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The Linji Lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy
The Linji lu, or Record of Linji, ranks among the most famous and influential texts of the Chan and Zen traditions. Ostensibly containing the teachings of the Tang dynasty figure Linji Yixuan, the text has generally been accepted at face value, as reliable records of the teachings of this historical figure. In this book, Albert Welter offers the first systematic study of the Linji lu in a western language. Welter places the Linji lu in its historical context, showing how the text was manipulated over time by the Linji faction. Rather than recording the teachings of the illustrious patriarch of legend, the text reflects the motivations of Linji-faction descendants in the Song dynasty (9601279). The story of the Linji lu is not simply the story of one heroic figure, Linji Yixuan, but the story of an entire movement that sought validation through retrospective image making. The success of this effort is seen in Chan's rise to prominence. Drawing on the findings of Japanese scholars, Welter moves beyond the minutiae of textual analysis to place the development of Linji lu within the broader forces shaping the development of the Chinese Records of Sayings literary genre as a whole.
Women in Tang China
This important book provides the first comprehensive survey of women in China during the Sui and Tang dynasties from the sixth through tenth centuries CE. Bret Hinsch provides rich insight into female life in the medieval era, ranging from political power, wealth, and work to family, religious roles, and virtues. He explores women’s lived experiences but also delves into the subjective side of their emotional life and the ideals they pursued. Deeply researched, the book draws on a wide range of sources, including standard histories, poetry, prose literature, and epigraphic sources such as epitaphs, commemorative religious inscriptions, and Dunhuang documents. Building on the best Western and Japanese scholarship, Hinsch also draws heavily on Chinese scholarship, most of which is unknown outside China. As the first study in English about women in the medieval era, this groundbreaking work will open a new window into Chinese history for Western readers.
Diamond Sutra Narratives
Contextualizing the sutra within a milieu of intense religious and cultural experimentation, this volume unravels the sudden rise of Diamond Sutra devotion in the Tang dynasty against the backdrop of a range of social, political, and literary activities. Through the translation and exploration of a substantial body of narratives extolling the efficacy of the sutra, it explores the complex social history of lay Buddhism by focusing on how the laity might have conceived of the sutra and devoted themselves to it. Corroborated by various sources, it reveals the cult’s effect on medieval Chinese religiosity in the activities of an empowered laity, who modified and produced parasutraic texts, prompting the monastic establishment to accommodate to the changes they brought about.
China and her biographical dimensions
Das Buch ist dem Andenken des 1999 verstorbenen renommierten Bochumer Sinologen Helmut Martin gewidmet. Namhafte Chinawissenschaftler aus der ganzen Welt spannen in ihren Beitragen einen Bogen, der das umfangreiche ?uvre der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit Helmut Martins widerspiegelt. Nach einer personlich gehaltenen Einfuhrung zu Leben und Werk Helmut Martins konzentriert sich der Themenschwerpunkt des Bandes auf (auto-)biographische Fragestellungen in Literatur, Wissenschaft, Politik und Wirtschaft des traditionellen und des modernen Chinas. Die chinesische und taiwanesische Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts sind hierbei besonders ins Blickfeld geruckt. Aber auch zu linguistischen Fragestellungen und den Themen Ubersetzung, Chinarezeption und -perzeption sind eine Reihe wichtiger Aufsatze enthalten. Im Anhang des Buches findet sich ein Gesamtverzeichnis der Schriften von und uber Helmut Martin.
The Talent of Shu
The Talent of Shu reconstructs the intellectual world of early medieval Sichuan through a critical biography of Qiao Zhou, a noted classicist, historian, and official of Shu-Han. Countering conceptions of Sichuan as an intellectual backwater, author J. Michael Farmer provides an analytical narrative history of the significant intellectual and scholarly activity in the region during the late second through third centuries CE. Qiao Zhou stands as an apt figure to represent the intellectual world of third-century Sichuan. An heir to a long-standing regional intellectual tradition, he was trained in political prophesy, canonical studies, and ancient history, and in true Confucian fashion, employed these skills in the service of the state. While some of Qiao's scholarship, as well as his political engagement, was conservative, he also stands as an innovator in the fields of canonical and historical criticism and local history. As such, he embodies not only the scholarly tradition of Sichuan, but also the intellectual transitions of the age.
Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China
Why did traditional Chinese literati so often identify themselves with women in their writing? What can this tell us about how they viewed themselves as men and how they understood masculinity? How did their attitudes in turn shape the martial heroes and other masculine models they constructed? Martin Huang attempts to answer these questions in this valuable work on manhood in late imperial China. He focuses on the ambivalent and often paradoxical role played by women and the feminine in the intricate negotiating process of male gender identity in late imperial cultural discourses. Two common strategies for constructing and negotiating masculinity were adopted in many of the works examined h...
Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables
In 1967 a body of Chinese texts was discovered in a tomb outside Shanghai. It contained a set of unique examples of an oral genre favoured by unlearned classes in the late imperial period (15th century), best called 'chantefables', appearing at the beginning of a profound historical shift which resulted in a broadening of the uses of writing and printing in China. These texts are now generally seen to occupy an important place in the development of Chinese literature as a whole, and of Chinese vernacular literature in particular. In the first monographic treatment of all the chantefable corpus in English the author, by examination from a more anthropological view, points out that these 'oral...
Out of the Margins
The novel Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan), China's earliest full-length narrative in vernacular prose, first appeared in print in the sixteenth century. The tale of one hundred and eight bandit heroes evolved from a long oral tradition; in its novelized form, it played a pivotal role in the rise of Chinese vernacular fiction, which flourished during the late Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) periods. Liangyan Ge's multidimensional study considers the evolution of Water Margin and the rise of vernacular fiction against the background of the vernacularization of premodern Chinese literature as a whole. This gradual and arduous process, as the book convincingly shows, was driven by sustained co...
Fables for the Patriarchs
This provocative study explores issues of gender in Tang-dynasty literature and culture, and their meaning for society as a whole. Drawing on a comprehensive range of historical, literary, and social texts, Jowen R. Tung unravels the complex mechanisms of one of the world's oldest patriarchal systems. With remarkable depth and originality of analysis, the author persuasively applies contemporary feminist theory to Tang dynasty poetry, narrative, and anecdotal literature. Interpreting both well-known and obscure works in fresh ways, Tung sheds light on areas long left shadowed or ignored. In the process, she paints a far darker picture of a period traditionally known as the 'golden age.'
