Dice and Gods on the Silk Road

Dice and Gods on the Silk Road PDF Author: Brandon Dotson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004464379
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
What do dice and gods have in common? What is the relationship between dice divination and dice gambling? This interdisciplinary collaboration situates the tenth-century Chinese Buddhist “Divination of Maheśvara” within a deep Chinese backstory of divination with dice and numbers going back to at least the 4th century BCE. Simultaneously, the authors track this specific method of dice divination across the Silk Road and into ancient India through a detailed study of the material culture, poetics, and ritual processes of dice divination in Chinese, Tibetan, and Indian contexts. The result is an extended meditation on the unpredictable movements of gods, dice, divination books, and divination users across the various languages, cultures, and religions of the Silk Road.

Dice and Gods on the Silk Road

Dice and Gods on the Silk Road PDF Author: Brandon Dotson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004464379
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
What do dice and gods have in common? What is the relationship between dice divination and dice gambling? This interdisciplinary collaboration situates the tenth-century Chinese Buddhist “Divination of Maheśvara” within a deep Chinese backstory of divination with dice and numbers going back to at least the 4th century BCE. Simultaneously, the authors track this specific method of dice divination across the Silk Road and into ancient India through a detailed study of the material culture, poetics, and ritual processes of dice divination in Chinese, Tibetan, and Indian contexts. The result is an extended meditation on the unpredictable movements of gods, dice, divination books, and divination users across the various languages, cultures, and religions of the Silk Road.

Handbook of Divination and Prognostication in China

Handbook of Divination and Prognostication in China PDF Author: Michael Lackner
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004514260
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 570

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Book Description
The first book that systematically explores the manifold aspects of divination and prognostication in traditional and modern China.

Playing with Reality

Playing with Reality PDF Author: Kelly Clancy
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593538188
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
A wide-ranging intellectual history that reveals how important games have been to human progress, and what’s at stake when we forget what games we’re really playing. We play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to make predictions about the future. Games are an essential aspect of humanity and a powerful tool for modeling reality. They’re also a lot of fun. But games can be dangerous, especially when we mistake the model worlds of games for reality itself and let gamification co-opt human decision making. Playing with Reality explores the riveting history of games since the Enlightenment, weaving an unexpected path through military theory, political science, evolutionary biology, the development of computers and AI, cutting-edge neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. Neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy shows how intertwined games have been with the arc of history. War games shaped the outcomes of real wars in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. Game theory warped our understanding of human behavior and brought us to the brink of annihilation—yet still underlies basic assumptions in economics, politics, and technology design. We used games to teach computers how to learn for themselves, and now we are designing games that will determine the shape of society and future of democracy. In this revelatory new work, Clancy makes the bold argument that the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature and our actions.

Tibetan Magic

Tibetan Magic PDF Author: Cameron Bailey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350354961
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This book focuses on the theme of magic in Tibetan contexts, encompassing both pre-modern and modern text-cultures as well as contemporary practices. It offers a new understanding of the identity and role of magical specialists in both historical and contemporary contexts. Combining the theoretical approaches of anthropology, ethnography, religious and textual studies, the book aims to shed light on experiences, practices and practitioners that have been frequently marginalized by the normative mainstream monastic Buddhist traditions and Western Buddhist scholarship, which focuses primarily on meditation and philosophy. The book explores the intersection between magic/folk practices and Tantra, a complex, socio-religious phenomenon associated not only with the religious and political elites who sponsored it, but also with 'marginal' ethnic groups and social milieus, as well as with lay communities at large, who resorted to ritual agents to fulfil their worldly needs.

Living Folk Religions

Living Folk Religions PDF Author: Sravana Borkataky-Varma
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000878627
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Living Folk Religions presents cutting-edge contributions from a range of disciplines to examine religious folkways across cultures. This collection embraces the non-elite and non-sanctioned, the oral, fluid, accessible, evolving religions of people (volk) on the ground. Split into five sections, this book covers: What Is Folk Religion? Spirit Beings and Deities Performance and Ritual Praxis Possession and Exorcism Health, Healing, and Lifestyle Topics include demons and ambivalent gods, tree and nature spirits, revolutionary renunciates, oral lore, possession and exorcism, divination, midwestern American spiritualism, festivals, queer sexuality among ritual specialists, the dead returned, vernacular religions, diaspora adaptations, esoteric influences underlying public cultures, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), music and sound experiences, death rituals, and body and wellness cultures. Living Folk Religions is a must-read for those studying Comparative Religions, World Religions, and Religious Studies, and it will also interest specialists and general readers, particularly enthusiastic readers of Anthropology, Folklore and Folk Studies, Global Studies, and Sociology.

Medicine and Healing in Ancient East Asia

Medicine and Healing in Ancient East Asia PDF Author: Constance A. Cook
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108981224
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
This Element first discusses the creation of transmitted medical canons that are generally dated from early imperial times through the medieval era and then, by way of contrast, provides translations and analyses of non-transmitted texts from the pre-imperial late Shang and Zhou eras, the early imperial Qin and Han eras, and then a brief discussion covering the period through the 11th-c. CE. The Element focuses on the evolution of concepts, illness categories, and diagnostic and treatment methodologies evident in the newly discovered material and reveals a side of medical practice not reflected in the canons. It is both traditions of healing, the canons and the currents of local practice revealed by these texts, that influenced the development of East Asian medicine more broadly. The local practices show there was no real evolution from magical to non-magical medicine. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Dice of the Gods

The Dice of the Gods PDF Author: Lucian De Zilwa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description


From Chang'an To Athens: The Ancient Sports Cultures Of The Silk Road

From Chang'an To Athens: The Ancient Sports Cultures Of The Silk Road PDF Author: Qilin Sun
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811272182
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
This book collects and studies the colourful sports and history of countries along the historical Silk Road from Chang'an to Athens, including a wide range of sports ranging from polo and chess to archery and lion dance. It will examine, research and analyse a large number of sports cultural relics and documentary materials unearthed by archaeology in recent years, and comprehensively collects and classifies these sports materials which belong to different countries along the Silk Road. In doing so, it aims to promote the sports forms of these countries and set the context of sports development, so as to raise awareness about the exchange and dissemination of sports culture between ancient China and Western countries.

On the Ancient History of the Silk Road

On the Ancient History of the Silk Road PDF Author: Chuanming Rui
Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company
ISBN: 9789811232961
Category : Asia, Central
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Silk Road was a network of trade routes which connected the East and West, and was central to the economic, cultural, political, and religious interactions between these regions from the 2nd century BCE to the 18th century. This book studies various aspects of the ancient history of the silk road. The 16 chapters in the book are divided into three parts: Silk Road and The Nomads; The Sogdians, the Special Role on the Silk Road; Silk Road and the Spread of Religious Ideas. It studies the purpose and effects of silk exportation, the intermarriage between China and other ethnic groups, the origin of the Turks, the influence and domination of the Sogdians on the nomads, and the religious ideas, especially the Manicheism, spreading across the Silk Road.

Jaya's Golden Necklace

Jaya's Golden Necklace PDF Author: Peter Linenthal
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1614292329
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 21

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Book Description
Jaya's Golden Necklace is the first children's book to tell of the origin and cultural roots of the beloved Buddha image. A story of East and West, it teaches lessons and entertains while also opening a door into Asian culture. Set along the Silk Road, Jaya's journey highlights the interconnected and multicultural worlds of yesterday and today.