The Weaving of Mantra

The Weaving of Mantra PDF Author: Ryûichi Abé
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231528870
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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Book Description
The great Buddhist priest Kûkai (774-835) is credited with the introduction and establishment of tantric -or esoteric -Buddhism in early ninth-century Japan. In Ryûichi Abé examines this important religious figure -neglected in modern academic literatu

The Weaving of Mantra

The Weaving of Mantra PDF Author: Ryûichi Abé
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231528870
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 620

Get Book Here

Book Description
The great Buddhist priest Kûkai (774-835) is credited with the introduction and establishment of tantric -or esoteric -Buddhism in early ninth-century Japan. In Ryûichi Abé examines this important religious figure -neglected in modern academic literatu

The Weaving of Mantra

The Weaving of Mantra PDF Author: Ryūichi Abe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231112864
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
"The Weaving of Mantra embeds Kukai within the fabric of political and social life in ninth-century Japan and explains how esoteric Buddhism played a critical role in many societal changes in Japan - from the growth of monasteries into major feudal powers to the formation of the native phonetic alphabet, kana. As Abe illustrates, Kukai's writings and the new type of discourse they spawned also marked Japan's transition from the ancient order to the medieval world, replacing Confucianism as the ideology of the state."--BOOK JACKET.

Strange Names of God

Strange Names of God PDF Author: Sangkeun Kim
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820471303
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
One of the most precarious and daunting tasks for sixteenth-century European missionaries in the cross-cultural mission frontiers was translating the name of «God» (Deus) into the local language. When the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) introduced the Chinese term Shangti as the semantic equivalent of Deus, he made one of the most innovative cross-cultural missionary translations. Ricci's employment of Shangti was neither a simple rewording of a Chinese term nor the use of a loan-word, but was indeed a risk-taking «identification» of the Christian God with the Confucian Most-High, Shangti. Strange Names of God investigates the historical progress of the semantic configuration of Shangti as the divine name of the Christian God in China by focusing on Chinese intellectuals' reaction to the strangely translated Chinese name of God.

Japanese Mandalas

Japanese Mandalas PDF Author: Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824820817
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The first broad study of Japanese mandalas to appear in a Western language, this volume interprets mandalas as sanctified realms where identification between the human and the sacred occurs. The author investigates eighth- to seventeenth-century paintings from three traditions: Esoteric Buddhism, Pure Land Buddhism, and the kami-worshipping (Shinto) tradition. It is generally recognized that many of these mandalas are connected with texts and images from India and the Himalayas. A pioneering theme of this study is that, in addition to the South Asian connections, certain paradigmatic Japanese mandalas reflect pre-Buddhist Chinese concepts, including geographical concepts. In convincing and lucid prose, ten Grotenhuis chronicles an intermingling of visual, doctrinal, ritual, and literary elements in these mandalas that has come to be seen as characteristic of the Japanese religious tradition as a whole. This beautifully illustrated work begins in the first millennium B.C.E. in China with an introduction to the Book of Documents and ends in present-day Japan at the sacred site of Kumano. Ten Grotenhuis focuses on the Diamond and Womb World mandalas of Esoteric Buddhist tradition, on the Taima mandala and other related mandalas from the Pure Land Buddhist tradition, and on mandalas associated with the kami-worshipping sites of Kasuga and Kumano. She identifies specific sacred places in Japan with sacred places in India and with Buddhist cosmic diagrams. Through these identifications, the realm of the buddhas is identified with the realms of the kami and of human beings, and Japanese geographical areas are identified with Buddhist sacred geography. Explaining why certain fundamental Japanese mandalas look the way they do and how certain visual forms came to embody the sacred, ten Grotenhuis presents works that show a complex mixture of Indian Buddhist elements, pre-Buddhist Chinese elements, Chinese Buddhist elements, and indigenous Japanese elements.

Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism

Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism PDF Author: Pamela Winfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199945551
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Pamela D. Winfield offers a fascinating juxtaposition and comparison of the thoughts of two pre-modern Japanese Buddhist masters, Kukai (774-835) and Dogen (1200-1253) on the role of imagery in the enlightenment experience.

