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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Oriental religions
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The Tao of Pooh
(Paperback)
Benjamin Hoff; Illustrated by E.H. Shepard
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R265
R237
Discovery Miles 2 370
Save R28 (11%)
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"What's this you're writing?... asked Pooh, climbing onto the
writing table. "The Tao of Pooh,... I replied. "The how of Pooh?...
asked Pooh, smudging one of the words I had just written. "The Tao
of Pooh,... I replied, poking his paw away with my pencil. "It
seems more like ow! of Pooh,... said Pooh, rubbing his paw. "Well,
it's not,... I replied huffily. "What's it about?... asked Pooh,
leaning forward and smearing another word. "It's about how to stay
happy and calm under all circumstances!... I yelled. "Have you read
it?... asked Pooh... ...Winnie-the-Pooh has a certain way about
him, a way of doing things that has made him the world's most
beloved bear, and Pooh's Way, as Benjamin Hoff brilliantly
demonstrates, seems strangely close to the ancient Chinese
principles of Taoism. Follow the Pooh Way in this humorous and
enlightening introduction to Taoism, with classic decorations by
E.H.Shepard throughout. Over a million copies sold.
After a century during which Confucianism was viewed by academics
as a relic of the imperial past or, at best, a philosophical
resource, its striking comeback in Chinese society today raises a
number of questions about the role that this ancient
tradition-re-appropriated, reinvented, and sometimes
instrumentalized-might play in a contemporary context. The Sage and
the People, originally published in French, is the first
comprehensive enquiry into the "Confucian revival" that began in
China during the 2000s. It explores its various dimensions in
fields as diverse as education, self-cultivation, religion, ritual,
and politics. Resulting from a research project that the two
authors launched together in 2004, the book is based on the
extensive anthropological fieldwork they carried out in various
parts of China over the next eight years. Sebastien Billioud and
Joel Thoraval suspected, despite the prevailing academic consensus,
that fragments of the Confucian tradition would sooner or later be
re-appropriated within Chinese society and they decided to their
hypothesis. The reality greatly exceeded their initial
expectations, as the later years of their project saw the rapid
development of what is now called the "Confucian revival" or
"Confucian renaissance". Using a cross-disciplinary approach that
links the fields of sociology, anthropology, and history, this book
unveils the complexity of the "Confucian Revival" and the relations
between the different actors involved, in addition to shedding
light on likely future developments.
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Karma
(Paperback)
Annie Besant
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R398
Discovery Miles 3 980
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Ships in 12 - 19 working days
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With over four million copies in print, Parmahansa Yogananda's
autobiography has been translated into thirty-three languages, and
it still serves as a gateway into yoga and alternative spirituality
for countless North American practitioners. This book examines
Yogananda's life and work to clarify linkages between the seemingly
disparate aspects of modern yoga, and illuminates the intimate
connections between yoga and metaphysically-leaning American
traditions such as Unitarianism, New Thought, and Theosophy.
Instead of treating yoga as a stable practice, Anya P. Foxen
proposes that it is the figure of the Yogi that give the practice
of his followers both form and meaning. Focusing on Yogis rather
than yoga during the period of transnational popularization
highlights the continuities in the concept of the Yogi as
superhuman even as it illuminates the transformation of the
practice itself. Skillfully balancing traditional yogic ritual,
metaphysical spirituality, physical culture, and a flair for the
stage, Foxen shows, Yogananda taught a proto-modern yoga to his
American audiences. His Yogoda program has remained under the radar
of yoga scholarship due to its lack of reliance on recognizable
postures. However, as a regimen of training for the modern Yogi,
Yogananda's method synthesizes the spiritual and superhuman
aspirations of Indian traditions with the metaphysical and
health-oriented sensibilities of Euro-American progressivism in a
way that exactly prefigures present-day transnational yoga culture.
Yet, at the heart of it all, Yogananda retains a sense of what it
means to be a Yogi: his message is that the natural destiny of the
human is the superhuman.
While the resonance of Giambattista Vico's hermeneutics for
postcolonialism has long been recognised, a rupture has been
perceived between his intercultural sensibility and the actual
content of his philological investigations, which have often been
criticised as being Eurocentric and philologically spurious. China
is a case in point. In his magnum opus New Science, Vico portrays
China as backward and philosophically primitive compared to Europe.
