The Magnitude of Ming
Title | The Magnitude of Ming PDF eBook |
Author | Christopher Lupke |
Publisher | University of Hawaii Press |
Total Pages | 392 |
Release | 2005-01-31 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 082487398X |
Few ideas in Chinese discourse are as ubiquitous as ming, variously understood as “command,” “allotted lifespan,” “fate,” or “life.” In the earliest days of Chinese writing, ming was already present, invoked in divinations and etched into ancient bronzes; it has continued to inscribe itself down to the twenty-first century in literature and film. This volume assembles twelve essays by some of the most eminent scholars currently working in Chinese studies to produce the first comprehensive study in English of ming’s broad web of meanings. The essays span the history of Chinese civilization and represent disciplines as varied as religion, philosophy, anthropology, literary studies, history, and sociology. Cross-cultural comparisons between ancient Chinese views of ming and Western conceptions of moira and fatum are discussed, providing a specific point of departure for contrasting the structure of attitudes between the two civilizations. Ming is central to debates on the legitimacy of rulership and is the crucial variable in Daoist manuals for prolonging one’s life. It has preoccupied the philosopher and the poet and weighed on the minds of commoners throughout imperial China. Ming was the subject of the great critic Jin Shengtan’s last major literary work and drove the narrative of such classic novels as The Investiture of the Gods and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Confucius, Mencius, and most other great thinkers of the classical age, as well as those in ages to come, had much to say on the subject. It has only been eschewed in contemporary Chinese philosophy, but even its effacement there has ironically turned it into a sort of absent cause. Contributors: Stephen Bokenkamp, Zong-qi Cai, Robert Campany, Woei Lien Chong, Deirdre Sabina Knight, Christopher Lupke, Mu-chou Poo, Michael Puett, Lisa Raphals, P. Steven Sangren, David Schaberg, Patricia Sieber.
Fate and Prognostication in the Chinese Literary Imagination
Title | Fate and Prognostication in the Chinese Literary Imagination PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | BRILL |
Total Pages | 232 |
Release | 2020-04-28 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9004427570 |
The essays collected in Fate and Prognostication in the Chinese Literary Imagination deal with the issues hidden in the Chinese conception of fate as represented in literary texts and films, with a focus placed on human efforts to solve the riddles of fate prediction.
Coping with the Future
Title | Coping with the Future PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | BRILL |
Total Pages | 602 |
Release | 2018-06-12 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9004356789 |
Coping with the Future: Theories and Practices of Divination in East Asia offers contributions to various practical and theoretical aspects of divination from antiquity to the present in East Asia.
In Pursuit of the Great Peace
Title | In Pursuit of the Great Peace PDF eBook |
Author | Zhao Lu |
Publisher | State University of New York Press |
Total Pages | 352 |
Release | 2019-05-31 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1438474938 |
Through an examination of the Great Peace (taiping), one of the first utopian visions in Chinese history, Zhao Lu describes the transformation of literati culture that occurred during the Han Dynasty. Driven by anxiety over losing the mandate of Heaven, the imperial court encouraged classicism in order to establish the Great Peace and follow Heaven's will. But instead of treating the literati as puppets of competing and imagined lineages, Zhao uses sociological methods to reconstruct their daily lives and to show how they created their own thought by adopting, modifying, and opposing the work of their contemporaries and predecessors. The literati who served as bureaucrats in the first century BCE gradually became classicists who depended on social networking as they traveled to study the classics. By the second century CE, classicism had dissolved in this traveling culture and the literati began to expand the corpus of knowledge beyond the accepted canon. Thus, far from being static, classicism in Han China was full of innovation, and ultimately gave birth to both literary writing and religious Daoism.
Landscapes of the Chinese Soul
Title | Landscapes of the Chinese Soul PDF eBook |
Author | Tomas Plaenkers |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 302 |
Release | 2018-04-17 |
Genre | Psychology |
ISBN | 0429915551 |
This book documents the research project on the trauma of the Cultural Revolution in China and its intergenerational effects. It allows the reader to view the trauma through the perspective of 2,500 years of Chinese thought, and in the light of Chinese social history and governmental policy.
The Ming Maritime Trade Policy in Transition, 1368 to 1567
Title | The Ming Maritime Trade Policy in Transition, 1368 to 1567 PDF eBook |
Author | Kangying Li |
Publisher | Otto Harrassowitz Verlag |
Total Pages | 232 |
Release | 2010 |
Genre | China |
ISBN | 9783447061728 |
The Ming maritime policy in transition, 1368-1567" is an unprecedented structural approach to one of the most puzzling phenomena in Chinese early modern history: the maritime trade prohibition from 1368 to 1567. This policy deliberately interdicted its own people from sailing abroad and prevented foreigners from entering China unless they were part of an official tribute mission. Other than treating this phenomenon as an isolated trade policy or defense strategy the author analyzes the policy against the general Chinese historical background from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. He approaches the policy as a superstructure established on the foundation of a compatible ideology, the social context, economic institutions and the political power landscape. The 200 years long process of the policy in transition is hence investigated as a 200 years course that witnessed the general transformation of the Ming ideological, social, economic and political structures. It is the historical undercurrent rather than spindrift that appeals to this book's historiography; it is a comprehensive study of the two particular centuries of the Ming society, of which the developments and characteristics have amazed not only historians.
The Quest for Ecstatic Morality in Early China
Title | The Quest for Ecstatic Morality in Early China PDF eBook |
Author | Kenneth W. Holloway |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | 175 |
Release | 2013-03-28 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0199941742 |
This book examines the missing link between what came to be called Confucianism and Daoism.