Great Fool

Great Fool PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824862708
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Taigu Ryokan (1759-1831) remains one of the most popular figures in Japanese Buddhist history. Despite his religious and artistic sophistication, Ryokan referred to himself as "Great Fool" and refused to place himself within the cultural elite of his age. In contrast to the typical Zen master of his time, who presided over a large monastery, trained students, and produced recondite religious treatises, Ryokan followed a life of mendicancy in the countryside. Instead of delivering sermons, he expressed himself through kanshi (poems composed in classical Chinese) and waka and could typically be found playing with the village children in the course of his daily rounds of begging. Great Fool is the first study in a Western language to offer a comprehensive picture of the legendary poet-monk and his oeuvre. It includes not only an extensive collection of the master's kanshi, topically arranged to facilitate an appreciation of Ryokan's colorful world, but selections of his waka, essays, and letters. The volume also presents for the first time in English the Ryokan zenji kiwa (Curious Accounts of the Zen Master Ryokan), a firsthand source composed by a former student less than sixteen years after Ryokan's death. Although it lacks chronological order, the Curious Account is invaluable for showing how Ryokan was understood and remembered by his contemporaries. It consists of colorful anecdotes and episodes, sketches from Ryokan's everyday life. To further assist the reader, three introductory essays approach Ryokan from the diverse perspectives of his personal history and literary work.

Visible Mantra: Visualising & Writing Buddhist Mantras

Visible Mantra: Visualising & Writing Buddhist Mantras PDF Author: Jayarava
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0956692915
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The long awaited print version of the popular Buddhist mantra website: visiblemantra.org. This is a celebration of the visual forms of mantra and other varieties of sacred speech, drawing on Buddhist traditions from India, China, Japan, and Tibet. The book includes all the mantras from the website, plus a few more. Each is presented in four scripts: Siddhaṃ (Bonji 梵字), Lantsa (aka Rañjana), Devanāgarī, and Tibetan (dbu can). Plus seed-syllables, dhāraṇī and Pāli chants. All accompanied by Jayarava's meticulously researched notes and comments, and background reading drawn from Jayarava's blog. An invaluable resource for Buddhist artists, calligraphers and practitioners.

Word Embodied

Word Embodied PDF Author: Halle O'Neal
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684175887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
"In this study of the Japanese jeweled pagoda mandalas, Halle O’Neal reveals the entangled realms of sacred body, beauty, and salvation. Much of the previous scholarship on these paintings concentrates on formal analysis and iconographic study of their narrative vignettes. This has marginalized the intriguing interplay of text and image at their heart, precluding a holistic understanding of the mandalas and diluting their full import in Buddhist visual culture. Word Embodied offers an alternative methodology, developing interdisciplinary insights into the social, religious, and artistic implications of this provocative entwining of word and image.O’Neal unpacks the paintings’ revolutionary use of text as picture to show how this visual conflation mirrors important conceptual indivisibilities in medieval Japan. The textual pagoda projects the complex constellation of relics, reliquaries, scripture, and body in religious doctrine, practice, and art. Word Embodied also expands our thinking about the demands of viewing, recasting the audience as active producers of meaning and offering a novel perspective on disciplinary discussions of word and image that often presuppose an ontological divide between them. This examination of the jeweled pagoda mandalas, therefore, recovers crucial dynamics underlying Japanese Buddhist art, including invisibility, performative viewing, and the spectacular visualizations of embodiment."

The Three Treasures

The Three Treasures PDF Author: Edward Kamens
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472221043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
When the young Princess Sonshi became a Buddhist nun in the year 984, a scholar-official of the royal court was commissioned to create a guide to the Buddhist religion that would be accessible for her. He did so in the form of the illustrated works of fiction (monogatari) that appealed to women readers of her time and class. The text has survived in later manuscripts; the illustrations, if they ever existed, have not. This revised translation recreates Sonshi’s experience of receiving this multimedia presentation, with illustrations selected to help contemporary readers visualize its content and essays that provide context on the religious and cultural experience of the author. The Three Treasures is a unique document that opens a window onto the world of Buddhist religious experience—especially for women—in high classical Japan, the time of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book and Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji.

The Skull Mantra

The Skull Mantra PDF Author: Eliot Pattison
Publisher: Minotaur Books
ISBN: 1429979275
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Winner of the 2001 Edgar Award for Best First Novel, The Skull Mantra was a sensation when first published and received wide acclaim from critics and readers alike. The Skull Mantra is ranked as a novel about a people and a place--the Tibetans of the high Himalayas--as it is a gripping thriller. The corpse is missing its head and is dressed in American clothes. Found by a Tibetan prison work gang on a windy cliff, the grisly remains clearly belong to someone too important for Chinese authorities to bury and forget. So the case is handed to veteran police inspector Shan Tao Yun. Methodical, clever Shan is the best man for the job, but he too is a prisoner, deported to Tibet for offending someone high up in Beijing's power structure. Granted a temporary release, Shan is soon pulled into the Tibetan people's desperate fight for its sacred mountains and the Chinese regime's blood-soaked policies. Then, a Buddhist priest is arrested, a man Shan knows is innocent. Now time is running out for Shan to find the real killer. The Skull Mantra is the winner of the 2000 Edgar Award for Best First Novel.