Download or read book China Root written by David Hinton and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully compelling and liberating guide to the original nature of Zen in ancient China by renowned author and translator David Hinton. Buddhism migrated from India to China in the first century C.E., and Ch'an (Japanese: Zen) is generally seen as China's most distinctive and enduring form of Buddhism. In China Root, however, David Hinton shows how Ch'an was in fact a Buddhist-influenced extension of Taoism, China's native system of spiritual philosophy. Unlike Indian Buddhism's abstract sensibility, Ch'an was grounded in an earthy and empirically-based vision. Exploring this vision, Hinton describes Ch'an as a kind of anti-Buddhism. A radical and wild practice aspiring to a deeply ecological liberation: the integration of individual consciousness with landscape and with a Cosmos seen as harmonious and alive. In China Root, Hinton describes this original form of Zen with his trademark clarity and elegance, each chapter exploring in enlightening ways a core Ch'an concept--such as meditation, mind, Buddha, awakening--as it was originally understood and practiced in ancient China. Finally, by examining a range of standard translations in the Appendix, Hinton reveals how this original understanding and practice of Ch'an/Zen is almost entirely missing in contemporary American Zen, because it was lost in Ch'an's migration from China through Japan and on to the West. Whether you practice Zen or not, taking this journey on the wings of Hinton's remarkable insight and powerful writing will transform how you understand yourself and the world.
Download or read book The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra written by Roger Hart and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A monumental accomplishment in the history of non-Western mathematics, The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra explains the fundamentally visual way Chinese mathematicians understood and solved mathematical problems. It argues convincingly that what the West "discovered" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had already been known to the Chinese for 1,000 years. Accomplished historian and Chinese-language scholar Roger Hart examines Nine Chapters of Mathematical Arts—the classic ancient Chinese mathematics text—and the arcane art of fangcheng, one of the most significant branches of mathematics in Imperial China. Practiced between the first and seventeenth centuries by anonymous and most likely illiterate adepts, fangcheng involves manipulating counting rods on a counting board. It is essentially equivalent to the solution of systems of N equations in N unknowns in modern algebra, and its practice, Hart reveals, was visual and algorithmic. Fangcheng practitioners viewed problems in two dimensions as an array of numbers across counting boards. By "cross multiplying" these, they derived solutions of systems of linear equations that are not found in ancient Greek or early European mathematics. Doing so within a column equates to Gaussian elimination, while the same operation among individual entries produces determinantal-style solutions. Mathematicians and historians of mathematics and science will find in The Chinese Roots of Linear Algebra new ways to conceptualize the intellectual development of linear algebra.
Download or read book In Search of Your Asian Roots written by Sheau-yeah J. Chao and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Herbs and Roots written by Tamara Venit Shelton and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative, deeply researched history of Chinese medicine in America and the surprising interplay between Eastern and Western medical practice Chinese medicine has a long history in the United States, with written records dating back to the American colonial period. In this intricately crafted history, Tamara Venit Shelton chronicles the dynamic systems of knowledge, therapies, and materia medica crossing between China and the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. Chinese medicine, she argues, has played an important and often unacknowledged role in both facilitating and undermining the consolidation of medical authority among formally trained biomedical scientists in the United States. Practitioners of Chinese medicine, as racial embodiments of “irregular” medicine, became useful foils for Western physicians struggling to assert their superiority of practice. At the same time, Chinese doctors often embraced and successfully employed Orientalist stereotypes to sell their services to non-Chinese patients skeptical of modern biomedicine. What results is a story of racial constructions, immigration politics, cross-cultural medical history, and the lived experiences of Asian Americans in American history.
Download or read book Bitter Roots written by Bruce Quan, Jr and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-09 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This account of five generations of one family's life in America could simply be called an historical drama--the "characters" are all people who lived and breathed and walked the earth of China and California, from the 1850s to the present day. It is my hope and intention that these fact-based stories will enlighten, encourage and inspire whoever reads them: students, historians, Asian Americans and all other peoples of different races who may recognize themselves or their families in this drama--in short, we human beings who inhabit our world with skins of different shades, and languages made of different sounds, but with minds and hearts aligned to what is good and true in life, taught to us by our mothers and fathers, aunties and uncles, brothers and sisters and family friends, down through the generations. -- Bruce Quan, Jr.
Download or read book Cultural Curiosity written by Josephine M.T. Khu and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-07-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology of autobiographical essays reveals the human side of the Chinese diaspora. Written by ethnic Chinese who were born or raised outside of China, these moving pieces, full of the poignant details of everyday life, describe the experience of growing up as a visible minority and the subsequent journey each author made to China. The authors—whose diverse backgrounds in countries such as New Zealand, Denmark, Sri Lanka, England, Indonesia, and the United States mirror the complex global scope of the Chinese diaspora—describe in particular how their journey to the country of their ancestors transformed their sense of what it means to be Chinese. The collection as a whole provides important insights into what ethnic identity has come to mean in our transnational era. Among the pieces is Brad Wong's discussion of his visit to his grandfather's poverty-stricken village in China's southern Guangdong province. He describes working with a few of the peasants tilling vegetables and compares life in the village with his middle-class upbringing in a San Francisco suburb. In another essay, Milan Lin-Rodrigo tells of her life in Sri Lanka and of the trip she made to China as an adult. She describes the difficult and sometimes humorous cultural differences she experienced when she met her Chinese half-sister and her father's first wife. Josephine Khu's lively afterword provides background information on the Chinese diaspora and gives a theoretical framework for understanding the issues raised in the essays. This intimate and rich anthology will be compelling reading for all who are seeking answers to the increasingly complex issue of ethnic and personal identity.
