Author: Suzanne SimpsonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Asceticism
Languages : en
Pages : 31
Book Description
Seeds of Immortality : Daoist Use of Sesame in Early Medieval China
Author: Suzanne SimpsonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Asceticism
Languages : en
Pages : 31
Book Description
Journal of Daoist Studies
Author: Roaming Into the Beyond
Author: Zornica KirkovaPublisher:
ISBN: 9789004311565
Category : Chinese poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Introduction -- Religious and literary background -- The dramatis personae -- A phenomenology of immortals -- The world of the immortals -- The way to immortality -- Immortality in the context of the human world -- Conclusion
Great Clarity
Author: Fabrizio PregadioPublisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804751773
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 386
Book Description
This is the first book to examine extensively the religious aspects of Chinese alchemy. Its main focus is the relation of alchemy to the Daoist traditions of the early medieval period (third to sixth centuries). It shows how alchemy contributed to and was tightly integrated into the elaborate body of doctrines and practices that Daoists built at that time, from which Daoism as we know it today evolved. The book also clarifies the origins of Chinese alchemy and the respective roles of alchemy and meditation in self-cultivation practices. It contains full translations of three important medieval texts, all of them accompanied by running commentaries, making available for the first time in English the gist of the early Chinese alchemical corpus.
In Search of Immortality
Author: Xun LiuMaking Transcendents
Author: Robert Ford CampanyPublisher:
ISBN: 9780824870218
Category : Asceticism
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
By the middle of the third century B.C.E. in China there were individuals who sought to become transcendents (xian) - deathless, godlike beings endowed with supernormal powers. This quest for transcendence became a major form of religious expression and helped lay the foundation on which the first Daoist religion was built. Both xian and those who aspired to this exalted status in the centuries leading up to 350 C.E. have traditionally been portrayed as secretive and hermit-like figures. This groundbreaking study offers a very different view of xian-seekers in late classical and early medieval China.
Early Daoist Dietary Practices
Author: Shawn ArthurPublisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739178938
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
Much as the modern Western world is concerned with diets, health, and anti-aging remedies, many early medieval Chinese Daoists also actively sought to improve their health and increase their longevity through specialized ascetic dietary practices. Focusing on a fifth-century manual of herbal-based, immortality-oriented recipes—the Lingbao Wufuxu (The Preface to the Five Lingbao Talismans of Numinous Treasure)—Shawn Arthur investigates the diets, their ingredients, and their expected range of natural and supernatural benefits. Analyzing the ways that early Daoists systematically synthesized religion, Chinese medicine, and cosmological correlative logic, this study offers new understandings of important Daoist ideas regarding the body’s composition and mutability, health and disease, grain avoidance (bigu) diets, the parasitic Three Worms, interacting with the spirit realm, and immortality. This work also employs a range of cross-disciplinary scientific and medical research to analyze the healing properties of Daoist self-cultivation diets and to consider some natural explanations for better understanding Daoist asceticism and its underlying world view.
Crossroads of Cuisine
Author: Paul David BuellPublisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004432108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
Crossroads of Cuisine offers history of food and cultural exchanges in and around Central Asia. It discusses geographical base, and offers historical and cultural overview. A photo essay binds it all together. The book offers new views of the past.
Eminent Nuns
Author: Beata GrantPublisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824832027
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
The seventeenth century is generally acknowledged as one of the most politically tumultuous but culturally creative periods of late imperial Chinese history. Scholars have noted the profound effect on, and literary responses to, the fall of the Ming on the male literati elite. Also of great interest is the remarkable emergence beginning in the late Ming of educated women as readers and, more importantly, writers. Only recently beginning to be explored, however, are such seventeenth-century religious phenomena as "the reinvention" of Chan Buddhism—a concerted effort to revive what were believed to be the traditional teachings, texts, and practices of "classical" Chan. And, until now, the role played by women in these religious developments has hardly been noted at all. Eminent Nuns is an innovative interdisciplinary work that brings together several of these important seventeenth-century trends. Although Buddhist nuns have been a continuous presence in Chinese culture since early medieval times and the subject of numerous scholarly studies, this book is one of the first not only to provide a detailed view of their activities at one particular moment in time, but also to be based largely on the writings and self-representations of Buddhist nuns themselves. This perspective is made possible by the preservation of collections of "discourse records" (yulu) of seven officially designated female Chan masters in a seventeenth-century printing of the Chinese Buddhist Canon rarely used in English-language scholarship. The collections contain records of religious sermons and exchanges, letters, prose pieces, and poems, as well as biographical and autobiographical accounts of various kinds. Supplemental sources by Chan monks and male literati from the same region and period make a detailed re-creation of the lives of these eminent nuns possible. Beata Grant brings to her study background in Chinese literature, Chinese Buddhism, and Chinese women’s studies. She is able to place the seven women, all of whom were active in Jiangnan, in their historical, religious, and cultural contexts, while allowing them, through her skillful translations, to speak in their own voices. Together these women offer an important, but until now virtually unexplored, perspective on seventeenth-century China, the history of female monasticism in China, and the contributionof Buddhist nuns to the history of Chinese women’s writing.
World History as the History of Foundations, 3000 BCE to 1500 CE
Author: Michael BorgoltePublisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004415084
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 783
Book Description
In World History as the History of Foundations, 3000 BCE to 1500 CE, Michael Borgolte investigates the origins and development of foundations from Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. In his survey foundations emerge not as mere legal institutions, but rather as “total social phenomena” which touch upon manifold aspects, including politics, the economy, art and religion of the cultures in which they emerged. Cross-cultural in its approach and the result of decades of research, this work represents by far the most comprehensive account of the history of foundations that has hitherto been published.