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The Taoist Body
This elegant and lucid introduction to the traditions of Taoism and the masters who transmit them will reward all those interested in China and in religions.
Linked Faiths
This collection of essays provides refreshing insights into the religious dimensions of traditional Chinese culture. Spanning two millennia, it deals with topics as varied as ritual, popular cults, puppet theatre, medicine and literature, but its bulk is devoted to Taoism.
The Taoist Canon
Taoism remains the only major religion whose canonical texts have not been systematically arranged and made available for study. This long-awaited work, a milestone in Chinese studies, catalogs and describes all existing texts within the Taoist canon. The result will not only make the entire range of existing Taoist texts accessible to scholars of religion, it will open up a crucial resource in the study of the history of China. The vast literature of the Taoist canon, or Daozang, survives in a Ming Dynasty edition of some fifteen hundred different texts. Compiled under imperial auspices and completed in 1445—with a supplement added in 1607—many of the books in the Daozang concern the hi...
Doctoring Traditions
There is considerable interest now in the contemporary lives of the so-called traditional medicines of South Asia and beyond. "Doctoring Traditions, "which examines Ayurveda in British India, particularly Bengal, roughly from the 1860s to the 1930s, is a welcome departure even within the available work in the area. For in it the author subtly interrogates the therapeutic changes that created modern Ayurveda. He does so by exploring how Ayurvedic ideas about the body changed dramatically in the modern period and by breaking with the oft-repeated but scantily examined belief that changes in Ayurvedic understandings of the body were due to the introduction of cadaveric dissections and Western anatomical knowledge. "Doctoring Traditions" argues that the actual motor of change were a number of small technologies that were absorbed into Ayurvedic practice at the time, including thermometers and microscopes. In each of its five core chapters the book details how the adoption of a small technology set in motion a dramatic refiguration of the body. This book will be required reading for historians both of medicine and South Asia.
Heaven Is Empty
Offers a new perspective on the relationship between religion and the creation of the first Chinese empires. Heaven Is Empty offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of Chinas early empires (221 BCE9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The cohesive function of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Romes empire across geographical and social boundaries. Eventually reelaborated in Christian terms, it came to embody the timelessness and universality of Western conceptions of legitimate authority, while re...
Crossing and Dwelling
A deeply researched and vividly written study, this book depicts religion in place and in movement, dwelling and crossing. Drawing on insights from the natural and social sciences, Tweed's work is grounded in the gritty particulars of distinctive religious practices, even as it moves toward ideas about cross-cultural patterns. It offers a responsible way to think broadly about religion, a topic that is crucial for understanding the contemporary world.
Introduction of Buddhism to Korea
A collection of articles dealing with the introduction of Buddhism in Korea and its subsequent spread from there to Japan. The studies contained in this volume cover the Three Kingdom period.
Christian Heretics in Late Imperial China
Following the prohibition of missionary activity after 1724, China's Christians were effectively cut off from all foreign theological guidance. The ensuing isolation forced China's Christian communities to become self-reliant in perpetuating the basic principles of their faith. Left to their own devices, the missionary seed developed into a panoply of indigenous traditions, with Christian ancestry as the common denominator. Christianity thus underwent the same process of inculturation as previous religious traditions in China, such as Buddhism and Judaism. As the guardian of orthodox morality, the prosecuting state sought to exercise all-pervading control over popular thoughts and social functions. Filling the gap within the discourse of Christianity in China and also as part of the wider analysis of religion in late Imperial China, this study presents the campaigns against Christians during this period as part and parcel of the campaign against 'heresy' and 'heretical' movements in general.
Battlefronts Real and Imagined
This collection examines the cultural and intellectual dimensions of war and its resolution between Han Chinese and the various ethnically dissimilar peoples surrounding them during the crucial 'middle period' of Chinese history.
Monastic and Lay Traditions in North-Eastern Tibet
In recent years, the Sino-Tibetan frontier regions have attracted increasing scholarly interest. The region of Rebkong in Qinghai province is of particular significance because of its unique location on the Sino-Tibetan borderland, its multi-ethnic population and its complex religious history, which incorporates both large Geluk monasteries and significant Nyingma and Bonpo lay tantric communities. Covering the nineteenth century to the present, this volume brings together ten papers that explore the relationship between religion and culture in Rebkong. Using insights from anthropology, history and religious studies, the contributors offer new research and fresh interpretations of this important region on China’s periphery, discussing issues of ethnicity and identity, the role of public institutions, and the role of religion and rituals.
