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Clouds Thick Whereabouts Unknown
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Book Synopsis Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown by :
Download or read book Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown written by and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiled by a leading scholar of Chinese poetry, Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown is the first collection of Chan (Zen) poems to be situated within Chan thought and practice. Combined with exquisite paintings by Charles Chu, the anthology compellingly captures the ideological and literary nuances of works that were composed, paradoxically, to "say more by saying less," and creates an unparalleled experience for readers of all backgrounds. Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown includes verse composed by monk-poets of the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. Their style ranges from the direct vernacular to the evocative and imagistic. Egan's faithful and elegant translations of poems by Han Shan, Guanxiu, and Qiji, among many others, do justice to their perceptions and insights, and his detailed notes and analyses unravel centuries of Chan metaphor and allusion. In these gems, monk-poets join mainstream ideas on poetic function to religious reflection and proselytizing, carving out a distinct genre that came to influence generations of poets, critics, and writers. The simplicity of Chan poetry belies its complex ideology and sophisticated language, elements Egan vividly explicates in his religious and literary critique. His interpretive strategies enable a richer understanding of Mahayana Buddhism, Chan philosophy, and the principles of Chinese poetry.
Book Synopsis Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown by :
Download or read book Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown written by and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-19 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiled by a leading scholar of Chinese poetry, Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown is the first collection of Chan (Zen) poems to be situated within Chan thought and practice. Combined with exquisite paintings by Charles Chu, the anthology compellingly captures the ideological and literary nuances of works that were composed, paradoxically, to "say more by saying less," and creates an unparalleled experience for readers of all backgrounds. Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown includes verse composed by monk-poets of the eighth to the seventeenth centuries. Their style ranges from the direct vernacular to the evocative and imagistic. Egan's faithful and elegant translations of poems by Han Shan, Guanxiu, and Qiji, among many others, do justice to their perceptions and insights, and his detailed notes and analyses unravel centuries of Chan metaphor and allusion. In these gems, monk-poets join mainstream ideas on poetic function to religious reflection and proselytizing, carving out a distinct genre that came to influence generations of poets, critics, and writers. The simplicity of Chan poetry belies its complex ideology and sophisticated language, elements Egan vividly explicates in his religious and literary critique. His interpretive strategies enable a richer understanding of Mahayana Buddhism, Chan philosophy, and the principles of Chinese poetry.
Book Synopsis The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch by : Philip Yampolsky
Download or read book The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch written by Philip Yampolsky and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Platform Sutra records the teachings of Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch, who is revered as one of the two great figures in the founding of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. This translation is the definitive English version of the eighth-century Chan classic. Phillip B. Yampolsky has based his translation on the Tun-huang manuscript, the earliest extant version of the work. A critical edition of the Chinese text is given at the end of the volume. Dr. Yampolsky also furnishes a lengthy and detailed historical introduction which contains much information hitherto unavailable even to scholars, and provides the context essential to an understanding of Hui-neng's work. He gives an account of the history and legends of Ch'an Buddhism, with particular attention to the traditions associated with Hui-neng, quoting or summarizing the most important narratives. He then discusses the various texts of the Platform Sutra, and analyzes its contents. The reprint edition adds a new introduction to the translation, situating it in the literature and relating it to the companion volume. The glossary has been updated from Wade-Giles to pinyin.
Book Synopsis Chan Rhetoric of Uncertainty in the Blue Cliff Record by : Steven Heine
Download or read book Chan Rhetoric of Uncertainty in the Blue Cliff Record written by Steven Heine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an innovative and critical analysis, in light of Song dynasty (960-11279) Chinese cultural and intellectual historical trends, of the Blue Cliff Record, the seminal Chan/Zen Buddhist collection of commentaries on one hundred gongan/koan cases, which has long been celebrated for its intricate and articulate interpretative methods.
