Auspicious Omens and Miracles in Ancient China

Auspicious Omens and Miracles in Ancient China PDF Author: Tiziana Lippiello
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Auspicious Omens and Miracles in Ancient China

Auspicious Omens and Miracles in Ancient China PDF Author: Tiziana Lippiello
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description


Picturing Heaven in Early China

Picturing Heaven in Early China PDF Author: Lillian Lan-ying Tseng
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684175097
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
Tian, or Heaven, had multiple meanings in early China. It had been used since the Western Zhou to indicate both the sky and the highest god, and later came to be regarded as a force driving the movement of the cosmos and as a home to deities and imaginary animals. By the Han dynasty, which saw an outpouring of visual materials depicting Heaven, the concept of Heaven encompassed an immortal realm to which humans could ascend after death. Using excavated materials, Lillian Tseng shows how Han artisans transformed various notions of Heaven—as the mandate, the fantasy, and the sky—into pictorial entities. The Han Heaven was not indicated by what the artisans looked at, but rather was suggested by what they looked into. Artisans attained the visibility of Heaven by appropriating and modifying related knowledge of cosmology, mythology, astronomy. Thus the depiction of Heaven in Han China reflected an interface of image and knowledge. By examining Heaven as depicted in ritual buildings, on household utensils, and in the embellishments of funerary settings, Tseng maintains that visibility can hold up a mirror to visuality; Heaven was culturally constructed and should be culturally reconstructed.

Buddhist Historiography in China

Buddhist Historiography in China PDF Author: John Kieschnick
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231556098
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Winner, 2023 Toshihide Numata Book Award, Numata Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley Since the early days of Buddhism in China, monastics and laity alike have expressed a profound concern with the past. In voluminous historical works, they attempted to determine as precisely as possible the dates of events in the Buddha’s life, seeking to iron out discrepancies in varying accounts and pinpoint when he delivered which sermons. Buddhist writers chronicled the history of the Dharma in China as well, compiling biographies of eminent monks and nuns and detailing the rise and decline in the religion’s fortunes under various rulers. They searched for evidence of karma in the historical record and drew on prophecy to explain the past. John Kieschnick provides an innovative, expansive account of how Chinese Buddhists have sought to understand their history through a Buddhist lens. Exploring a series of themes in mainstream Buddhist historiographical works from the fifth to the twentieth century, he looks not so much for what they reveal about the people and events they describe as for what they tell us about their compilers’ understanding of history. Kieschnick examines how Buddhist doctrines influenced the search for the underlying principles driving history, the significance of genealogy in Buddhist writing, and the transformation of Buddhist historiography in the twentieth century. This book casts new light on the intellectual history of Chinese Buddhism and on Buddhists’ understanding of the past.

China’s Northern Wei Dynasty, 386-535

China’s Northern Wei Dynasty, 386-535 PDF Author: Puning Liu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000283143
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The Northern Wei was a dynasty which originated outside China and ruled northern China when the south of China was ruled by a series of dynasties which originated inside China. Both during the time that the Northern Wei dynasty was in power and over many centuries subsequently, the legitimacy of the Northern Wei dynasty has been questioned. This book outlines the history of the Northern Wei dynasty, including its origins and the history of its southern rivals; considers the practices adopted by both the Northern Wei dynasty and its rivals to establish legitimacy; and examines the debates which preoccupied Chinese scholars subsequently. The book casts light on traditional ideas about legitimate rule in China, ideas which have enduring relevance as tradition continues to be very significant in contemporary China.

