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This handbook aims to facilitate a greater understanding of the OECD statistics and indicators produced and so allow for their more effective use in policy analysis.
As their ubiquitous presence in Tokugawa artwork and literature suggests, images of bourgeois wives and courtesans took on iconic status as representations of two opposing sets of female values. Their differences, both real and idealized, indicate the full range of female roles and sexual values affirmed by Tokugawa society, with Buddhist celibacy on the one end and the relatively free sexual associations of the urban and rural lower classes on the other. The roles of courtesan and bourgeois housewife were each tied to a set of value-based behaviors, the primary institution to which a woman belonged, and rituals that sought to model a woman’s comportment in her interactions with men and fi...
The Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China contains the first complete translation of China's earliest and most influential monastic code. The twelfth-century text Chanyuan qinggui (Rules of Purity for the Chan Monastery) provides us with a wealth of detail on all aspects of life in public Buddhist monasteries during the Sung (960-1279). Part One consists of Yifa's overview of the development of monastic regulations in Chinese Buddhist history, a biography of the text's author, and an analysis of the social and cultural context of premodern Chinese Buddhist monasticism. Of particular importance are the interconnections made between Chan traditions and the dual heritages of Chinese culture and Indian Buddhist Vinaya. Although much of the text's source material is traced directly to the Vinayas and the works of the Vinaya advocate Daoan (312-385) and the Lu master Daoxuan (596-667), the Chanyuan qinggui includes elements foreign to the original Vinaya texts - elements incorporated from Chinese governmental policies and traditional Chinese etiquette. Following the translator's overview is a complete translation of the text, extensively annotated.
Explores the significant impact of this countercultural figure of postwar Japan.
The tradition of Chan Buddhism—more popularly known as Zen—has been romanticized throughout its history. In this book, John R. McRae shows how modern critical techniques, supported by recent manuscript discoveries, make possible a more skeptical, accurate, and—ultimately—productive assessment of Chan lineages, teaching, fundraising practices, and social organization. Synthesizing twenty years of scholarship, Seeing through Zen offers new, accessible analytic models for the interpretation of Chan spiritual practices and religious history. Writing in a lucid and engaging style, McRae traces the emergence of this Chinese spiritual tradition and its early figureheads, Bodhidharma and the...
Explores how Soto monks between the 13th and 16th centuries developed new forms of monastic organization and Zen instructions and new applications for Zen rituals within lay life; how these innovations helped shape rural society; and how remnants of them remain in the modern Soto school, now the lar
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.
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Tracing the evolution of state military institutions from the seventh through the twelfth centuries, this book challenges much of the received wisdom of Western scholarship on the origins and early development of warriors in Japan. This prelude to the rise of the samurai, who were to become the masters of Japan's medieval and early modern eras, was initiated when the imperial court turned for its police and military protection to hired swords--professional mercenaries largely drawn from the elites of provincial society. By the middle of the tenth century, this provincial military order had been handed a virtual monopoly of Japan's martial resources. Yet it was not until near the end of the t...