Author: Edward L. Davis
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824823986
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
Society and the Supernatural in Song China is at once a meticulous examination of spirit possession and exorcism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a social history of the full panoply of China's religious practices and practitioners at the moment when she was poised to dominate the world economy. Although the Song dynasty (960-1276) is often identified with the establishment of Confucian orthodoxy, Edward Davis demonstrates the renewed vitality of the dynasty's Taoist, Buddhist, and local religious traditions. He charts the rise of hundreds of new temple-cults and the lineages of clerical exorcists and vernacular priests; the increasingly competitive interaction among all practitioners of therapeutic ritual; and the wide social range of their patrons and clients.
Society and the Supernatural in Song China
Author: Edward L. Davis
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824823986
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
Society and the Supernatural in Song China is at once a meticulous examination of spirit possession and exorcism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a social history of the full panoply of China's religious practices and practitioners at the moment when she was poised to dominate the world economy. Although the Song dynasty (960-1276) is often identified with the establishment of Confucian orthodoxy, Edward Davis demonstrates the renewed vitality of the dynasty's Taoist, Buddhist, and local religious traditions. He charts the rise of hundreds of new temple-cults and the lineages of clerical exorcists and vernacular priests; the increasingly competitive interaction among all practitioners of therapeutic ritual; and the wide social range of their patrons and clients.
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824823986
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
Society and the Supernatural in Song China is at once a meticulous examination of spirit possession and exorcism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a social history of the full panoply of China's religious practices and practitioners at the moment when she was poised to dominate the world economy. Although the Song dynasty (960-1276) is often identified with the establishment of Confucian orthodoxy, Edward Davis demonstrates the renewed vitality of the dynasty's Taoist, Buddhist, and local religious traditions. He charts the rise of hundreds of new temple-cults and the lineages of clerical exorcists and vernacular priests; the increasingly competitive interaction among all practitioners of therapeutic ritual; and the wide social range of their patrons and clients.
Performing Filial Piety in Northern Song China
Author: Cong Ellen Zhang
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082488275X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Educated men in Song-dynasty China (960–1279) traveled frequently in search of scholarly and bureaucratic success. These extensive periods of physical mobility took them away from their families, homes, and native places for long periods of time, preventing them from fulfilling their most sacred domestic duty: filial piety to their parents. In this deeply grounded work, Cong Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than two thousand funerary biographies and other official and private writing, Zhang argues that the predicament in which Song literati found themselves diminished neither the importance of filial piety nor the appeal of participating in examinations and government service. On the contrary, the Northern Song witnessed unprecedented literati activity and state involvement in the bolstering of ancient forms of filial performances and the promotion of new ones. The result was the triumph of a new filial ideal: luyang. By labeling highly coveted honors and privileges attainable solely through scholarly and official accomplishments as the most celebrated filial acts, the luyang rhetoric elevated office-holding men to be the most filial of sons. Consequently, the proper performance of filiality became essential to scholar-official identity and self-representation. Zhang convincingly demonstrates that this reconfiguration of elite male filiality transformed filial piety into a status- and gender-based virtue, a change that had wide implications for elite family life and relationships in the Northern Song. The separation of elite men from their parents and homes also made the idea of “native place” increasingly fluid. This development in turn generated an interest in family preservation as filial performance. Individually initiated, kinship- and native place-based projects flourished and coalesced with the moral and cultural visions of leading scholar-intellectuals, providing the social and familial foundations for the ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism as well as new cultural norms that transformed Chinese society in the Song and beyond.
