Author: Suzanne Elizabeth Cahill Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 9780804721127 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 348
Book Description
Drawing on medieval Chinese poetry, fiction, and religious scriptures, this book illuminates the greatest goddess of Taoism and her place in Chinese society.
Author: Patricia Monaghan Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 0313354669 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 973
Book Description
This collection of accessible essays relates the stories of individual goddesses from around the world, exploring their roles in the cultures from which they came, their histories and status today, and the controversies surrounding them. Goddesses in World Culture brings readers the fascinating stories of close to 100 of the world's goddesses, ranging from the immediately recognizable to the obscure. These figures, many of whom derive from ancient cultures and civilizations, serve as points of departure for examining questions that go well beyond the role of women in religion and spirituality to include social organization, environmental awareness, historical developments, and psychological archetypes. Each volume of this groundbreaking set is composed of 20–25 previously unpublished articles written by expert contributors from diverse disciplines. Volume one covers Asia and Africa, volume two covers the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe, and volume three covers Australia and the Americas. Goddesses from cultures often overlooked in texts on religion, such as those of the Australian Aborigines, Korea, Nepal, and the Caribbean, are included here. In addition, the work offers new translations of ancient texts, introduces little-known folklore, and suggests new approaches to contemporary religious practices.
Author: Richard Tarnas Publisher: Ballantine Books ISBN: 0307804526 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 560
Book Description
"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.
Author: Robert Ford Campany Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824863496 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
Honorable Mention, Joseph Levenson Prize (pre-1900 category), Association for Asian Studies 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. It suggests that transcendence did not involve a withdrawal from society but rather should be seen as a religious role situated among other social roles and conceived in contrast to them. Robert Campany argues that the much-discussed secrecy surrounding ascetic disciplines was actually one important way in which practitioners presented themselves to others. He contends, moreover, that many adepts were not socially isolated at all but were much sought after for their power to heal the sick, divine the future, and narrate their exotic experiences. The book moves from a description of the roles of xian and xian-seekers to an account of how individuals filled these roles, whether by their own agency or by others’—or, often, by both. Campany summarizes the repertoire of features that constituted xian roles and presents a detailed example of what analyses of those cultural repertoires look like. He charts the functions of a basic dialectic in the self-presentations of adepts and examines their narratives and relations with others, including family members and officials. Finally, he looks at hagiographies as attempts to persuade readers as to the identities and reputations of past individuals. His interpretation of these stories allows us to see how reputations were shaped and even co-opted—sometimes quite surprisingly—into the ranks of xian. Making Transcendents provides a nuanced discussion that draws on a sophisticated grasp of diverse theoretical sources while being thoroughly grounded in traditional Chinese hagiographical, historiographical, and scriptural texts. The picture it presents of the quest for transcendence as a social phenomenon in early medieval China is original and provocative, as is the paradigm it offers for understanding the roles of holy persons in other societies.
Author: Yanning Wang Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 0739179845 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 207
Book Description
This is a study of Chinese gentry women’s poems on the theme of travel written during the late imperial period (ca.1600–1911), when Chinese women’s literature and culture flourished as never before. It challenges the clichéd image of completely secluded and immobile women anxiously waiting inside their prescribed feminine space, the so-called inner quarters, for the return of traveling husbands or other male kin. The travel poems discussed in this book, while not necessarily representative of all of the women writers of this period, point to the fact that many of them longed to explore the world through travel as did so many of their male counterparts. Sometimes they were able to actualize this desire for travel and sometimes they were forced to resort to imaginary “armchair travel.” In either case, women writers often used poetry as a means of recording their experiences or delineating their dreams of traveling outside the inner quarters, and indeed sometimes far away from the inner quarters. With its promise of adventure and fulfillment and, above all, a broadening of one’s intellectual and emotional horizons, travel was an important, and until now understudied, theme of late imperial women’s poetry.
Author: Kathryn M. Grossman Publisher: SIU Press ISBN: 9780809318896 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
The intricate interweaving of characters, plot, subplots, themes, imagery, topography, and digressions in Hugo's prose masterpiece results in a completely integrated metaphorical system. Superficial chaos, Grossman argues, is deeply ordered by repeating patterns that produce a kind of literary fractal, a multilayered verbal network.
Author: Patricia Monaghan, PhD Publisher: New World Library ISBN: 1608682188 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 450
Book Description
More Than 1,000 Goddesses & Heroines from around the World Groundbreaking scholar Patricia Monaghan spent her life researching, writing about, and documenting goddesses and heroines from all religions and all corners of the globe. Her work demonstrated that from the beginning of recorded history, goddesses reigned alongside their male counterparts as figures of inspiration and awe. Drawing on anthropology, folklore, literature, and psychology, Monaghan’s vibrant and accessible encyclopedia covers female deities from Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, Asia and Oceania, Europe, and the Americas, as well as every major religious tradition.
Author: Michael Como Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 0824837525 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 330
Book Description
Among the most exciting developments in the study of Japanese religion over the past two decades has been the discovery of tens of thousands of ritual vessels, implements, and scapegoat dolls (hitogata) from the Nara (710-784) and early Heian (794-1185) periods. Because inscriptions on many of the items are clearly derived from Chinese rites of spirit pacification, it is now evident that previous scholarship has mischaracterized the role of Buddhism in early Japanese religion. Weaving and Binding makes a compelling argument that both the Japanese royal system and the Japanese Buddhist tradition owe much to continental rituals centered on the manipulation of yin and yang, animal sacrifice, and spirit quelling. Building on these recent archaeological discoveries, Michael Como charts an epochal transformation in the religious culture of the Japanese islands, tracing the transmission and development of fundamental paradigms of religious practice to immigrant lineages and deities from the Korean peninsula. In addition to archaeological materials, Como makes extensive use of a wide range of textual sources from across Asia, including court chronicles, poetry collections, gazetteers, temple records, and divinatory texts. As he investigates the influence of myths, legends, and rites of the ancient Chinese festival calendar on religious practice across the Japanese islands, Como shows how the ability of immigrant lineages to propitiate hostile deities led to the creation of elaborate networks of temple-shrine complexes that shaped later sectarian Shinto as well as popular understandings of the relationship between the buddhas and the gods of Japan. For much of the book, this process is examined through rites and legends from the Chinese calendar that were related to weaving, sericulture, and medicine—technologies that to a large degree were controlled by lineages with roots in the Korean peninsula and that claimed female deities and weaving maidens as founding ancestors. Como’s examination of a series of ancient Japanese legends of female immortals, weaving maidens, and shamanesses reveals that female deities played a key role in the moving of technologies and ritual practices from peripheral regions in Kyushu and elsewhere into central Japan and the heart of the imperial cult. As a result, some of the most important building blocks of the purportedly native Shinto tradition were to a remarkable degree shaped by the ancestral cults of immigrant lineages and popular Korean and Chinese religious practices. This is a provocative and innovative work that upsets the standard interpretation of early historical religion in Japan, revealing a complex picture of continental cultic practice both at court and in the countryside.
Author: Suzanne Elizabeth Cahill
Author: Suzanne E. Cahill
Author: James Allen
Author: Patricia Monaghan
Author: Richard Tarnas
Author: Robert Ford Campany
Author: Yanning Wang
Author: Kathryn M. Grossman
Author: Patricia Monaghan, PhD
Author: Michael Como