Daoism and Chinese Culture

Daoism and Chinese Culture PDF

Author: Livia Kohn

Publisher: Three Pine Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A long-awaited textbook that introduces the major schools, teachings, and practices of Daoism, this work presents a chronological survey that is thematically divided into four parts: Ancient Thought, Religious Communities, Spiritual Practices, and Modernity. The work offers an integrated vision of the Daoist tradition in its historical and cultural context, establishing connections with relevant information on Confucianism, Chinese Buddhism, popular religion, and political developments. It also places Daoism into a larger theoretical and comparative framework, relating it to mysticism, millenarianism, forms of religious organization, ritual, meditation, and modernity. The book makes ample use of original materials and provides references to further readings and original sources in translation. It is a powerful resource for teaching and studying alike.

Taoism and the Arts of China

Taoism and the Arts of China PDF

Author: Stephen Little

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9780520227859

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A celebration of Taoist art traces the influence of philosophy on the visual arts in China.

Picturing the True Form

Picturing the True Form PDF

Author: Shih-shan Susan Huang

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 533

ISBN-13: 168417516X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to both earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Shih-shan Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, and paintings, as well as other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not static, but entails an active journey of seeing underlying and secret phenomena.This book’s structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea that the inner and outer mirror each other and the boundary demarcating the two is fluid. Huang also reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism—aniconic, immaterial, and ephemeral—and shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart."

Daoism in Japan

Daoism in Japan PDF

Author: Jeffrey L. Richey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-05-01

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1317662865

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Like an ancient river, Daoist traditions introduced from China once flowed powerfully through the Japanese religious landscape, forever altering its topography and ecology. Daoism’s presence in Japan still may be discerned in its abiding influence on astrology, divination, festivals, literature, politics, and popular culture, not to mention Buddhism and Shintō. Despite this legacy, few English-language studies of Daoism’s influence on Japanese religious culture have been published. Daoism in Japan provides an exploration of the particular pathways by which Daoist traditions entered Japan from continental East Asia. After addressing basic issues in both Daoist Studies and the study of Japanese religions, including the problems of defining ‘Daoism’ and ‘Japanese,’ the book looks at the influence of Daoism on ancient, medieval and modern Japan in turn. To do so, the volume is arranged both chronologically and topically, according to the following three broad divisions: "Arrivals" (c. 5th-8th centuries CE), "Assimilations" (794-1868), and "Apparitions" (1600s-present). The book demonstrates how Chinese influence on Japanese religious culture ironically proved to be crucial in establishing traditions that usually are seen as authentically, even quintessentially, Japanese. Touching on multiple facets of Japanese cultural history and religious traditions, this book is a fascinating contribution for students and scholars of Japanese Culture, History and Religions, as well as Daoist Studies.

China: Promise or Threat?

China: Promise or Threat? PDF

Author: Horst Jürgen Helle

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 9004330607

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In China: Promise or Threat? Helle compares the cultures of China and the West through both private and public spheres. For China, the private sphere of family life is well developed while behaviour in public relating to matters of government and the law is less reliable. In contrast, the West operates in reverse. The book’s twelve chapters investigate the causes and effects of threats to the environment, military confrontations, religious differences, fundamentals of cultural history, and the countries’ orientations for finding solutions to societal problems, all informed by the Confucian impulse to recapture the lost splendour of a past versus faith in progress toward a blessed future. The West has promoted individualism while China is locked in its kinship society.

Daoist China: Governance, Economy, Culture

Daoist China: Governance, Economy, Culture PDF

Author: Livia Kohn

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1931483353

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Traveling in China today and walking about in various cities, it is easy to observe the continued unbridled construction of huge, megalithic high-rise complexes in vast stretches of the country, complete with the untrammeled despoiling of nature and intensification of pollution, as well as the ever increasing vibrancy of the Chinese people, glued to their cell phones and actively connected online, always moving about and hustling for yet another deal. At the same time, using the internet without a VPN and talking to academics at various universities, it becomes obvious that there is a massive increase in repressive measures by the state, the tightening of the intellectual control of both content and expression, the fluctuating inaccessibility of information sources that used to be perfectly fine. What, the question arises, is going on here? Where China stands today and where is it headed from here? And what, in all of this, is the role and place of Daoism? These sixty vignettes on "Daoist China" present different aspects of life in China, in each case describing the current situation and connecting it to the role and changing facets of Daoism today, focusing in turn on dimensions of governance, economics, and culture.

China's Green Religion

China's Green Religion PDF

Author: James Miller

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-05-16

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0231544537

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

How can Daoism, China's indigenous religion, give us the aesthetic, ethical, political, and spiritual tools to address the root causes of our ecological crisis and construct a sustainable future? In China's Green Religion, James Miller shows how Daoism orients individuals toward a holistic understanding of religion and nature. Explicitly connecting human flourishing to the thriving of nature, Daoism fosters a "green" subjectivity and agency that transforms what it means to live a flourishing life on earth. Through a groundbreaking reconstruction of Daoist philosophy and religion, Miller argues for four key, green insights: a vision of nature as a subjective power that informs human life; an anthropological idea of the porous body based on a sense of qi flowing through landscapes and human beings; a tradition of knowing founded on the experience of transformative power in specific landscapes and topographies; and an aesthetic and moral sensibility based on an affective sensitivity to how the world pervades the body and the body pervades the world. Environmentalists struggle to raise consciousness for their cause, Miller argues, because their activism relies on a quasi-Christian concept of "saving the earth." Instead, environmentalists should integrate nature and culture more seamlessly, cultivating through a contemporary intellectual vocabulary a compelling vision of how the earth materially and spiritually supports human flourishing.

Daoism in the Twentieth Century

Daoism in the Twentieth Century PDF

Author: David A Palmer

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2012-03

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 0520289862

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An interdisciplinary group of scholars explores the social history and anthropology of Daoism from the late nineteenth century to the present, focusing on the evolution of traditional forms of practice and community, as well as modern reforms and reinventions. Essays investigate ritual specialists, body cultivation and meditation traditions, monasticism, new religious movements, state-sponsored institutionalization, and transnational networks"--Publisher's Web site.

Lanterna Rally - Theme by Grace Themes