Publications de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient

Publications de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Asia
Languages : en
Pages : 574

Get Book Here

Book Description

Publications de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient

Publications de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Asia
Languages : en
Pages : 574

Get Book Here

Book Description


Interpreting Southeast Asia's Past

Interpreting Southeast Asia's Past PDF Author: Peter Sharrock
Publisher: NUS Press
ISBN: 9789971694050
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Get Book Here

Book Description
Interpreting Southeast Asia's Past: Monument, Image and Text features 31 papers read at the 10th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists, held in London in September 2004. The volume covers monumental arts, sculpture and painting, epigraphy and heritage management across mainland Southeast Asia and as far south as Indonesia. New research on monumental arts includes chapters on the Bayon of Angkor and the great brick temple sites of Champa. There is an article discussing the purpose of making and erecting sacred sculptures in the ancient world and accounts of research on the sacred art of Burma, Thailand and southern China (including the first study of the few surviving Saiva images in Burma), of a spectacular find of bronze Mahayana Buddhas, and of the sculpted bronzes of the Dian culture. New research on craft goods and crafting techniques deals with ancient Khmer materials, including recently discovered ceramic kiln sites, the sandstone sources of major Khmer sculptures, and the rare remaining traces of paint, plaster and stucco on stone and brick buildings. More widely distributed goods also receive attention, including Southeast Asian glass beads, and there are contributions on Southeast Asian heritage and conservation, including research on Angkor as a living World Heritage site and discussion of a UNESCO project on the stone jars of the Plain of Jars in Laos that combines recording, safeguarding, bomb clearance, and eco-tourism development.

Literary Techniques in Old Tamil Caṅkam Poetry

Literary Techniques in Old Tamil Caṅkam Poetry PDF Author: Eva Wilden
Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag
ISBN: 9783447053358
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Get Book Here

Book Description
The present study is a step towards an historical and philologicaldescription of the founding literary tradition of Southern India. This so-called Cankam literature was composed around the beginning of the common era in a language today known as "Classical Tamil". Ten anthologies of its poetry have survived. Its literary techniques and their presuppositions are presented here in detail on the basis of an analysis of one of these anthologies, the Kur-untokai, which is a collection of 401 short love poems. While the introduction and the last chapter, on poetic style, are also meant for the general student of literature, the second and third chapters will be of interest mainly to specialists. These deal with syntax (especially particle syntax) and with the poetological background of the poetry. The formal features described include the use of formulae; the organisation of a poetic universe in terms of themes, topoi and motifs; syntactic types, such as circular construction; rhetorical fi gures, such as metaphors, similes and insets; poetic ambiguity achieved through the use of a symbolic code; puns; and intertextual allusions.

The Silk Roads

The Silk Roads PDF Author: Vadime Elisseeff
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571812223
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
A look at the cultural, or intercultural, exchange that took place in the Silk Roads and the role this has played in the shaping of cultures and civilizations.

Supernatural Agents

Supernatural Agents PDF Author: Iikka Pyysiainen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195380029
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
The cognitive science of religion is a rapidly growing field whose practitioners apply insights from advances in cognitive science in order to provide a better understanding of religious impulses, beliefs, and behaviors. In this book Ilkka Pyysiainen shows how this methodology can profitably be used in the comparative study of beliefs about superhuman agents. He begins by developing a theoretical outline of the basic, modular architecture of the human mind and especially the human capacity to understand agency. He then goes on to discuss examples of supernatural agency in detail, arguing that the human ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others forms the basis of conceptions of supernatural agents and of such social cognition in which supernatural agents are postulated as interested parties in social life. Beliefs about supernatural agency are natural, says Pyysiainen, in the sense that such concepts are used in an intuitive and automatic fashion. Two dots and a straight line below them automatically trigger the idea of a face, for example. Given that the mind consists of a host of such modular mechanisms, certain kinds of beliefs will always have a selective advantage over others. Abstract theological concepts are usually elaborate versions of such simpler and more contagious folk conceptions. Pyysiainen uses ethnographical and survey materials as well as doctrinal treatises to show that there are certain recurrent patterns in beliefs about supernatural agents both at the level of folk-religion and of formal theology.

Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks

Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks PDF Author: Jason Neelis
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004181598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines catalysts for Buddhist formation in ancient South Asia and expansion throughout and beyond the northwestern Indian subcontinent to Central Asia by investigating symbiotic relationships between networks of religious mobility and trade.

A God's Own Tale

A God's Own Tale PDF Author: Terry F. Kleeman
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791420027
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
This scripture was revealed through spirit writing in 1181. It traces Wenchang’s development through his many transformations culminating in his apotheosis as director of the Wenchang Palace and custodian of the Cinnamon Record that determines men’s and women’s fates. The god has since assumed a high position in the Taoist pantheon, has been introduced into the school system and Confucian temples, and now controls the all-important civil service examinations in China. The text translated here provides a unique window into the religious world of Traditional China. Numerous anecdotes of good- and evil-doers reveal the ethical dilemmas facing men and women of the time, from social questions like infanticide and discrimination against women to more purely religious issues such as how evil gods are punished and how China’s divergent religious traditions can be reconciled.

Borobudur

Borobudur PDF Author: John Miksic
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 1462909108
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
With vivid photography and insightful commentary, this travel pictorial shines a light on the Buddhist art and architecture of Borobudur. The glorious ninth-century Buddhist stupa of Borobudur--the largest Buddhist monument in the world--stands in the midst of the lush Kedu Plain of Central Java in Indonesia, where it is visited annually by over a million people. Borobudur contains more than a thousand exquisitely carved relief panels extending along its many terraces for a total distance of more than a kilometer. These are arranged so as to take the visitor on a spiritual journey to enlightenment, and one ascends the monument past scenes depicting the world of desire, the life story of Buddha, and the heroic deeds of other enlightened beings--finally arriving at the great circular terraces at the top of the structure that symbolizes the formless world of pure knowledge and perfection.

Indian Epigraphy

Indian Epigraphy PDF Author: Richard Salomon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195099842
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a general survey of all the inscriptional material in the Sanskrit, Prakrit, and modern Indo-Aryan languages, including donative, dedicatory, panegyric, ritual, and literary texts carved on stone, metal, and other materials. This material comprises many thousands of documents dating from a range of more than two millennia, found in India and the neighboring nations of South Asia, as well as in many parts of Southeast, central, and East Asia. The inscriptions are written, for the most part, in the Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts and their many varieties and derivatives.Inscriptional materials are of particular importance for the study of the Indian world, constituting the most detailed and accurate historical and chronological data for nearly all aspects of traditional Indian culture in ancient and medieval times. Richard Salomon surveys the entire corpus of Indo-Aryan inscriptions in terms of their contents, languages, scripts, and historical and cultural significance. He presents this material in such a way as to make it useful not only to Indologists but also non-specialists, including persons working in other aspects of Indian or South Asian studies, as well as scholars of epigraphy and ancient history and culture in other regions of the world.

Imagining the Fetus

Imagining the Fetus PDF Author: Vanessa R Sasson
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195380045
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
In contemporary Western culture, the word "fetus" introduces either a political subject or a literal, medicalized entity. Neither of these frameworks does justice to the vast array of religious literature and oral traditions from cultures around the world in which the fetus emerges as a powerful symbol or metaphor. This volume presents essays that explore the depiction of the fetus in the world's major religious traditions, finding some striking commonalities as well as intriguing differences. Among the themes that emerge is the tendency to conceive of the fetus as somehow independent of the mother's body — as in the case of the Buddha, who is described as inhabiting a palace while gestating in the womb. On the other hand, the fetus can also symbolically represent profound human needs and emotions, such as the universal experience of vulnerability. The authors note how the advent of the fetal sonogram has transformed how people everywhere imagine the unborn today, giving rise to a narrow range of decidedly literal questions about personhood, gender, and disability.