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Signs From The Unseen Realm
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Download or read book Signs from the Unseen Realm written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In medieval China hundreds of Buddhist miracle texts were circulated. Robert Ford Campany, one of North America's pre-eminent scholars of Chinese religion, here presents an annotated translation of the largest extant collection of miracle tales from the medieval period.
Book Synopsis Signs from the Unseen Realm by : Robert Ford Campany
Download or read book Signs from the Unseen Realm written by Robert Ford Campany and published by Kuroda Classics in East Asian. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains an annotated translation of the largest existing collection of Buddhist miracle texts from China's early medieval period, Wang Yan's Records of Signs from the Unseen Realm, which were compiled around 490 CE.
Book Synopsis Signs from the Unseen Realm by : Robert Ford Campany
Download or read book Signs from the Unseen Realm written by Robert Ford Campany and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early medieval China hundreds of Buddhist miracle texts were circulated, inaugurating a trend that would continue for centuries. Each tale recounted extraordinary events involving Chinese persons and places—events seen as verifying claims made in Buddhist scriptures, demonstrating the reality of karmic retribution, or confirming the efficacy of Buddhist devotional practices. Robert Ford Campany, one of North America’s preeminent scholars of Chinese religion, presents in this volume the first complete, annotated translation, with in-depth commentary, of the largest extant collection of miracle tales from the early medieval period, Wang Yan’s Records of Signs from the Unseen Realm, compiled around 490 C.E. In addition to the translation, Campany provides a substantial study of the text and its author in their historical and religious settings. He shows how these lively tales helped integrate Buddhism into Chinese society at the same time that they served as platforms for religious contestation and persuasion. Campany offers a nuanced, clear methodological discussion of how such narratives, being products of social memory, may be read as valuable evidence for the history of religion and culture. Readers interested in Buddhism; historians of Chinese religions, culture, society, and literature; scholars of comparative religion: All will find Signs from the Unseen Realm a stimulating and rich contribution to scholarship.
Book Synopsis An Introduction to the Sufi Path by : Anab Whitehouse
Download or read book An Introduction to the Sufi Path written by Anab Whitehouse and published by Bilquees Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the Grace of God, my spiritual guide knew far, far more than what I have heard him say on any given occasion. Unfortunately, I have forgotten far, far more than what I remember of what has been related to me by him. Moreover, I have written far less than what I remember of what he taught me. The result of this funneling process is the present book – An Introduction to the Sufi Path. Everything that is good and correct in this book comes, by the Grace of God, through my shaykh or spiritual teacher who was willing to accept me as a reclamation project. Everything that is incorrect in An Introduction to the Sufi Path comes from my own shortcomings and ignorance. The material contained within An Introduction to the Sufi Path is intended to stimulate reflection concerning a variety of themes that are important to spiritual life in the midst of everyday life. God willing, the content given expression through the different chapters constitutes -- both individually as well as collectively -- a Sufi perspective. However, one does not have to be on the Sufi path or inclined to that path in order to engage the material in this book. Anyone with an interest in spirituality and mysticism will find, God willing, an abundance of themes within the boundaries of this work that are able to form the seeds of contemplative reflection for any faith background.
Download or read book Weird Confucius written by Zhao Lu and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-03-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning antiquity until the present, Zhao Lu analyses the eclectic and fictitious representations of Confucius that have been widely celebrated by communities of people throughout history. While mainstream scholarship mostly considers Confucius in terms of his role as a celebrated man of wisdom and as a teacher with a humanistic worldview, Zhao addresses the weirder representations. He considers depictions of Confucius as a prophet, a fortune-teller, a powerful demon hunter, a shrewd villain of 19th century American newspapers, an embodiment of feudal evils in the Cultural Revolution, and as a cute friend. Zhao asks why some groups would risk contradicting the well-accepted image of Confucius with such representations and shows how these illustrations reflect the specific anxieties of these communities. He reveals not only how people across history perceived Confucius in diverse ways, but more importantly how they used Confucius in daily life, ranging from calming their anxiety about the future, to legitimizing a dynasty, stereotyping Chinese people, and even to forging a new sense of history.
