Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!

You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.

Sign up

Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 440

Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism

For more than a thousand years, Buddhism has dominated Japanese death rituals and concepts of the afterlife. The nine essays in this volume, ranging chronologically from the tenth century to the present, bring to light both continuity and change in death practices over time. They also explore the interrelated issues of how Buddhist death rites have addressed individual concerns about the afterlife while also filling social and institutional needs and how Buddhist death-related practices have assimilated and refigured elements from other traditions, bringing together disparate, even conflicting, ideas about the dead, their postmortem fate, and what constitutes normative Buddhist practice. The...

Shamanism [2 volumes]
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 1088

Shamanism [2 volumes]

A guide to worldwide shamanism and shamanistic practices, emphasizing historical and current cultural adaptations. This two-volume reference is the first international survey of shamanistic beliefs from prehistory to the present day. In nearly 200 detailed, readable entries, leading ethnographers, psychologists, archaeologists, historians, and scholars of religion and folk literature explain the general principles of shamanism as well as the details of widely varied practices. What is it like to be a shaman? Entries describe, region by region, the traits, such as sicknesses and dreams, that mark a person as a shaman, as well as the training undertaken by initiates. They detail the costumes, ...

The Silk Road
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 374

The Silk Road

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2014-10-30
  • -
  • Publisher: Unknown

This is the first volume by multiple authors in our series entitled The Silk Road: Interwoven History. This volume one, ?Long-distance Trade, Culture, and Society,? examines the history of the Silk Road from antiquity to modern times in different regions, while focusing on diverse topics, such as the Parthian Empire, Bactria, Turkmen music, medieval maritime trade, and so on. The wide-ranging articles are trying to address the extent to which the Silk Road played an important role in the history of the cultural contacts between the East and West.

The Wiley Blackwell companion to East and inner Asian Buddhism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 535

The Wiley Blackwell companion to East and inner Asian Buddhism

  • Type: Book
  • -
  • Published: 2014
  • -
  • Publisher: Unknown

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to East and Inner Asian Buddhism combines outstanding contributions covering Buddhism as it developed and is practiced in this region. These newly-commissioned essays provide fresh scholarly perspectives on a wide range of concepts, texts, and practices. Offers a comprehensive and balanced survey of Buddhism within East and Central Asia, from the time of the Buddha through to the present day Provides fresh perspectives on a wide range of concepts, texts, traditions, doctrines, practices, and institutions - on topics spanning gender roles, tantric rituals, and the spread of Zen into Europe Brings together cutting-edge research by an interdisciplinary and international contributor team, including historians, literature scholars, and historians, as well as those from religious studies Presents a panoramic view of the extraordinary richness and variety of local Buddhist expressions and practices within Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Tibetan, cultures.

The Way That Lives in the Heart
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 404

The Way That Lives in the Heart

The Way That Lives in the Heart is a richly detailed ethnographic analysis of the practice of Chinese religion in the modern, multicultural Southeast Asian city of Penang, Malaysia. The book conveys both an understanding of shared religious practices and orientations and a sense of how individual men and women imagine, represent, and transform popular religious practices within the time and space of their own lives. This work is original in three ways. First, the author investigates Penang Chinese religious practice as a total field of religious practice, suggesting ways in which the religious culture, including spirit-mediumship, has been transformed in the conjuncture with modernity. Second, the book emphasizes the way in which socially marginal spirit mediums use a religious anti-language and unique religious rituals to set themselves apart from mainstream society. Third, the study investigates Penang Chinese religion as the product of a specific history, rather than presenting an overgeneralized overview that claims to represent a single "Chinese religion."

Συναγωνίζεσθαι: Studies in Honour of Guido Avezzù. Vol. 1.2
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 465

Συναγωνίζεσθαι: Studies in Honour of Guido Avezzù. Vol. 1.2

Συναγωνίζεσθαι, the ancient Greek verb chosen as the title of this volume, belongs to the jargon of dramaturgy as employed by Aristotle inPoetics, where he emphasizes the function of the Chorus as an active co-protagonist in the dynamics of drama. Here it suggests the collaborative nature of this Festschrift offered to Guido Avezzù in the year of his retirement by friends and colleagues. The volume collects a wide selection of contributions by international scholars, grouped into four sections: Greek Tragedy (Part 1), Greek Comedy (Part 2), Reception (Part 3), and Theatre and Beyond (Part 4). The Authors. A. Andrisano, P. Angeli Bernardini, A. Bagordo, A. Bierl, S. Bigliazzi, ...

Narratives of Sorrow and Dignity
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 431

Narratives of Sorrow and Dignity

Bardwell L. Smith offers a fresh perspective on mizuko kuyo, the Japanese ceremony performed to bring solace to those who have experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion. Showing how old and new forms of myth, symbol, doctrine, praxis, and organization combine and overlap in contemporary mizuko kuyo, Smith provides critical insight from many angles: the sociology of the family, the power of the medical profession, the economics of temples, the import of ancestral connections, the need for healing in both private and communal ways and, perhaps above all, the place of women in modern Japanese religion. At the heart of Smith's research is the issue of how human beings experience the death of a life that has been and remains precious to them. While universal, these losses are also personal and unique. The role of society in helping people to heal from these experiences varies widely and has changed enormously in recent decades. In examples of grieving for these kinds of losses one finds narratives not only of deep sorrow but of remarkable dignity.

The Book of Yokai
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 330

The Book of Yokai

Monsters, ghosts, fantastic beings, and supernatural phenomena of all sorts haunt the folklore and popular culture of Japan. Broadly labeled yokai, these creatures come in infinite shapes and sizes, from tengu mountain goblins and kappa water spirits to shape-shifting foxes and long-tongued ceiling-lickers. Currently popular in anime, manga, film, and computer games, many yokai originated in local legends, folktales, and regional ghost stories. Drawing on years of research in Japan, Michael Dylan Foster unpacks the history and cultural context of yokai, tracing their roots, interpreting their meanings, and introducing people who have hunted them through the ages. In this delightful and acces...

Shamanic Drumming
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 152

Shamanic Drumming

This useful book reveals profound teachings about shamanic drumming, which is a time-honored method of healing and helping others. Rhythmist Drake presents the first practical guide to applying this ancient healing art to modern lives.

Imaging Disaster
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 414

Imaging Disaster

  • Categories: Art

Imaging Disaster is a rich social history of Japan’s Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Drawing on a kaleidoscopic range of images from the fine arts, magazines, cartoons, and other popular sources, Gennifer Weisenfeld has produced an original study of this catastrophic event from an art historical perspective. —Jonathan Reynolds, Barnard College Imaging Disaster is an exhaustive and illuminating study of the visual culture generated by Japan’s most devastating natural disaster. Comprehensive in scope—covering photography, cinema, painting, postcards, sketches, urban planning, and even scientific models—Weisenfeld makes a compelling point that the massive profusion of visual representations that followed the quake must itself be considered an integral part of this tragic historical event.—Seiji Lippit, UCLA