Book Synopsis Cultural Transplantation: The Writing of Classical Chinese Poetry in Colonial Singapore (1887‒1945) by : Lap Lam
Download or read book Cultural Transplantation: The Writing of Classical Chinese Poetry in Colonial Singapore (1887‒1945) written by Lap Lam and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-28 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classical-style poetry in modern China and other Sinitic-speaking localities is attracting greater attention with the recent upsurge in academic revision of modern Chinese literary history. Using the concept of cultural transplantation, this monograph attempts to illustrate the uniqueness, compatibility, and adaptability of classical Chinese poetry in colonial Singapore as well as its sustained connections with literary tradition and homeland. It demonstrates how the reading of classical Chinese poetry can better our understanding of Singapore’s political, social, and cultural history, deepen knowledge of the transregional relationship between China and Nanyang, and fine-tune, redress, and enrich our perception of Singapore Chinese literature, Sinophone literature, the Chinese diaspora, and global Chinese identity.
Book Synopsis Exemplary Women of Early China by : Anne Behnke Kinney
Download or read book Exemplary Women of Early China written by Anne Behnke Kinney and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When should a woman disobey her father, contradict her husband, or shape the policy of a ruler? According to the Lienü zhuan, or Categorized Biographies of Women, it is not only appropriate but necessary for women to offer counsel when fathers, husbands, sons, and rulers stray from virtue. The earliest Chinese text devoted to the moral education of women, the Lienü zhuan was compiled by Liu Xiang (79–8 B.C.E.) at the end of the Han dynasty (202 B.C.E.–9 C.E.) and recounts the deeds of both virtuous and wicked women. Informed by early legends, fictionalized historical accounts, and formal speeches on statecraft, the text taught generations of Chinese women to cultivate filial piety and maternal kindness and undertake such practices as suicide and self-mutilation to preserve chastity and reform wayward men. The Lienü zhuan’s stories inspired artists for a millennium and found their way into local and dynastic histories. An innovative work for its time, the text remains a critical tool for mapping women’s social, political, and domestic roles at a formative time in China’s development.
Download or read book Haiku Before Haiku written by and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the rise of the charmingly simple, brilliantly evocative haiku is often associated with the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, the form had already flourished for more than four hundred years before Basho even began to write. These early poems, known as hokku, are identical to haiku in syllable count and structure but function differently as a genre. Whereas each haiku is its own constellation of image and meaning, a hokku opens a series of linked, collaborative stanzas in a sequence called renga. Under the mastery of Basho, hokku first gained its modern independence. His talents contributed to the evolution of the style into the haiku beloved by so many poets around the world--Richard Wright, Jack Kerouac, and Billy Collins being notable devotees. Haiku Before Haiku presents 320 hokku composed between the thirteenth and early eighteenth centuries, from the poems of the courtier Nijo Yoshimoto to those of the genre's first "professional" master, Sogi, and his disciples. It features 20 masterpieces by Basho himself. Steven D. Carter introduces the history of haiku and its aesthetics, classifying these poems according to style and context. His rich commentary and notes on composition and setting illuminate each work, and he provides brief biographies of the poets, the original Japanese text in romanized form, and earlier, classical poems to which some of the hokku allude.
Book Synopsis Patrons and Patriarchs by : Benjamin Brose
Download or read book Patrons and Patriarchs written by Benjamin Brose and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patrons and Patriarchs breaks new ground in the study of clergy-court relations during the tumultuous period that spanned the collapse of the Tang dynasty (618–907) and the consolidation of the Northern Song (960–1127). This era, known as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, has typically been characterized as a time of debilitating violence and instability, but it also brought increased economic prosperity, regional development, and political autonomy to southern territories. The book describes how the formation of new states in southeastern China elevated local Buddhist traditions and moved Chan (Zen) monks from the margins to the center of Chinese society. Drawing on biographies, inscriptions, private histories, and government records, it argues that the shift in imperial patronage from a diverse array of Buddhist clerics to members of specific Chan lineages was driven by political, social, and geographical reorientations set in motion by the collapse of the Tang dynasty and the consolidation of regional powers during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. As monastic communities representing diverse arrays of thought, practice, and pedagogy allied with rival political factions, the outcome of power struggles determined which clerical networks assumed positions of power and which doctrines were enshrined as orthodoxy. Rather than view the ascent of Chan monks and their traditions as instances of intellectual hegemony, this book focuses on the larger sociopolitical processes that lifted members of Chan lineages onto the imperial stage. Against the historical backdrop of the tenth century, Patrons and Patriarchs explores the nature and function of Chan lineage systems, the relationships between monastic and lay families, and the place of patronage in establishing identity and authority in monastic movements.