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082488275X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
Educated men in Song-dynasty China (960–1279) traveled frequently in search of scholarly and bureaucratic success. These extensive periods of physical mobility took them away from their families, homes, and native places for long periods of time, preventing them from fulfilling their most sacred domestic duty: filial piety to their parents. In this deeply grounded work, Cong Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than two thousand funerary biographies and other official and private writing, Zhang argues that the predicament in which Song literati found themselves diminished neither the importance of filial piety nor the appeal of participating in examinations and government service. On the contrary, the Northern Song witnessed unprecedented literati activity and state involvement in the bolstering of ancient forms of filial performances and the promotion of new ones. The result was the triumph of a new filial ideal: luyang. By labeling highly coveted honors and privileges attainable solely through scholarly and official accomplishments as the most celebrated filial acts, the luyang rhetoric elevated office-holding men to be the most filial of sons. Consequently, the proper performance of filiality became essential to scholar-official identity and self-representation. Zhang convincingly demonstrates that this reconfiguration of elite male filiality transformed filial piety into a status- and gender-based virtue, a change that had wide implications for elite family life and relationships in the Northern Song. The separation of elite men from their parents and homes also made the idea of “native place” increasingly fluid. This development in turn generated an interest in family preservation as filial performance. Individually initiated, kinship- and native place-based projects flourished and coalesced with the moral and cultural visions of leading scholar-intellectuals, providing the social and familial foundations for the ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism as well as new cultural norms that transformed Chinese society in the Song and beyond.
Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China
Author: Mihwa Choi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190849460
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
In traditional China, a funeral and the accompanying death rituals represented a critical moment for the immediate family of the deceased to show their filial piety, a core value of the society. At the same time, death rituals were social occasions, and channels for the outward demonstration of belief in a religiously pluralistic society. During the Northern Song period, however, death rituals increasingly became an arena for political contention as attempts were made to transform these practices from a private matter into one subject to state control. Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China examines how political confrontations over the proper conduct of death rituals during Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) inaugurated a period of Confucian revivalism. Mihwa Choi interprets Northern Song court politics, family ritual practices, burial practices, and the popular imagination of the afterlife as sites of contest between groups of varying social status, political vision, and religious belief. She demonstrates that the oversight of ritual affairs by scholar-officials helped them gain the political upper hand they sought, and, more broadly, fostered a revival of Confucianism as the dominant value system of Chinese society in the period that followed.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190849460
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
In traditional China, a funeral and the accompanying death rituals represented a critical moment for the immediate family of the deceased to show their filial piety, a core value of the society. At the same time, death rituals were social occasions, and channels for the outward demonstration of belief in a religiously pluralistic society. During the Northern Song period, however, death rituals increasingly became an arena for political contention as attempts were made to transform these practices from a private matter into one subject to state control. Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China examines how political confrontations over the proper conduct of death rituals during Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) inaugurated a period of Confucian revivalism. Mihwa Choi interprets Northern Song court politics, family ritual practices, burial practices, and the popular imagination of the afterlife as sites of contest between groups of varying social status, political vision, and religious belief. She demonstrates that the oversight of ritual affairs by scholar-officials helped them gain the political upper hand they sought, and, more broadly, fostered a revival of Confucianism as the dominant value system of Chinese society in the period that followed.
Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China
Author: Patricia Buckley Ebrey
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684174341
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 675
Book Description
Huizong was an exceptional emperor who lived through momentous times. A man of many talents, he wrote poetry and created his own distinctive calligraphy style; collected paintings, calligraphies, and antiquities on a large scale; promoted Daoism; and involved himself in the training of court artists, the layout of gardens, and reforms of music and medicine. The quarter century when Huizong ruled is just as fascinating. The greatly enlarged scholar-official class had come into its own but was deeply divided by factional strife. The long struggle between the Chinese state and its northern neighbors entered a new phase when Song proved unable to defend itself against the newly emergent Jurchen state of Jin. Huizong and thousands of members of his family and court were taken captive, and the Song dynasty had to recreate itself in the South.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684174341
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 675
Book Description
Huizong was an exceptional emperor who lived through momentous times. A man of many talents, he wrote poetry and created his own distinctive calligraphy style; collected paintings, calligraphies, and antiquities on a large scale; promoted Daoism; and involved himself in the training of court artists, the layout of gardens, and reforms of music and medicine. The quarter century when Huizong ruled is just as fascinating. The greatly enlarged scholar-official class had come into its own but was deeply divided by factional strife. The long struggle between the Chinese state and its northern neighbors entered a new phase when Song proved unable to defend itself against the newly emergent Jurchen state of Jin. Huizong and thousands of members of his family and court were taken captive, and the Song dynasty had to recreate itself in the South.