In this first study dedicated to China in Vico's thought, Daniel
Canaris shows that scholars have been beguiled by Vico's value
judgements of China without considering the function of these value
judgements in his theory of divine providence. This monograph
illustrates that Vico's image of China is best appreciated within
the contemporary theological controversies surrounding the Jesuit
accommodation of Confucianism. Through close examination of Vico's
sources and intellectual context, Canaris argues that by refusing
to consider Confucius as a "filosofo", Vico dismantles the
rationalist premises of the theological accommodation proposed by
the Jesuits and proposes a new functionalist valorisation of
non-Christian religion that anticipates post-colonial critiques of
the Enlightenment.
The study of religions is essential for understanding other
cultures, building a sense of belonging in a multicultural world
and fostering a global intercultural dialogue. Exploring Chinese
religions as one interlocutor in this dialogue, Diana Arghirescu
engages with Song-dynasty Confucian and Buddhist theoretical
developments through a detailed study of the original texts of the
Chan scholar-monk Qisong (1007-1072) and the Neo-Confucian master
Zhu Xi (1130-1200). Starting with these figures, she builds an
interpretive theory focusing on "ethical interrelatedness" and
proposes it as a theoretical tool for the study of the Chinese
religious traditions. By actively engaging with other contemporary
theories of religion and refusing to approach Chinese religions
with Western frameworks, Arghirescu's comparative perspective makes
it possible to uncover differences between the various Western and
Chinese cultural presuppositions upon which these theories are
built. As such, this book breaks new ground in the methodology of
religious studies, comparative philosophy and furthers our
understanding of the Confucian-Buddhist interaction.
Kung joins with three esteemed colleagues to address the question:
"Can we break through the barriers of noncommunication, fear, and
mistrust that separate the followers of the world's great
religions?" The authors analyze the main lines of approach taken by
Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and give Christian responses to the
values and challenges each tradition presents.
This book interprets the Tao Te Ching from the perspective of
personal cultivation. The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu is regarded as
one of the greatest books of wisdom ever written in history, but
few can grasp what it says in entirety. Embedded in each of its
5,000 Chinese characters are highly profound messages. Master Sim
Pooh Ho is a Tai Chi Master and the leader of a Tai Chi lineage
that traces back centuries. In his book Decoding the Tao Te Ching,
he combines the ancestral teachings of Tai Chi with his practice
and provides readers with unique insights into Lao Tzu's ancient
book.The Tao Te Ching is difficult to comprehend because many of
the concepts it introduces are elusive. What is Tao and Te, being
and non-being or yin and yang? The concepts, however, are
discernible in Tai Chi because they are what make the practice
work. Decoding the Tao Te Ching is written in a simple manner by a
Tai Chi master, and translated in an accessible way by his senior
disciple Tekson TEO, thus making it an enlightening read to all
English readers interested in this topic.
Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan is the first
systematic study of Shinto's environmental turn. The book traces
the development in recent decades of the idea of Shinto as an
'ancient nature religion,' and a resource for overcoming
environmental problems. The volume shows how these ideas gradually
achieved popularity among scientists, priests, Shinto-related new
religious movements and, eventually, the conservative shrine
establishment. Aike P. Rots argues that central to this development
is the notion of chinju no mori: the sacred groves surrounding many
Shinto shrines. Although initially used to refer to remaining areas
of primary or secondary forest, today the term has come to be
extended to any sort of shrine land, signifying not only historical
and ecological continuity but also abstract values such as
community spirit, patriotism and traditional culture. The book
shows how Shinto's environmental turn has also provided legitimacy
internationally: influenced by the global discourse on religion and
ecology, in recent years the Shinto establishment has actively
engaged with international organizations devoted to the
conservation of sacred sites. Shinto sacred forests thus carry
significance locally as well as nationally and internationally, and
figure prominently in attempts to reposition Shinto in the centre
of public space.
In Philosophical Enactment and Bodily Cultivation in Early Daoism,
Thomas Michael illuminates the formative early history of the
Daodejing and the social, political, religious, and philosophical
trends that indelibly marked it. This book centers on the matrix of
the Daodejing that harbors a penetrating phenomenology of the Dao
together with a rigorous system of bodily cultivation. It traces
the historical journey of the text from its earliest oral
circulations to its later transcriptions seen in a growing
collection of ancient Chinese excavated manuscripts. It examines
the ways in which Huang-Lao thinkers from the Han Dynasty
transformed the original phenomenology of the Daodejing into a
metaphysics that reconfigured its original matrix, and it explores
the success of the Wei-Jin Daoist Ge Hong in bringing the matrix
back into its original alignment. This book is an important
contribution to cross-cultural studies, bringing contemporary
Chinese scholarship on Daoism into direct conversation with Western
scholarship on Daoism. The book also concludes with a discussion of
Martin Heidegger's recognition of the position and value of the
Daodejing for the future of comparative philosophy.
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