Book Synopsis The Book of Lord Shang by : Yang Shang
Download or read book The Book of Lord Shang written by Yang Shang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiled in China in the fourth–third centuries BCE, The Book of Lord Shang argues for a new powerful government to rule over society and turn every man into a diligent tiller and valiant soldier. Creating a “rich state and a strong army” will be the first step toward unification of “All-under-Heaven.” These ideas served the state of Qin that eventually created the first imperial polity on Chinese soil. In Yuri Pines’s translation, The Book of Lord Shang’s intellectual boldness and surprisingly modern-looking ideas shine through, underscoring the text’s vibrant contribution to global political thought. The Book of Lord Shang is attributed to the statesman and theorist Shang Yang and his followers. It epitomizes the ideology of China’s so-called Legalist School of thought. In the ninety years since the work’s previous translation, major breakthroughs in studies of the book’s dating and context have recast our understanding of its messages. Pines applies these advances to a whole new reading of the text’s content and function in the sociopolitical life of its times and subsequent centuries. This abridged and revised edition of Pines’s annotated translation is ideal for newcomers to the book while also guiding early Chinese scholars and comparatists. It highlights the text’s practical success and its influence on political thought and political practice in traditional and modern China.
Book Synopsis Zen and Material Culture by : Pamela D. Winfield
Download or read book Zen and Material Culture written by Pamela D. Winfield and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-07 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stereotype of Zen Buddhism as a minimalistic or even immaterial meditative tradition persists in the Euro-American cultural imagination. This volume calls attention to the vast range of "stuff" in Zen by highlighting the material abundance and iconic range of the Soto, Rinzai, and Obaku sects in Japan. Chapters on beads, bowls, buildings, staffs, statues, rags, robes, and even retail commodities in America all shed new light on overlooked items of lay and monastic practice in both historical and contemporary perspectives. Nine authors from the cognate fields of art history, religious studies, and the history of material culture analyze these "Zen matters" in all four senses of the phrase: the interdisciplinary study of Zen's matters (objects and images) ultimately speaks to larger Zen matters (ideas, ideals) that matter (in the predicate sense) to both male and female practitioners, often because such matters (economic considerations) help to ensure the cultural and institutional survival of the tradition. Zen and Material Culture expands the study of Japanese Zen Buddhism to include material inquiry as an important complement to mainly textual, institutional, or ritual studies. It also broadens the traditional purview of art history by incorporating the visual culture of everyday Zen objects and images into the canon of recognized masterpieces by elite artists. Finally, the volume extends Japanese material and visual cultural studies into new research territory by taking up Zen's rich trove of materia liturgica and supplementing the largely secular approach to studying Japanese popular culture. This groundbreaking volume will be a resource for anyone whose interests lie at the intersection of Zen art, architecture, history, ritual, tea ceremony, women's studies, and the fine line between Buddhist materiality and materialism.
Book Synopsis Unearthing the Changes by : Edward L. Shaughnessy
Download or read book Unearthing the Changes written by Edward L. Shaughnessy and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, three ancient manuscripts relating to the Yi jing (I Ching), or Classic of Changes, have been discovered. The earliest—the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi—dates to about 300 B.C.E. and shows evidence of the text's original circulation. The Guicang, or Returning to Be Stored, reflects another ancient Chinese divination tradition based on hexagrams similar to those of the Yi jing. In 1993, two manuscripts were found in a third-century B.C.E. tomb at Wangjiatai that contain almost exact parallels to the Guicang's early quotations, supplying new information on the performance of early Chinese divination. Finally, the Fuyang Zhou Yi was excavated from the tomb of Xia Hou Zao, lord of Ruyin, who died in 165 B.C.E. Each line of this classic is followed by one or more generic prognostications similar to phrases found in the Yi jing, indicating exciting new ways the text was produced and used in the interpretation of divinations. Unearthing the Changes details the discovery and significance of the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi, the Wangjiatai Guicang, and the Fuyang Zhou Yi, including full translations of the texts and additional evidence constructing a new narrative of the Yi jing's writing and transmission in the first millennium B.C.E. An introduction situates the role of archaeology in the modern attempt to understand the Classic of Changes. By showing how the text emerged out of a popular tradition of divination, these newly unearthed manuscripts reveal an important religious dimension to its evolution.
