Download or read book The Middle Kingdom and the Dharma Wheel written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle Kingdom and the Dharma Wheel comprises seven articles relating to saṃgha-state relations in Chinese history from the early Tang to the Qing dynasty.
Download or read book Buddhism in Central Asia I written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 341 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, Khitan) will be explored in a systematic way. The first volume Buddhism in Central Asia (Part I): Patronage, Legitimation, Sacred Space, and Pilgrimage is based on the start-up conference held on May 23rd–25th, 2018, at CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) and focuses on the first two of altogether six thematic topics to be dealt with in the project, namely on “patronage and legitimation strategy” as well as "sacred space and pilgrimage."
Download or read book The Zhenzheng lun by Xuanyi written by Thomas Jülch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Zhenzheng lun 甄正論 (T 2112, Treatise of Revealing the Correct) is a Chinese Buddhist apologetic treatise with a distinct anti-Daoist stance in three juan. It is organized as a dialogue between a Daoist, the "Venerable Obstructed by Customs" (zhisu gongzi 滯俗公子), and the Buddhist "Master Revealing the Correct" (zhenzheng xiansheng 甄正先生) in which the former is gradually led towards an orthodox Buddhist understanding by the latter through the refutation of his various arguments against Buddhism. Composed in the late 7th century, the text was authored depending on the political interests and strategies of Wu Zhao武曌 (624–705), who in 690 was enthroned as Empress Wu Zetian 武則天. This study of Thomas Jülch offers a richly annotated and complete translation of the Zhenzheng lun along with an introductory part that focuses on reconstructing the political and propagandistic circumstances relevant to the understanding of the Zhenzheng lun.
Download or read book Middle Imperial China 900 1350 written by Linda Walton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-03 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A highly readable and engaging survey of China's history from the tenth through the mid-fourteenth centuries.
Download or read book The Buddhist Roots of Zhu Xi s Philosophical Thought written by John Makeham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zhu Xi (1130-1200) is arguably the most important Chinese philosopher of the past millennium, both in terms of his legacy and for the sophistication of his systematic philosophy. The Buddhist Roots of Zhu Xi's Philosophical Thought combines two major areas of Chinese philosophy that are rarely tackled together: Chinese Buddhist philosophy and Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucian philosophy.
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 From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane written by Peter Jackson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic account of how a new world order under Tamerlane was born out of the decline of the Mongol Empire By the mid-fourteenth century, the world empire founded by Genghis Khan was in crisis. The Mongol Ilkhanate had ended in Iran and Iraq, China’s Mongol rulers were threatened by the native Ming, and the Golden Horde and the Central Asian Mongols were prey to internal discord. Into this void moved the warlord Tamerlane, the last major conqueror to emerge from Inner Asia. In this authoritative account, Peter Jackson traces Tamerlane’s rise to power against the backdrop of the decline of Mongol rule. Jackson argues that Tamerlane, a keen exponent of Mongol custom and tradition, operated in Genghis Khan’s shadow and took care to draw parallels between himself and his great precursor. But, as a Muslim, Tamerlane drew on Islamic traditions, and his waging of wars in the name of jihad, whether sincere or not, had a more powerful impact than those of any Muslim Mongol ruler before him.
Download or read book Zhipan s Account of the History of Buddhism in China written by Thomas Jülch and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-02-22 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his carefully annotated translation of Fozu tongji, juan 39-42, Thomas Jülch enables an in-depth understanding of a key text of Chinese Buddhist historiography.
Download or read book In the Shadow of the Mongol Empire written by David M. Robinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memories of the Mongol Empire loomed large in fourteenth-century Eurasia. Robinson explores how Ming China exploited these memories for its own purposes.
Download or read book Religious Individualisation written by Martin Fuchs and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 1058 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together key findings of the long-term research project ‘Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective’ (Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University). Combining a wide range of disciplinary approaches, methods and theories, the volume assembles over 50 contributions that explore and compare processes of religious individualisation in different religious environments and historical periods, in particular in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe from antiquity to the recent past. Contrary to standard theories of modernisation, which tend to regard religious individualisation as a specifically modern or early modern as well as an essentially Western or Christian phenomenon, the chapters reveal processes of religious individualisation in a large variety of non-Western and pre-modern scenarios. Furthermore, the volume challenges prevalent views that regard religions primarily as collective phenomena and provides nuanced perspectives on the appropriation of religious agency, the pluralisation of religious options, dynamics of de-traditionalisation and privatisation, the development of elaborated notions of the self, the facilitation of religious deviance, and on the notion of dividuality.
Download or read book Building Bridges between Chan Buddhism and Confucianism written by Diana Arghirescu and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Building Bridges between Chan Buddhism and Confucianism, Diana Arghirescu explores the close connections between Buddhism and Confucianism during China's Song period (960–1279). Drawing on In Essays on Assisting the Teaching written by Chan monk-scholar Qisong (1007–1072), Arghirescu examines the influences between the two traditions. In his writings, Qisong made the first substantial efforts to compare the major dimensions of Confucian and Chan Buddhist thought from a philosophical view, seeking to establish a meaningful and influential intellectual and ethical bridge between them. Arghirescu meticulously reveals a "Confucianized" dimension of Qisong's thought, showing how he revisited and reinterpreted Confucian terminology in his special form of Chan aimed at his contemporary Confucian readers and auditors "who do not know Buddhism." Qisong's form of eleventh-century Chan, she argues, is unique in its cohesive or nondual perspective on Chinese Buddhist, Confucian, and other philosophical traditions, which considers all of them to be interdependent and to share a common root. Building Bridges between Chan Buddhism and Confucianism is the first book to identify, examine, and expand on a series of Confucian concepts and virtues that were specifically identified and discussed from a Buddhist perspective by a historical Buddhist writer. It represents a major contribution in the comparative understanding of both traditions.