Living Karma

Living Karma PDF Author: Beverley Foulks McGuire
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231168020
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Ouyi Zhixu (1599Ð1655) was an eminent Chinese Buddhist monk who, contrary to his contemporaries, believed karma could be changed. Through vows, divination, repentance rituals, and ascetic acts such as burning and blood writing, he sought to alter what others understood as inevitable and inescapable. Drawing attention to OuyiÕs unique reshaping of religious practice, Living Karma reasserts the significance of an overlooked individual in the modern development of Chinese Buddhism. While Buddhist studies scholarship tends to privilege textual analysis, Living Karma promotes a balanced study of ritual practice and writing, treating OuyiÕs texts as ritual objects and his reading and writing as religious acts. Each chapter addresses a specific religious practiceÑwriting, divination, repentance, vows, and bodily ritualsÑoffering first a diachronic overview of each practice within the history of Chinese Buddhism and then a synchronic analysis of each phenomenon through close readings of OuyiÕs work. The book sheds much-needed light on this little-known figure and his representation of karma, which proved to be a seminal innovation in the religious thought of late imperial China.

Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece

Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece PDF Author: Lisa Raphals
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110729228X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Book Description
Divination was an important and distinctive aspect of religion in both ancient China and ancient Greece, and this book will provide the first systematic account and analysis of the two side by side. Who practised divination in these cultures and who consulted it? What kind of questions did they ask, and what methods were used to answer those questions? As well as these practical aspects, Lisa Raphals also examines divination as a subject of rhetorical and political narratives, and its role in the development of systematic philosophical and scientific inquiry. She explores too the important similarities, differences and synergies between Greek and Chinese divinatory systems, providing important comparative evidence to reassess Greek oracular divination.

Transgressive Typologies

Transgressive Typologies PDF Author: Doran Doran
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684170877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The exceptionally powerful Chinese women leaders of the late seventh and early eighth centuries—including Wu Zhao, the Taiping and Anle princesses, Empress Wei, and Shangguan Wan’er—though quite prominent in the Chinese cultural tradition, remain elusive and often misunderstood or essentialized throughout history. Transgressive Typologies utilizes a new, multidisciplinary approach to understand how these figures’ historical identities are constructed in the mainstream secular literary-historical tradition and to analyze the points of view that inform these constructions. Using close readings and rereadings of primary texts written in medieval China through later imperial times, this study elucidates narrative typologies and motifs associated with these women to explore how their power is rhetorically framed, gendered, and ultimately deemed transgressive. Rebecca Doran offers a new understanding of major female figures of the Tang era within their literary-historical contexts, and delves into critical questions about the relationship between Chinese historiography, reception-history, and the process of image-making and cultural construction.

Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China

Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China PDF Author: Mihwa Choi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019045976X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The adaptation of ancestral ritual to serve the royal imaginary -- How does heaven come to speak?: the contesting discourse and the revival of Confucian death rituals -- Ordering society through Confucian rituals -- Offering for saving of the souls -- Social imaginaries and politics in the narratives on the world-beyond and the supernatural -- Burial: a contested site for social imaginaries

In Pursuit of the Great Peace

In Pursuit of the Great Peace PDF Author: Zhao Lu
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438474938
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Through an examination of the Great Peace (taiping), one of the first utopian visions in Chinese history, Zhao Lu describes the transformation of literati culture that occurred during the Han Dynasty. Driven by anxiety over losing the mandate of Heaven, the imperial court encouraged classicism in order to establish the Great Peace and follow Heaven's will. But instead of treating the literati as puppets of competing and imagined lineages, Zhao uses sociological methods to reconstruct their daily lives and to show how they created their own thought by adopting, modifying, and opposing the work of their contemporaries and predecessors. The literati who served as bureaucrats in the first century BCE gradually became classicists who depended on social networking as they traveled to study the classics. By the second century CE, classicism had dissolved in this traveling culture and the literati began to expand the corpus of knowledge beyond the accepted canon. Thus, far from being static, classicism in Han China was full of innovation, and ultimately gave birth to both literary writing and religious Daoism.

Chinese Character Manipulation in Literature and Divination

Chinese Character Manipulation in Literature and Divination PDF Author: Anne Kathrin Schmiedl
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004422374
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In Chinese Character Manipulation in Literature and Divination, Anne Schmiedl analyses the historical development and linguistic properties of Chinese character manipulation, focusing on a late imperial work on this subject, the Zichu by Zhou Lianggong (1612–1672).