Book Synopsis Record of Daily Knowledge and Collected Poems and Essays by : Yanwu Gu
Download or read book Record of Daily Knowledge and Collected Poems and Essays written by Yanwu Gu and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gu Yanwu pioneered the late-Ming and early Qing-era practice of Han Learning, or Evidential Learning, favoring practical over theoretical approaches to knowledge. He strongly encouraged scholars to return to the simple, ethical precepts of early Confucianism, and in his best-known work, Rizhi lu (Record of Daily Knowledge), he applied this paradigm to literature, government, economics, history, education, and philology. This volume includes translations of selected essays from Rizhi lu and Gu Yanwu's Shiwen Ji (Collected Poems and Essays), along with an introduction explaining the personal and political dimensions of the scholar's work. Gu Yanwu wrote the essays and poems featured in this volume while traveling across China during the decades immediately after the fall of the Ming Dynasty. They merge personal observation with rich articulations of Confucian principles and are, as Gu said, "not old coin but copper dug from the hills." Like many of his contemporaries, Gu Yanwu believed the Ming Dynasty had suffered from an overconcentration of power in its central government and recommended decentralizing authority while strengthening provincial self-government. In his introduction, Ian Johnston recounts Gu Yanwu's personal history and reviews his published works, along with their scholarly reception. Annotations accompany his translations, and a special essay on feudalism by Tang Dynasty poet and scholar Liu Zongyuan (773–819) provides insight into Gu Yanwu's later work on the subject.
Book Synopsis A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune by : Haosheng Yang
Download or read book A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune written by Haosheng Yang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-03-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Modernity Set to a Pre-Modern Tune, Haosheng Yang provides an in-depth study of the classical-style poems of the most iconoclastic May Fourth Chinese writers (Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Zhou Zuoren, Guo Moruo, and Nie Gannu) and highlights the five literary masters’ engagement with traditional lyricism as their critical response to the sociopolitical turbulence of twentieth-century China. This study challenges the bias against classical forms as allegedly outdated modes incapable of representing modern reality in current Chinese literary history. Yang’s fascinating book positions modern Chinese literature’s formalistic nonlinearity, representational experiences, and aspiration for a new voice through an old form as factors that are all crucial to exploring more fully the blurred boundary between the traditional and the modern.
Book Synopsis Quelling the Demons' Revolt by : Guanzhong Luo
Download or read book Quelling the Demons' Revolt written by Guanzhong Luo and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this Ming-era novel, historical narrative, raucous humor, and the supernatural are interwoven to tell the tale of an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Song dynasty. A poor young girl meets an old woman who gives her a magic book that allows her to create rice and money. Her father, terrified that his daughter's demonic nature might be discovered, marries her off. Forced to flee, she and others with supernatural abilities find themselves in the midst of a grotesque version of a historical uprising, in which facts are intermingled with slapstick humor and wild fictions. Attributed to the writer Luo Guanzhong, Quelling the Demons' Revolt is centered on the events of the rebellion led by Wang Ze in 1047–48. But it is a distorted, humorous version, in which Wang Ze's lieutenants show up as a comical peddler and a mysterious Daoist priest and a celebrated warrior appears despite having died many years earlier. Rather than fantastic adventures and supernatural marvels, the author points to human vanities and fixations as well as social injustice, warning of the vulnerability of any pursuit of order in a world plagued by demonic forces as well as mundane corruption. Although the story takes place long before the era in which it was written, ultimately Quelling the Demons' Revolt is the story of the Ming dynasty in Song masquerade, presciently warning of the dynasty's downfall. The novel is divided into chapters, but in many ways it is an arrangement of self-contained stories that draw on vernacular storytelling. This translation offers English-speaking readers a spirited example of social critique combined with caustic humor from the era of Luo Guanzhong.