Book Synopsis Icons - Imaging the Unseen by : Dani‰l J. Louw
Download or read book Icons - Imaging the Unseen written by Dani‰l J. Louw and published by AFRICAN SUN MeDIA. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ÿ The experience of the divine has been referred to by many artists over the centuries, whether their subject was the human figure, landscape, still life or indeed religious or biblical themes. Art therefore requires a kind of openness; a willingness to mediate rather than to control. This sensitivity can best be described as humility, an obeisance to something we are part of. Therefore, to 'see' the 'unseen' in visual arts brings about awe and requires 'iconic viewing'. The spiritual realm, as portrayed by icons, has a healing quality in a world where the news and the arts are so full of tragedy and where the church's message so often sounds escapist or na‹ve.
Book Synopsis A Garden of Marvels by : Robert Ford Campany
Download or read book A Garden of Marvels written by Robert Ford Campany and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 300 and 600 C.E., Chinese writers compiled thousands of accounts of the strange and the extraordinary. Some described weird spirits, customs, and flora and fauna in distant lands. Some depicted individuals of unusual spiritual or moral achievement. But most told of ordinary people’s encounters with ghosts, demons, or gods; sojourns in the land of the dead; eerily significant dreams; and uncannily accurate premonitions. The selection of such stories presented here provides an alluring introduction to early medieval Chinese storytelling and opens a doorway to the enchanted world of thought, culture, and religious belief of that era. Known as zhiguai, or “accounts of anomalies,” they convey a great deal about how people saw the cosmos and their place in it. The tales were circulated because they were entertaining but also because their compilers meant to document the mysterious workings of spirits, the wonders of exotic places, and the nature of the afterlife. A collection of more than two hundred tales, A Garden of Marvels offers an authoritative yet accessible introduction to zhiguai writings, particularly those never before translated or adequately researched. This volume will likely find its way to bedside tables as well as into classrooms and libraries, just as collections of zhiguai did in early medieval times.
Book Synopsis The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History by : Andrew Chittick
Download or read book The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History written by Andrew Chittick and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work offers a sweeping re-assessment of the Jiankang Empire (3rd-6th centuries CE), known as the Chinese "Southern Dynasties." It shows how, although one of the medieval world's largest empires, Jiankang has been rendered politically invisible by the standard narrative of Chinese nationalist history, and proposes a new framework and terminology for writing about medieval East Asia. The book pays particular attention to the problem of ethnic identification, rejecting the idea of "ethnic Chinese," and delineating several other, more useful ethnographic categories, using case studies in agriculture/foodways and vernacular languages. The most important, the Wuren of the lower Yangzi region, were believed to be inherently different from the peoples of the Central Plains, and the rest of the book addresses the extent of their ethnogenesis in the medieval era. It assesses the political culture of the Jiankang Empire, emphasizing military strategy, institutional cultures, and political economy, showing how it differed from Central Plains-based empires, while having significant similarities to Southeast Asian regimes. It then explores how the Jiankang monarchs deployed three distinct repertoires of political legitimation (vernacular, Sinitic universalist, and Buddhist), arguing that the Sinitic repertoire was largely eclipsed in the sixth century, rendering the regime yet more similar to neighboring South Seas states. The conclusion points out how the research re-orients our understanding of acculturation and ethnic identification in medieval East Asia, generates new insights into the Tang-Song transition period, and offers new avenues of comparison with Southeast Asian and medieval European history.
Download or read book Buddhism and the Body written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-08-28 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mahayana, Theravada, ancient, modern? Even at the most basic level, the diversity of Buddhism makes a comprehensive approach daunting. This book is a first step in solving the problem. In foregrounding the bodies of practitioners, a solid platform for analysing the philosophy of Buddhism begins to become apparent. Building upon somaesthetics Buddhism is seen for its ameliorative effect, which spans the range of how the mind integrates with the body. This exploration of positive effect spans from dreams to medicine. Beyond the historical side of these questions, a contemporary analysis includes its intersection with art, philosophy, and ethnography.
Book Synopsis The Unseen Realm by : Heiser, Michael S.
