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Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars
Christianity is often praised as an agent of Chinese modernization or damned as a form of cultural and religious imperialism. In both cases, Christianity’s foreignness and the social isolation of converts have dominated this debate. Eugenio Menegon uncovers another story. In the sixteenth century, European missionaries brought a foreign and global religion to China. Converts then transformed this new religion into a local one over the course of the next three centuries. Focusing on the still-active Catholic communities of Fuan county in northeast Fujian, this project addresses three main questions. Why did people convert? How did converts and missionaries transform a global and foreign rel...
Redefining Heresy and Tolerance
In Redefining Heresy and Tolerance, Hung Tak Wai examines how the Qing empire governed Muslims and Christians under its rule with a non-interventionist policy. Manchu emperors adopted a tolerant attitude towards Islam and Christianity as long as political stability and loyalty remained unthreatened. However, Hung argues that such tolerance had its limitations. Since the mid-eighteenth century, the Qing court intentionally minimised the importance of the Islamic identity. Restrictions were imposed on the Muslims’ external connections with Western Asia. The Christian minority was kept distant from politics and the Han majority. At the same time, Confucian scholars began to acquire a new unde...
Interpretation and Intellectual Change
This volume deals with the development of Chinese hermeneutics, or exegetic systems, from their beginnings to the twentieth century. The contributors address critical issues in the study of Chinese hermeneutics by focusing on key periods during which the hermeneutic tradition in China underwent significant changes. The volume is divided into six parts, corresponding to the six major periods of intellectual change in traditional and contemporary China. Part 1 considers the foundational period of Chinese hermeneutics, examining Confucian classics such as the Analects, Mencius, and the Book of Odes. Part 2 traces the broadening of the hermeneutic tradition from Confucian classics to the militar...
Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade
Relations between China and India underwent a dramatic transformation from Buddhist-dominated to commerce-centered exchanges in the seventh to fifteenth centuries. The unfolding of this transformation, its causes, and wider ramifications are examined in this masterful analysis of the changing patterns of the interaction between the two most important cultural spheres in Asia. Tansen Sen offers a new perspective on Sino-Indian relations during the Tang dynasty (618–907), arguing that the period is notable not only for religious and diplomatic exchanges but also for the process through which China emerged as a center of Buddhist learning, practice, and pilgrimage. Before the seventh century,...
Reconstructing the Confucian Dao
Discusses how Zhou Dunyis thought became a cornerstone of neo-Confucianism. Zhu Xi, the twelfth-century architect of the neo-Confucian canon, declared Zhou Dunyi to be the first true sage since Mencius. This was controversial, as many of Zhu Xis contemporaries were critical of Zhou Dunyis Daoist leanings, and other figures had clearly been more significant to the Song dynasty Confucian resurgence. Why was Zhou Dunyi accorded such importance? Joseph A. Adler finds that the earlier thinker provided an underpinning for Zhu Xis religious practice. Zhou Dunyis theory of the interpenetration of activity and stillness allowed Zhu Xi to proclaim that his own theory of mental and spiritual cultivation mirrored the fundamental principle immanent in the natural world. This book revives Zhu Xi as a religious thinker, challenging longstanding characterizations of him. Readers will appreciate the inclusion of complete translations of Zhou Dunyis major texts, Zhu Xis published commentaries, and other primary source material.
Du Fu Transforms
Often considered China’s greatest poet, Du Fu (712–770) came of age at the height of the Tang dynasty, in an era marked by confidence that the accumulated wisdom of the precedent cultural tradition would guarantee civilization’s continued stability and prosperity. When his society collapsed into civil war in 755, however, he began to question contemporary assumptions about the role that tradition should play in making sense of experience and defining human flourishing. In this book, Lucas Bender argues that Du Fu’s reconsideration of the nature and importance of tradition has played a pivotal role in the transformation of Chinese poetic understanding over the last millennium. In reimagining his relationship to tradition, Du Fu anticipated important philosophical transitions from the late-medieval into the early-modern period and laid the template for a new and perduring paradigm of poetry’s relationship to ethics. He also looked forward to the transformations his own poetry would undergo as it was elevated to the pinnacle of the Chinese poetic pantheon.
Sources of East Asian Tradition: The modern period
"Wm. Theodore de Bary offers a selection of essential readings from his immensely popular anthologies Sources of Chinese Tradition, Sources of Korean Tradition, and Sources of Japanese Tradition so readers can experience a concise but no less comprehensive portrait of the social, intellectual, and religious traditions of East Asia."--
The Great Civilized Conversation
Having spent decades teaching and researching the humanities, Wm. Theodore de Bary is well positioned to speak on its merits and reform. Believing a classical liberal education is more necessary than ever, he outlines in these essays a plan to update existing core curricula by incorporating classics from both Eastern and Western traditions, thereby bringing the philosophy and moral values of Asian civilizations to American students and vice versa. The author establishes a concrete link between teaching the classics of world civilizations and furthering global humanism. Selecting texts that share many of the same values and educational purposes, he joins Islamic, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Western sources into a revised curriculum that privileges humanity and civility. He also explores the tradition of education in China and its reflection of Confucian and Neo-Confucian beliefs. He reflects on historyÕs great scholar-teachers and what their methods can teach us today, and he dedicates three essays to the power of The Analects of Confucius, The Tale of Genji, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon in the classroom.
Coming Out of the Middle Ages
The essays in this volume examine China's medievalism from the viewpoint of cultural history, philosophy and comparative literature. Contributors discuss the lingering effects of the Middle Ages on Chinese thought and industry, and assess how these attitudes affect China's relations with the West.