Structures of Governance in Song Dynasty China, 960–1279 CE
Author: Charles Hartman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009235648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 467
Book Description
A groundbreaking revisionist history of the workings of governance in Imperial China centered on the Song Dynasty (960-1279 BCE).
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009235648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 467
Book Description
A groundbreaking revisionist history of the workings of governance in Imperial China centered on the Song Dynasty (960-1279 BCE).
China
Author: John Lagerwey
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888028049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Over the last 40 years, our vision of Chinese culture and history has been transformed by the discovery of the role of religion in Chinese state-making and in local society. The Daoist religion, in particular, long despised as "superstitious," has recovered its place as "the native higher religion." But while the Chinese state tried from the fifth century on to construct an orthodoxy based on Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, local society everywhere carved out for itself its own geomantically defined space and organized itself around local festivals in honor of gods of its own choosing-gods who were often invented and then represented by illiterate mediums. Looking at China from the point of view of elite or popular culture therefore produces very different results.--John Lagerwey has done extensive fieldwork on local society and its festivals. This book represents a first attempt to use this new research to integrate top-down and bottom-up views of Chinese society, culture, and history. It should be of interest to a wide range of China specialists, students of religion and popular culture, as well as participants in the ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue between historians and anthropologists.--John Lagerwey is professor of Daoist history at the ?cole Pratique des Hautes ?tudes and of Chinese studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is author of Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History and editor of the 30-volume "Traditional Hakka Society Series" as well as the recently published four-volume set Early Chinese Religion.-----
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888028049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Over the last 40 years, our vision of Chinese culture and history has been transformed by the discovery of the role of religion in Chinese state-making and in local society. The Daoist religion, in particular, long despised as "superstitious," has recovered its place as "the native higher religion." But while the Chinese state tried from the fifth century on to construct an orthodoxy based on Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, local society everywhere carved out for itself its own geomantically defined space and organized itself around local festivals in honor of gods of its own choosing-gods who were often invented and then represented by illiterate mediums. Looking at China from the point of view of elite or popular culture therefore produces very different results.--John Lagerwey has done extensive fieldwork on local society and its festivals. This book represents a first attempt to use this new research to integrate top-down and bottom-up views of Chinese society, culture, and history. It should be of interest to a wide range of China specialists, students of religion and popular culture, as well as participants in the ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue between historians and anthropologists.--John Lagerwey is professor of Daoist history at the ?cole Pratique des Hautes ?tudes and of Chinese studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is author of Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History and editor of the 30-volume "Traditional Hakka Society Series" as well as the recently published four-volume set Early Chinese Religion.-----
AJi'an Literati and the Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China
Author: Anne Gerritsen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004156038
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Book Description
Drawing on largely local sources, including local gazetteers and literati inscriptions for religious sites, this book offers a comprehensive examination of what it means to be 'local' during the Southern Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties in Ji'an prefecture (Jiangxi). It argues that 'belonging locally' was important to Ji'an literati throughout this period. How they achieved that, however, changed significantly. Southern Song and Yuan literati wrote about religious sites from within their local communities, but their early Ming counterparts wrote about local temples from their posts at the capital, seeking to transform local sites from a distance. By the late Ming, temples had been superseded by other sites of local activism, including community compacts, lineage prefaces, and community covenants.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004156038
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Book Description
Drawing on largely local sources, including local gazetteers and literati inscriptions for religious sites, this book offers a comprehensive examination of what it means to be 'local' during the Southern Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties in Ji'an prefecture (Jiangxi). It argues that 'belonging locally' was important to Ji'an literati throughout this period. How they achieved that, however, changed significantly. Southern Song and Yuan literati wrote about religious sites from within their local communities, but their early Ming counterparts wrote about local temples from their posts at the capital, seeking to transform local sites from a distance. By the late Ming, temples had been superseded by other sites of local activism, including community compacts, lineage prefaces, and community covenants.
