Author: Ennin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781621386520
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 490
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Book Description
This book is the first complete translation into any modern language of the diary kept by Ennin, a Japanese Buddhist monk who traveled to China in AD 838 in search of new religious texts and further enlightenment in his faith. Ennin tells the memorable story of the hazards of sea travel in the ninth century and of his extensive journeys by foot and by riverboat throughout Northern China. In intimate detail, he describes life in the cities and monasteries of T'ang China, the ways of Chinese officialdom, secular festivals, and public events. He depicts Buddhism as a living religion just at the point when it reached its apogee in China, and offers the most authoritative account available of the great religious persecution of the 840's, which was so critical a turning point in Chinese history. Among the earliest diaries in Japanese literature, Ennin's immersive description of ninth-century China represents one of the first foreign eyewitness accounts of everyday life there. Despite its historical importance, Ennin's Diary has been long out of print, and it is our pleasure to make this great work available once again to the public. With a new foreword by Valerie Hansen, the modern reader will find this account more accessible and engaging than ever.
Author: Edwin O. Reischauer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781621386537
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
The perfect companion for Ennin's Diary, Ennin's Travels serves as perhaps the most accurate and detailed account of the extraordinary civilization that flourished in China more than a thousand years.
Author: 円仁
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 490
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Book Description
Author: David Abulafia
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199934983
Category : Navigation
Languages : en
Pages : 1115
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Book Description
"David Abulafia's new book guides readers along the world's greatest bodies of water to reveal their primary role in human history. The main protagonists are the three major oceans-the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian-which together comprise the majority of the earth's water and cover over half of its surface. Over time, as passage through them gradually extended and expanded, linking first islands and then continents, maritime networks developed, evolving from local exploration to lines of regional communication and commerce and eventually to major arteries. These waterways carried goods, plants, livestock, and of course people-free and enslaved-across vast expanses, transforming and ultimately linking irrevocably the economies and cultures of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas"--
Author: Yiwen Li
Publisher:
ISBN: 1009303112
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Between 839 and 1403 CE, there was a six-century lapse in diplomatic relations between present-day China and Japan. This hiatus in what is known as the tribute system has led to an assumption that there was little contact between the two countries in this period. Yiwen Li debunks this assumption, arguing instead that a vibrant Sino-Japanese trade network flourished in this period as Buddhist monks and merchants fostered connections across maritime East Asia. Based on a close examination of sources in multiple languages, including poems and letters, transmitted images and objects, and archaeological discoveries, Li presents a vivid and dynamic picture of the East Asian maritime world. She shows how this Buddhist trade network operated outside of the framework of the tribute system and, through novel interpretations of Buddhist records, provides a new understanding of the relationship between Buddhism and commerce.
Author: Anaïs Nin
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547540787
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 443
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Book Description
The trailblazing memoirist and author of Henry & June recounts her relationships with Henry Miller and others—including her own father. Anaïs Nin wrote in her uncensored diaries like they were a broad-minded confidante with whom she shared the liberating psychosexual dramas of her life. In this continuation of her notorious Henry & June, she recounts a particularly turbulent period between 1932 and 1934, and the men who dominated it: her protective husband, her therapist, and the poet Antonin Artaud. However, most consuming of all is novelist Henry Miller—a man whose genius, said Anaïs, was so demonic it could drive people insane. Here too, recounted in extraordinary detail, is the sexual affair she had with her father. At once loving, exciting, and vengeful, it was the ultimate social transgression for which Anaïs would eventually seek absolution from her analysts. “Before Lena Dunham there was Anaïs Nin. Like Dunham, she’s been accused of narcissism, sociopathy, and sexual perversion time and again. Yet even that comparison undercuts the strangeness and bravery of her work, for Nin was the first of her kind. And, like all truly unique talents, she was worshipped by some, hated by many, and misunderstood by most . . . A woman who’d spent decades on the bleeding edge of American intellectual life, a woman who had been a respected colleague of male writers who pushed the boundaries of acceptable sex writing. Like many great . . . experimentalists, she wrote for a world that did not yet exist, and so helped to bring it into being.” —The Guardian Includes an introduction by Rupert Pole
Author: John Kieschnick
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824818418
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
In an attempt to reconstruct an elusive aspect of the medieval Chinese imagination, The Eminent Monk examines biographies of Chinese Buddhist monks, from the uncompromising ascetic to the unfathomable wonder-worker. While analyzing images of the monk in medieval China, the author addresses some questions encountered along the way: What are we to make of accounts in “eminent monk” collections of deviant monks who violate monastic precepts? Who wrote biographies of monks and who read them? How did different segments of Chinese society contend for the image of the monk and which image prevailed? By placing biographies of monks in the context of Chinese political and religious rhetoric, The Eminent Monk explores both the role of Buddhist literature in Chinese history and the monastic imagination that inspired this literature.
Author: Laura Nader
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520285786
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 472
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Book Description
Over the past few centuries, as Western civilization has enjoyed an expansive and flexible geographic domain, Westerners have observed other cultures with little interest in a return gaze. In turn, these other civilizations have been similarly disinclined when they have held sway. Clearly, though, an external frame of reference outstrips introspection—we cannot see ourselves as others see us. Unprecedented in its scope, What the Rest Think of the West provides a rich historical look through the eyes of outsiders as they survey and scrutinize the politics, science, technology, religion, family practices, and gender roles of civilizations not their own. The book emphasizes the broader figurative meaning of looking west in the scope of history. Focusing on four civilizations—Islamic, Japanese, Chinese, and South Asian—Nader has collected observations made over centuries by scholars, diplomats, missionaries, travelers, merchants, and students reflecting upon their own “Wests.” These writings derive from a range of purposes and perspectives, such as the seventh-century Chinese Buddhist who goes west to India, the missionary from Baghdad who travels up the Volga in the tenth century and meets the Vikings, and the Egyptian imam who in 1826 is sent to Paris to study the French. The accounts variously express critique, adoration, admiration, and fear, and are sometimes humorous, occasionally disturbing, at times controversial, and always enlightening. With informative introductions to each of the selections, Laura Nader initiates conversations about the power of representational practices.
Author:
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231114417
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 1284
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Book Description
Donald Keene, a noted authority in the field, offers a guide through the first 900 years of Japanese literature. This period not only defined the unique properties of Japanese prose and prosody, but also produced some of its greatest works.
Author: Fred Reinhard Dallmayr
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791430699
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
Explores some steps toward non-assimilative encounters in the "global village."
