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Through a detailed analysis of epistolary writing, A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship: Spiritual Ambitions, Intellectual Debates, and Epistolary Connections brings to life the Buddhist discourse of a network of lay disciples who debated the value of Chan versus Pure Land, sudden versus gradual enlightenment, adherence to Buddhist precepts, and animal welfare. By highlighting the differences between their mentor, the monk Zhuhong 袾宏 (1535-1615), and his nemesis, the Yangming Confucian Zhou Rudeng 周汝登 (1547-1629), this work confronts long-held scholarly views of Confucian dominance to conclude that many classically educated, elite men found Buddhist practices a far more attractive option. Their intellectual debates, self-cultivation practices, and interpersonal relations helped shape the contours of late sixteenth-century Buddhist culture.
This nuanced study traces how Chinese came to view death as an opportunity to fashion and convey social identities and memories during the medieval period (200–1000) and the Tang dynasty (618–907), specifically. As Chinese society became increasingly multicultural and multireligious, to achieve these aims people selectively adopted, portrayed, and interpreted various acts of remembrance. Included in these were new and evolving burial, mourning, and commemorative practices: joint-burials of spouses, extended family members, and coreligionists; relocation and reburial of bodies; posthumous marriage and divorce; interment of a summoned soul in the absence of a body; and many changes to the ...
For close to a thousand years Amida’s Pure Land, a paradise of perfect ease and equality, was the most powerful image of shared happiness circulating in the Japanese imagination. In the late nineteenth century, some Buddhist thinkers sought to reinterpret the Pure Land in ways that would allow it speak to modern Japan. Their efforts succeeded in ways they could not have predicted. During the war years, economist Kawakami Hajime, philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, and historian Ienaga Saburō—left-leaning thinkers with no special training in doctrinal studies and no strong connection to any Buddhist institution—seized upon modernized images of Shinran in exile and a transcendent Western Paradise...
"This book tells the story of Chinese Zen master Yinyuan's journey from China to Japan amid the turmoil of the Manchu conquest of China. Despite tremendous difficulties, he persuaded the Shogun to build for him a new monastery (Manpukuji) in Kyoto and founded his own tradition called Obaku"--
In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.
Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province, and the surrounding environs have one of the richest Buddhist cultures in China. In A Tale of Two Stupas, Albert Welter tells the story of Hangzhou Buddhism through the conceptions, erections, and resurrections of Yongming Stupa, dedicated to the memory of one of Hangzhou's leading Buddhist figures, and Leifeng Pagoda, built to house stupa relics of the historical Buddha. Welter delves into the intricacies of these two sites and pays particular attention to their origins and rebirths. These sites have suffered devastation and endured long periods of neglect, yet both have been resurrected and re-resurrected during their histories and have resumed meaningful places in the contemporary Hangzhou landscape, a mark of their power and endurance. A Tale of Two Stupas adopts a site-specific, regional approach in order to show how the dynamics of initial conception, resurrection, and re-resurrection work, and what that might tell us about the nature of Hangzhou and Chinese Buddhism.
Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a periodical publication which offers a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading philosophers in North America, Europe, and Australasia, it publishes exemplary papers in epistemology, broadly construed. Topics within its purview include: - traditional epistemological questions concerning the nature of belief, justification, and knowledge, the status of scepticism, the nature of the a priori, etc; - new developments in epistemology, including movements such as naturalized epistemology, feminist epistemology, social epistemology, and virtue epistemology, and app...
This volume sets out to explore the world of domestic devotions and is premised on the assumption that the home was a central space of religious practice and experience throughout the early modern world. The contributions to this book, which deal with themes dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, tell of the intimate relationship between humans and the sacred within the walls of the home. The volume demonstrates that the home cannot be studied in isolation: the sixteen essays, that encompass religious history, the histories of art and architecture, material culture, literary history, and social and cultural history, instead point individually and collectively to the porosity of the home and its connectedness with other institutions and broader communities. Contributors: Dotan Arad, Kathleen Ashley, Martin Christ, Hildegard Diemberger, Marco Faini, Suzanna Ivanič, Debra Kaplan, Marion H. Katz, Soyeon Kim, Hester Lees-Jeffries, Borja Franco Llopis, Alessia Meneghin, Francisco J. Moreno Díaz del Campo, Cristina Osswald, Kathleen M. Ryor, Igor Sosa Mayor, Hanneke van Asperen, Torsten Wollina, and Jungyoon Yang.
This groundbreaking work provides an original and deeply knowledgeable overview of Chinese women and gender relations during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). Bret Hinsch explores in detail the central aspects of female life in this era, including family and marriage, motherhood, political power, work, inheritance, education, religious roles, and virtues. He considers not only the lived world of women, but also delves into their emotional life and the ideals they pursued. Drawing on a wide range of Western and Chinese primary and secondary sources—including standard histories, poetry, prose literature, and epitaphs—Hinsch makes an important period of Chinese women’s history accessible to Western readers.
This Special Issue engages with questions of theory and methods in the comparative, cross-cultural study of hagiographical sources. As such, it offers, first and foremost, the venue for conducting a scientific discussion on a (re)definition of "hagiography". It also allows for the identification of shared approaches and methodologies in the study of material that may be apprehended through this categorization, as an effective strategy for the study of religious phenomena. To achieve this, the present volume brings together a selected number of scholars, whose work focuses on the theoretical study of "hagiography" and the historical examination of hagiographical sources. In this Special Issue, five core essays put forward propositions for the comparative and cross-cultural (re)definition of "hagiography", to which further contributors respond, eventually providing a vibrant collaborative debate on a core theoretical and methodological issue in religious studies at large.