuang is one of the richest Buddhist sites in China with nearly 500 cave temples constructed between the fourth and the fourteenth century. The sculptures, murals, portable paintings, and manuscripts found in the caves represent every aspect of Buddhism, both doctrinally and artistically. From its earliest construction to the present, Dunhuang has been visualized in many ways by the architects, builders, and artists who made the caves to twentieth-century explorers and photographers, conservators, and contemporary artists. This book explores ways in which Dunhuang has been visualized from its creation to contemporary times. Essays by leading scholars from the U.S., Europe, and China cover a wide range of topics, from the architecture of cave temples to painting and sculptural programs, Buddhist ritual practices, expeditionary photography, conservation, and the contributions of Dunhuang to art history"--
Download or read book Atlas of Religion in China Social and Geographical Contexts written by Fenggang Yang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The speed and the scale with which traditional religions in China have been revived and new spiritual movements have emerged in recent decades make it difficult for scholars to stay up-to-date on the religious transformations within Chinese society. This unique atlas presents a bird’s-eye view of the religious landscape in China today. In more than 150 full-color maps and six different case studies, it maps the officially registered venues of China’s major religions - Buddhism, Christianity (Protestant and Catholic), Daoism, and Islam - at the national, provincial, and county levels. The atlas also outlines the contours of Confucianism, folk religion, and the Mao cult. Further, it describes the main organizations, beliefs, and rituals of China’s main religions, as well as the social and demographic characteristics of their respective believers. Putting multiple religions side by side in their contexts, this atlas deploys the latest qualitative, quantitative and spatial data acquired from censuses, surveys, and fieldwork to offer a definitive overview of religion in contemporary China. An essential resource for all scholars and students of religion and society in China.
Download or read book Faith in Mount Fuji written by Janine Anderson Sawada and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even a fleeting glimpse of Mount Fuji’s snow-capped peak emerging from the clouds in the distance evokes the reverence it has commanded in Japan from ancient times. Long considered sacred, during the medieval era the mountain evolved from a venue for solitary ascetics into a well-regulated pilgrimage site. With the onset of the Tokugawa period, the nature of devotion to Mount Fuji underwent a dramatic change. Working people from nearby Edo (now Tokyo) began climbing the mountain in increasing numbers and worshipping its deity on their own terms, leading to a widespread network of devotional associations known as Fujikō. In Faith in Mount Fuji Janine Sawada asserts that the rise of the Fuji movement epitomizes a broad transformation in popular religion that took place in early modern Japan. Drawing on existing practices and values, artisans and merchants generated new forms of religious life outside the confines of the sectarian establishment. Sawada highlights the importance of independent thinking in these grassroots phenomena, making a compelling case that the new Fuji devotees carved out enclaves for subtle opposition to the status quo within the restrictive parameters of the Tokugawa order. The founding members effectively reinterpreted materials such as pilgrimage maps, talismans, and prayer formulae, laying the groundwork for the articulation of a set of remarkable teachings by Jikigyō Miroku (1671–1733), an oil peddler who became one of the group’s leading ascetic practitioners. His writings fostered a vision of Mount Fuji as a compassionate parental deity who mandated a new world of economic justice and fairness in social and gender relations. The book concludes with a thought-provoking assessment of Jikigyō’s suicide on the mountain as an act of commitment to world salvation that drew on established ascetic practice even as it conveyed political dissent. Faith in Mount Fuji is a pioneering work that contains a wealth of in-depth analysis and original interpretation. It will open up new avenues of discussion among students of Japanese religions and intellectual history, and supply rich food for thought to readers interested in global perspectives on issues of religion and society, ritual culture, new religions, and asceticism.
Download or read book Worldly Saviors and Imperial Authority in Medieval Chinese Buddhism written by April D. Hughes and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although scholars have long assumed that early Chinese political authority was rooted in Confucianism, rulership in the medieval period was not bound by a single dominant tradition. To acquire power, emperors deployed objects and figures derived from a range of traditions imbued with religious and political significance. Author April D. Hughes demonstrates how dynastic founders like Wu Zhao (Wu Zetian, r. 690–705), the only woman to rule China under her own name, and Yang Jian (Emperor Wen, r. 581–604), the first ruler of the Sui dynasty, closely identified with Buddhist worldly saviors and Wheel-Turning Kings to legitimate their rule. During periods of upheaval caused by the decline of the Dharma, worldly saviors arrived on earth to quell chaos and to rule and liberate their subjects simultaneously. By incorporating these figures into the imperial system, sovereigns were able to depict themselves both as monarchs and as buddhas or bodhisattvas in uncertain times. In this inventive and original work, Hughes traces worldly saviors—in particular Maitreya Buddha and Prince Moonlight—as they appeared in apocalyptic scriptures from Dunhuang, claims to the throne made by various rebel leaders, and textual interpretations and assertions by Yang Jian and Wu Zhao. Yang Jian associated himself with Prince Moonlight and took on the persona of a Wheel-Turning King whose offerings to the Buddha were not flowers and incense but weapons of war to reunite a long-fragmented empire and revitalize the Dharma. Wu Zhao was associated with several different worldly savior figures. In addition, she saw herself as the incarnation of a Wheel-Turning King for whom it was said the Seven Treasures manifested as material representations of his right to rule. Wu Zhao duly had the Seven Treasures created and put on display whenever she held audiences at court. The worldly savior figure allowed rulers to inhabit the highest role in the religious realm along with the supreme role in the political sphere. This incorporation transformed notions of Chinese imperial sovereignty, and associating rulers with a buddha or bodhisattva continued long after the close of the medieval period.
Download or read book Treasured Oases A Selection of Jao Tsung i s Dunhuang Studies written by Tsung-i Jao and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-12-12 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dunhuang: China’s traditional northwest frontier and overland conduit of exchange with the Old World. Jao Tsung-i: China’s last great traditional man of letters, polymath, and pioneer of comparative humanistic inquiry during Hong Kong’s global heyday. Jao and Dunhuang had a special relationship that this book makes accessible in English for the first time. Inside, Jao proposes an entirely new school of Chinese landscape painting, reconsiders Dunhuang’s oldest manuscripts as its newest research field, and explores topics ranging from comparative religion to medieval multimedia.