Download or read book The Roots of Old Chinese written by Laurent Sagart and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phonology, morphology and lexicon of late Zhou Chinese are examined in this volume. It is argued that a proper understanding of Old Chinese morphology is essential in correctly reconstructing the phonology. Based on evidence from word-families, modern dialects and related words in neighboring languages, Old Chinese words are claimed to consist of a monosyllabic root, to which a variety of derivational affixes attached. This made Old Chinese typologically more like modern languages such as Khmer, Gyarong or Atayal, than like Middle and modern Chinese, where only faint traces of the old morphology remain. In the first part of the book, the author proposes improvements to Baxter's system of reconstruction, regarding complex initials and rhymes, and then reviews in great detail the Old Chinese affixal morphology. New proposals on phonology and morphology are integrated into a coherent reconstruction system. The second part of the book consists of etymological studies of important lexical items in Old Chinese. The author demonstrates in particular the role of proportional analogy in the formation of the system of personal pronouns. Special attention is paid to contact phenomena between Chinese and neighboring languages, and unlike most literature on Sino-Tibetan the author identifies numerous Chinese loanwords into Tibeto-Burman. The book, which contains a lengthy list of reconstructions, an index of characters and a general index, is intended for linguists and cultural historians, as well as advanced students.
Download or read book Your Chinese Roots written by Thomas Tsu-wee Tan and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Village with My Name written by Scott Tong and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-17 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “immensely readable” journey through modern Chinese history told through the experiences of the author’s extended family (Christian Science Monitor). When journalist Scott Tong moved to Shanghai, his assignment was to start the first full-time China bureau for “Marketplace,” the daily business and economics program on public radio stations across the US. But for Tong the move became much more: an opportunity to reconnect with members of his extended family who’d remained there after his parents fled the communists six decades prior. Uncovering their stories gave him a new way to understand modern China’s defining moments and its long, interrupted quest to go global. A Village with My Name offers a unique perspective on China’s transitions through the eyes of regular people who witnessed such epochal events as the toppling of the Qing monarchy, Japan’s occupation during WWII, exile of political prisoners to forced labor camps, mass death and famine during the Great Leap Forward, market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, and the dawn of the One Child Policy. Tong focuses on five members of his family, who each offer a specific window on a changing country: a rare American-educated girl born in the closing days of the Qing Dynasty, a pioneer exchange student, a toddler abandoned in wartime who later rides the wave of China’s global export boom, a young professional climbing the ladder at a multinational company, and an orphan (the author’s daughter) adopted in the middle of a baby-selling scandal fueled by foreign money. Through their stories, Tong shows us China anew, visiting former prison labor camps on the Tibetan plateau and rural outposts along the Yangtze, exploring the Shanghai of the 1930s, and touring factories across the mainland—providing a compelling and deeply personal take on how China became what it is today. “Vivid and readable . . . The book’s focus on ordinary people makes it refreshingly accessible.” —Financial Times “Tong tells his story with humor, a little snark, [and] lots of love . . . Highly recommended, especially for those interested in Chinese history and family journeys.” —Library Journal (starred review)
Download or read book China Under the Covers written by Margaret E. Davis and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bookbinding, adventure, and more in the Middle Kingdom, the cradle of the printing arts
Download or read book The Historical Roots of Technical Communication in the Chinese Tradition written by Daniel Dingxiong Ding and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-23 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces Chinese technical communication from its beginnings, investigating how it began and the major factors that shaped its practice. It also looks at the major philosophical and historical traditions in Chinese technical communication, and how historical and philosophical threads play out in contemporary Chinese technical communication practice. In considering such issues, the book gives attention to some of the major classical Chinese texts, but treats them as artefacts of technical communication. It explores the roots of Chinese technical communication, reviews traditional philosophy that has shaped such practice, discusses the key links in the history of Chinese technical communication, and recounts historical roots and contemporary practice side by side. It provides the reader with compelling perspectives on the historical roots of Chinese technical communication.
Download or read book Understanding the Chinese Mind written by Robert E. Allinson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1989 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume leading authorities in Western and Chinese philosophy explore different aspects of the Chinese mind by focusing on topical issues in philosophy, linguistics, and religion. The result is a unified volume which makes an invaluable contribution to the hermeneutics of cross-cultural interpretation as well to the investigation of the unique features of both Chinese philosophy and the Chinese mind. The distinguished contributors include John E. Smith, Robert C. Neville, Chad Hansen, Christoph Harbsmeier, Chung-ying Chen, Antonio S. Cua, Kuang-Ming Wu, and Lao Sze-kwang (Lao Yung-wei). A comprehensive bibliography of both Chinese and Western language sources is included, making this an essential reference for students and scholars of Chinese philosophy and East-West comparative philosophy.