Download or read book The Unseen Realm written by Heiser, Michael S. and published by Lexham Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Unseen Realm, Dr. Michael Heiser examines the ancient context of Scripture, explaining how its supernatural worldview can help us grow in our understanding of God. He illuminates intriguing and amazing passages of the Bible that have been hiding in plain sight. You'll find yourself engaged in an enthusiastic pursuit of the truth, resulting in a new appreciation for God's Word. Why wasn't Eve surprised when the serpent spoke to her? How did descendants of the Nephilim survive the flood? Why did Jacob fuse Yahweh and his Angel together in his prayer? Who are the assembly of divine beings that God presides over? In what way do those beings participate in God's decisions? Why do Peter and Jude promote belief in imprisoned spirits? Why does Paul describe evil spirits in terms of geographical rulership? Who are the "glorious ones" that even angels dare not rebuke? After reading this book, you may never read your Bible the same way again. Endorsements "There is a world referred to in the Scripture that is quite unseen, but also quite present and active. Michael Heiser's The Unseen Realm seeks to unmask this world. Heiser shows how important it is to understand this world and appreciate how its contribution helps to make sense of Scripture. The book is clear and well done, treating many ideas and themes that often go unseen themselves. With this book, such themes will no longer be neglected, so read it and discover a new realm for reflection about what Scripture teaches." --Darrell L. Bock, Executive Director for Cultural Engagement, Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies, Howard G. Hendricks Center for Christian Leadership and Cultural Engagement "'How was it possible that I had never seen that before?' Dr. Heiser's survey of the complex reality of the supernatural world as the Scriptures portray it covers a subject that is strangely sidestepped. No one is going to agree with everything in his book, but the subject deserves careful study, and so does this book." --John Goldingay, David Allan Hubbard Professor of Old Testament, School of Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary "This is a 'big' book in the best sense of the term. It is big in its scope and in its depth of analysis. Michael Heiser is a scholar who knows Scripture intimately in its ancient cultural context. All--scholars, clergy, and laypeople--who read this profound and accessible book will grow in their understanding of both the Old and New Testaments, particularly as their eyes are opened to the Bible's 'unseen world.'" --Tremper Longman III, Robert H. Gundry Professor of Biblical Studies, Westmont College
Book Synopsis Imperiled Destinies by : Franciscus Verellen
Download or read book Imperiled Destinies written by Franciscus Verellen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Imperiled Destinies" examines the evolution of Daoist beliefs about human liability and redemption over eight centuries and outlines ritual procedures for rescuing an ill‐starred destiny. From the second through the tenth century CE, Daoism emerged as a liturgical organization that engaged vigorously with Buddhism and transformed Chinese thinking about suffering, the nature of evil, and the aims of liberation. In the fifth century, elements of classical Daoism combined with Indian yogic practices to interiorize the quest for deliverance. The medieval record portrays a world engulfed by evil, where human existence was mortgaged from birth and burdened by increasing debts and obligations in this world and the next. Against this gloomy outlook, Daoism offered ritual and sacramental instruments capable of acting on the unseen world, providing therapeutic relief and ecstatic release from apprehensions of death, disease, war, spoilt harvests, and loss. Drawing on prayer texts, liturgical sermons, and experiential narratives, Franciscus Verellen focuses on the Daoist vocabulary of bondage and redemption, the changing meanings of sacrifice, and metaphoric conceptualizations bridging the visible and invisible realms. The language of medieval supplicants envisaged the redemption of an imperiled destiny as debt forgiveness, and deliverance as healing, purification, release, or emergence from darkness into light.
Book Synopsis The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE - 800 CE by : Robert Ford Campany
Download or read book The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE - 800 CE written by Robert Ford Campany and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-03-07 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreaming is a near-universal human experience, but there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. In this book, Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape—an array of ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke—that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These writings include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions. In these many sources, we find culturally distinctive answers to questions peoples the world over have asked for millennia: What happens when we dream? Do dreams foretell future events? If so, how might their imagistic code be unlocked to yield predictions? Could dreams enable direct communication between the living and the dead, or between humans and nonhuman animals? The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE – 800 CE sheds light on how people in a distant age negotiated these mysteries and brings Chinese notions of dreaming into conversation with studies of dreams in other cultures, ancient and contemporary. Taking stock of how Chinese people wrestled with—and celebrated—the strangeness of dreams, Campany asks us to reflect on how we might reconsider our own notions of dreaming.
Book Synopsis Women in Early Medieval China by : Bret Hinsch
Download or read book Women in Early Medieval China written by Bret Hinsch and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-10-05 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important study provides the only comprehensive survey of Chinese women during the early medieval period of disunion known as the Six Dynasties, which lasted from the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty in AD 220 to the reunification of China by the Sui dynasty in AD 581.