Download or read book A Tale of Two St pas written by Albert Welter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province, and the surrounding environs have one of the richest Buddhist cultures in China. In A Tale of Two Stupas, Albert Welter tells the story of Hangzhou Buddhism through the conceptions, erections, and resurrections of Yongming Stupa, dedicated to the memory of one of Hangzhou's leading Buddhist figures, and Leifeng Pagoda, built to house stupa relics of the historical Buddha. Welter delves into the intricacies of these two sites and pays particular attention to their origins and rebirths. These sites have suffered devastation and endured long periods of neglect, yet both have been resurrected and re-resurrected during their histories and have resumed meaningful places in the contemporary Hangzhou landscape, a mark of their power and endurance. A Tale of Two Stupas adopts a site-specific, regional approach in order to show how the dynamics of initial conception, resurrection, and re-resurrection work, and what that might tell us about the nature of Hangzhou and Chinese Buddhism.
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 The Many Lives of Yang Zhu written by Carine Defoort and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the most important portrayals of an ancient Chinese master, Yang Zhu, throughout Chinese history, from the fourth century BCE till today. Due to the striking scarcity of reliable textual testimony regarding his life and thought, all these portrayals are to a large extent inspired by their own historical contexts: Mencius's criticism in the late Warring States, the creation of a Confucian orthodoxy during the imperial era, and the establishment of a Chinese philosophy in the Republic. This volume adopts a historical approach, tracing the most important portrayals of Yang Zhu in their own contexts and mutual connections. It yields new insights not only into the figure of Yang Zhu, but also into the stages of China's intellectual history. Scarcity of reliable textual support is, to varying degrees, a common predicament in the study of ancient Chinese masters, but the case of Yang Zhu is particularly illuminating. The remarkable dearth of textual material represents the almost "nothing" out of which early Chinese philosophers such as Yang Zhu have been fruitfully "created."
Download or read book Empires and Gods written by Jörg Rüpke and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-02-19 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interaction with religions was one of the most demanding tasks for imperial leaders. Religions could be the glue that held an empire together, bolstering the legitimacy of individual rulers and of the imperial enterprise as a whole. Yet, they could also challenge this legitimacy and jeopardize an empire's cohesiveness. As empires by definition ruled heterogeneous populations, they had to interact with a variety of religious cults, creeds, and establishments. These interactions moved from accommodation and toleration, to cooptation, control, or suppression; from aligning with a single religion to celebrating religious diversity or even inventing a new transcendent civic religion; and from lavish patronage to indifference. The volume's contributors investigate these dynamics in major Eurasian empires--from those that functioned in a relatively tolerant religious landscape (Ashokan India, early China, Hellenistic, and Roman empires) to those that allied with a single proselytizing or non-proselytizing creed (Sassanian Iran, Christian and Islamic empires), to those that tried to accommodate different creeds through "pay for pray" policies (Tang China, the Mongols), exploring the advantages and disadvantages of each of these choices.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire 2 Volumes written by Michal Biran and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 1916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Chinggis Khan and his progeny ruled over two-thirds of Eurasia. Connecting East, West, North and South, the Mongols integrated most of the Old World, promoting unprecedented cross-cultural contacts and triggering the reshuffle of religious, ethnic, and geopolitical identities. The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire studies the Empire holistically in its full Eurasian context, putting the Mongols and their nomadic culture at the center. Written by an international team of more than forty leading scholars, this two-volume set provides an authoritative and multifaceted history of 'the Mongol Moment' (1206–1368) in world history and includes an unprecedented survey of the various sources for its study, textual (written in sisteen languages), archaeological, and visual. This groundbreaking Cambridge History sets a new standard for future study of the Empire. It will serve as the fundamental reference work for those interested in Mongol, Eurasian, and world history.
Download or read book An Afterlife for the Khan written by Jonathan Z. Brack and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Mongol Empire, the interfaith court provided a contested arena for a performance of the Mongol ruler’s sacred kingship, and the debate was fiercely ideological and religious. At the court of the newly established Ilkhanate, Muslim administrators, Buddhist monks, and Christian clergy all attempted to sway their imperial overlords, arguing fiercely over the proper role of the king and his government, with momentous and far-reaching consequences. Focusing on the famous but understudied figure of the grand vizier Rashid al-Din, a Persian Jew who converted to Islam, Jonathan Z. Brack explores the myriad ways Rashid al-Din and his fellow courtiers investigated, reformulated, and transformed long-standing ideas of authority and power. Out of this intellectual ferment of accommodation, resistance, and experimentation, they developed a completely new understanding of sacred kingship. This new ideal, and the political theology it subtends, would go on to become a central justification in imperial projects across Eurasia in the centuries that followed. An Afterlife for the Khan offers a powerful cultural and intellectual history of this pivotal moment for Islam and empire in the Middle East and Asia.