Download or read book Cold Mountain Poems written by Anjiang Hu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book unveils the legendary life and the mystic poems of the iconic Chinese Tang poet Han-shan (known by his pen name “Cold Mountain”) and investigates the dissemination and reception of the Cold Mountain Poems (CMPs) attributed to him. Han-shan and the CMPs are amongst the most legendary literary landscapes and cultural memories in the history of world scholarly exchange. The maniac poet recluse hidden in the Cold Mountains, the delicate poetic realms of Confucianism, Buddhism, Zen and Taoism contained in the Cold Mountain Poems, and the incredible pervasiveness of its text travel and canon construction worldwide, as well as the profound impact of CMPs on comparative literature, world literature and Chinese studies, provide the perfect lens to learn about Chinese language, literature, culture and society. This book is thus intended to investigate CMPs in a coherent global context. Considering the vertical studies of the Chinese literature polysystem, it highlights the horizontal influence of CMPs, literarily or non-literarily. Furthermore, it addresses the making and developing of the Han-shan phenomenon and its implications for translation studies, travel writing, canon construction and literary historiography. This book is for scholars, researchers and students in literary history and East Asian Studies focusing on Chinese literature and culture and those interested in the history of poetry in general.
Download or read book The Poetry Demon written by Jason Protass and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-07-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese Buddhist monks of the Song dynasty (960–1279) called the irresistible urge to compose poetry “the poetry demon.” In this ambitious study, Jason Protass seeks to bridge the fields of Buddhist studies and Chinese literature to examine the place of poetry in the lives of Song monks. Although much has been written about verses in the gong’an (Jpn. kōan) tradition, very little is known about the large corpora—roughly 30,000 extant poems—composed by these monastics. Protass addresses the oversight by using strategies associated with religious studies, literary studies, and sociology. He weaves together poetry with a wide range of monastic sources and in doing so argues against positing a “literary Chan” movement that wrote poetry as a path to awakening; he instead presents an understanding of monks’ poetry grounded in the Song discourse of monks themselves. The work begins by examining how monks fashioned new genres, created their own books, and fueled a monastic audience for monks’ poetry. It traces the evolution of gāthā from hymns found in Buddhist scripture to an independent genre for poems associated with Chan masters as living buddhas. While Song monastic culture produced a prodigious amount of verse, at the same time it promoted prohibitions against monks’ participation in poetry as a worldly or Confucian art: This constructive tension was an animating force. The Poetry Demon highlights this and other intersections of Buddhist doctrine with literary sociality and charts productive pathways through numerous materials, including collections of Chan “recorded sayings,” monastic rulebooks, “eminent monk” and “flame record” hagiographies, manuscripts of poetry, Buddhist encyclopedia, primers, and sūtra commentary. Two chapter-length case studies illustrate how Song monks participated in two of the most prominent and conservative modes of poetry of the time, those of parting and mourning. Protass reveals how monks used Chan humor with reference to emptiness to transform acts of separation into Buddhist teachings. In another chapter, monks in mourning expressed their grief and dharma through poetry. The Poetry Demon impressively uncovers new and creative ways to study Chinese Buddhist monks’ poetry while contributing to the broader study of Chinese religion and literature.
Book Synopsis I Think and Write, Therefore You Are Confused by : Vahid Paeez
Download or read book I Think and Write, Therefore You Are Confused written by Vahid Paeez and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The importance of good documentation can build a strong foundation for any thriving organization. This reference text provides a detailed and practical treatment of technical writing in an easy to understand manner. The text covers important topics including neuro-linguistics programming (NLP), experimental writing against technical writing, writing and unity of effect, five elements of communication process, human information processing, nonverbal communication and types of technical manuals. Aimed at professionals and graduate students working in the fields of ergonomics, aerospace engineering, aviation industry, and human factors, this book: Provides a detailed and practical treatment of technical writing. Discusses several personal anecdotes that serve as real-work examples. Explores communications techniques in a way that considers the psychology of what "works" Discusses in an easy to understand language, stories, and examples, the correct steps to create technical documents.