Download or read book Poet-Monks written by Thomas J. Mazanec and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-15 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Thomas J. Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the latter half of Tang-dynasty China, asserted a bold new vision of poetry that proclaimed the union of classical verse with Buddhist practices of repetition, incantation, and meditation. Mazanec traces the historical development of the poet-monk as a distinct actor in the Chinese literary world, arguing for the importance of religious practice in medieval literature. As they witnessed the collapse of the world around them, these monks wove together the frayed threads of their traditions to establish an elite-style Chinese Buddhist poetry. Poet-Monks shows that during the transformative period of the Tang-Song transition, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of poetic innovation.
Book Synopsis Chan Before Chan by : Eric M. Greene
Download or read book Chan Before Chan written by Eric M. Greene and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-01-31 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is Buddhist meditation? What is going on—and what should be going on—behind the closed or lowered eyelids of the Buddha or Buddhist adept seated in meditation? And in what ways and to what ends have the answers to these questions mattered for Buddhists themselves? Focusing on early medieval China, this book takes up these questions through a cultural history of the earliest traditions of Buddhist meditation (chan), before the rise of the Chan (Zen) School in the eighth century. In sharp contrast to what would become typical in the later Chan School, early Chinese Buddhists approached the ancient Buddhist practice of meditation primarily as a way of gaining access to a world of enigmatic but potentially meaningful visionary experiences. In Chan Before Chan, Eric Greene brings this approach to meditation to life with a focus on how medieval Chinese Buddhists interpreted their own and others’ visionary experiences and the nature of the authority they ascribed to them. Drawing from hagiography, ritual manuals, material culture, and the many hitherto rarely studied meditation manuals translated from Indic sources into Chinese or composed in China in the 400s, Greene argues that during this era meditation and the mastery of meditation came for the first time to occupy a real place in the Chinese Buddhist social world. Heirs to wider traditions that had been shared across India and Central Asia, early medieval Chinese Buddhists conceived of “chan” as something that would produce a special state of visionary sensitivity. The concrete visionary experiences that resulted from meditation were understood as things that could then be interpreted, by a qualified master, as indicative of the mediator’s purity or impurity. Buddhist meditation, though an elite discipline that only a small number of Chinese Buddhists themselves undertook, was thus in practice and in theory constitutively integrated into the cultic worlds of divination and “repentance” (chanhui) that were so important within the medieval Chinese religious world as a whole.
Book Synopsis Buddhism and Tales of the Supernatural in Early Medieval China by : Zhenjun Zhang
Download or read book Buddhism and Tales of the Supernatural in Early Medieval China written by Zhenjun Zhang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the literary thematic changes, Buddhist imagery, and new motifs in the fantastic dreamworld as seen in the tales of the supernatural in early medieval China.
Book Synopsis Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China by : N. Harry Rothschild
Download or read book Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China written by N. Harry Rothschild and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China presents a rogues’ gallery of treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, and disloyal officials. It plumbs the dark matter of the human condition, placing front and center transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. The work endeavors to apprehend the actions and motivations of these men and women, whose conduct deviated from normative social, cultural, and religious expectations. Early chapters examine how core Confucian bonds such as those between parents and children, and ruler and minister, were compromised, even severed. The living did not always reverently pay homage to the dead, children did not honor their parents with due filiality, a decorous distance was not necessarily observed between sons and stepmothers, and subjects often pursued their own interests before those of the ruler or the state. The elasticity of ritual and social norms is explored: Chapters on brazen Eastern Han (25–220) mourners and deviant calligraphers, audacious falconers, volatile Tang (618–907) Buddhist monks, and drunken Song (960–1279) literati reveal social norms treated not as universal truths but as debated questions of taste wherein political and social expedience both determined and highlighted individual roles within larger social structures and defined what was and was not aberrant. A Confucian predilection to “valorize [the] civil and disparage the martial” and Buddhist proscriptions on killing led literati and monks alike to condemn the cruelty and chaos of war. The book scrutinizes cultural attitudes toward military action and warfare, including those surrounding the bloody and capricious world of the Zuozhuan (Chronicle of Zuo), the relentless violence of the Five Dynasties and Ten States periods (907–979), and the exploits of Tang warrior priests—a series of studies that complicates the rhetoric by situating it within the turbulent realities of the times. By the end of this volume, readers will come away with the understanding that behaving badly in early and medieval China was not about morality but perspective, politics, and power.