Religion and Chinese Society Vol. 2
Author: John Lagerwey
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Book Description
Thirty years ago, Hu Shih's views of Chinese society and history were representative of Sinology in general: China itself had no native religion, just local customs; its only real religion was an import, Buddhism. These views have now been completely overturned, with massive implications for our understanding not only of China but also of humanity as a whole: it is no longer possible to imagine that at least one major traditional society constructed and construed itself without reference to a non-mundane world that permeated every facet of society, and it therefore becomes indispensable for students of China to take the history of Chinese religion into account and for students of religion to take into account the Chinese experience of and Chinese categories for dealing with religious phenomena. The present volumes contain a selection of twenty-one essays presented in a conference convened jointly by the Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient and the Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, on "Religion and Chinese Society: The Transformation of a Field and Its Implications for the Study of Chinese Culture" held on May 29-June 2, 2000. The collection aims at providing as wide a coverage as possible of recent research in the history of Chinese religion and seeks to draw some tentative conclusions about the implications for the study of Chinese religion and society in general.
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Book Description
Thirty years ago, Hu Shih's views of Chinese society and history were representative of Sinology in general: China itself had no native religion, just local customs; its only real religion was an import, Buddhism. These views have now been completely overturned, with massive implications for our understanding not only of China but also of humanity as a whole: it is no longer possible to imagine that at least one major traditional society constructed and construed itself without reference to a non-mundane world that permeated every facet of society, and it therefore becomes indispensable for students of China to take the history of Chinese religion into account and for students of religion to take into account the Chinese experience of and Chinese categories for dealing with religious phenomena. The present volumes contain a selection of twenty-one essays presented in a conference convened jointly by the Ecole francaise d'Extreme-Orient and the Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, on "Religion and Chinese Society: The Transformation of a Field and Its Implications for the Study of Chinese Culture" held on May 29-June 2, 2000. The collection aims at providing as wide a coverage as possible of recent research in the history of Chinese religion and seeks to draw some tentative conclusions about the implications for the study of Chinese religion and society in general.
Song Dynasty
Author:
Publisher: PediaPress
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
Publisher: PediaPress
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
Visual and Material Cultures in Middle Period China
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004349375
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Book Description
Eight studies examine key features of Chinese visual and material cultures, ranging from tomb design, metalware, ceramic pillows, and bronze mirrors, to printed illustrations, calligraphic rubbings, colophons, and paintings on Buddhist, landscape, and narrative themes. Questions addressed include how artists and artisans made their works, the ways both popular literature and market forces could shape ways of looking, and how practices and imagery spread across regions. The authors connect visual materials to funeral and religious practices, drama, poetry, literati life, travel, and trade, showing ways visual images and practices reflected, adapted to, and reproduced the culture and society around them. Readers will gain a stronger appreciation of the richness of the visual and material cultures of Middle Period China.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004349375
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Book Description
Eight studies examine key features of Chinese visual and material cultures, ranging from tomb design, metalware, ceramic pillows, and bronze mirrors, to printed illustrations, calligraphic rubbings, colophons, and paintings on Buddhist, landscape, and narrative themes. Questions addressed include how artists and artisans made their works, the ways both popular literature and market forces could shape ways of looking, and how practices and imagery spread across regions. The authors connect visual materials to funeral and religious practices, drama, poetry, literati life, travel, and trade, showing ways visual images and practices reflected, adapted to, and reproduced the culture and society around them. Readers will gain a stronger appreciation of the richness of the visual and material cultures of Middle Period China.