Download or read book The Tyranny of History written by William John Francis Jenner and published by Penguin (Non-Classics). This book was released on 1994 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author examines China's political, economic and social structures which have resulted in a culture that has stifled creative thinking - He argues that China has been both held together and held back by its extreme deference to history - Boxer movement - Cultural Revolution - Great Leap Forward.
Download or read book Who Can Ride the Dragon written by Yu Huan Zhang and published by Paradigm Publications. This book was released on 1999 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (The authors) have performed a great service by clearing a path into the formidable dense thicket that constitutes Chinese medicine in the West. This text provides... a window of inestimable value into a world of meaning that satisfies a yearning on the part of many who hunger to know the substrate from which Chinese Medicine emerges. Harriet Beinfield Author, Between Heaven and Earth, A Guide to Chinese Medicine An excellent book for those studying Traditional Chines Medicine (TCM), this new text provides an insight into the depth and subtlety of this interesting subject. It delves into the linguistic and cultural wellsprings of Chinas venerable past, describing all aspects of TCM and making it applicable to Western approaches. It teaches the reader about the characteristics, expressions and concepts of TCM, allowing them to integrate its theories and practice into their own personal approach.
Download or read book Luciferic Verses written by Eric Cunningham and published by SteinerBooks. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It is a significant, momentous fact that in the third millennium before Christ, an incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh actually took place in the east of Asia. And from this incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh --for this being became a teacher --there went forth what is described as the pre-Christian, pagan culture that still survived in the gnosis of the earliest Christian centuries." --Rudolf Steiner (The Influences of Lucifer and Ahriman) In the West today, Laozi --who lived sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BC --is perhaps the best-known (along with Confucius) ancient Chinese philosopher, owing to numerous modern renderings of his Daodejing (or Tao Te Ching). Eric Cunningham relates the substance of Laozi's classic work to modern philosophers and thinkers --especially Rudolf Steiner and his esoteric cosmology and philosophy, drawing significant and surprising parallels and contrasts with regard to Steiner's modern path of inner development and to aspects of popular culture. In doing so, he also sheds light on the evolution of consciousness and the universality of Laozi's wisdom of more than two millennia ago.Cunningham combines a new translation of the Chinese classic Daodejing with a unique interpretation of the Dao for today, innovatively employing perspectives of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy interwoven with esoteric world history. Inspirations for this singular reading of the Daodejing includes the suggestion by contemporary esoteric scholars that the mythical Yellow Emperor of Chinese history was a human incarnation of the spirit called Lucifer in the West. This argument has been used to explain the ways in which "demigods" have inserted themselves into the earthly sphere to affect human evolution and history. This theory resonates with certain readings of Genesis 6 and the idea that fallen angels have penetrated the human world and promoted the establishment of ruling classes and elite bloodlines throughout history.The Luciferic Verses considers such claims from the perspective of esoteric history. The author evaluates them on the basis of their convergence with kindred concepts --including Zen enlightenment, mysticism, and the "simulation" hypothesis depicted in the Matrix films --revealing the activities and historical implications of Gnosticism. He makes a bold case for this common thread in various "consciousness-only" concepts of mind --from Plato and the ancient Skeptics to Daoism, Zen, and even the idealism of the 1960s --leading directly to postmodern hypotheses of digital consciousness.Today, philosophers are exploring such topics as virtual reality and digital simulation as new ways of discussing the contours of reality suggested in the Daodejing. Rather than leading us to a more humanistic vision of reality, as the Daoist scholars traditionally maintain, this theory of mind might be the root of a systematic anti-humanist impulse that has operated throughout world history. The Luciferic Verses offers fresh perspectives on Laoze's classic guide to life and inner development, describing its relevance and meaning for today's cultural milieu and modern esoteric thought.
Download or read book The Making of Asian America written by Erika Lee and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-09 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as ... historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that has remade our "nation of immigrants," this is a new and definitive history of Asian Americans. But more than that, it is a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today"--Jacket.
Download or read book Messy Roots A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American written by Laura Gao and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Messy Roots is a laugh-out-loud, heartfelt, and deeply engaging story of their journey to find themself--as an American, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, as a queer person, and as a Wuhanese American in the middle of a pandemic.”—Malaka Gharib, author of I Was Their American Dream After spending her early years in Wuhan, China, riding water buffalos and devouring stinky tofu, Laura immigrates to Texas, where her hometown is as foreign as Mars—at least until 2020, when COVID-19 makes Wuhan a household name. In Messy Roots, Laura illustrates her coming-of-age as the girl who simply wants to make the basketball team, escape Chinese school, and figure out why girls make her heart flutter. Insightful, original, and hilarious, toggling seamlessly between past and present, China and America, Gao’s debut is a tour de force of graphic storytelling.
