The Sea and the Sacred in Japan is the first book to focus on the role of the sea in Japanese religions. While many leading Shinto deities tend to be understood today as unrelated to the sea, and mountains are considered the privileged sites of sacredness, this book provides new ways to understand Japanese religious culture and history. Scholars from North America, Japan and Europe explore the sea and the sacred in relation to history, culture, politics, geography, worldviews and cosmology, space and borders, and ritual practices and doctrines. Examples include Japanese indigenous conceptualizations of the sea from the Middle Ages to the 20th century; ancient sea myths and rituals; sea deities and sea cults; the role of the sea in Buddhist cosmology; and the international dimension of Japanese Buddhism and its maritime imaginary.

A wonderfully enjoyable storehouse of ancient Chinese history and legends, which also has an important role in understanding 21st-century China 'And remember: Heaven's blessing will cease forever if there's despair and poverty in your lands' The Most Venerable Book (also known as The Book of History) is one of the Five Classics, a key work of Chinese literature which preserves some of the most ancient and dramatic chronicles of the history, both real and mythological, of the Chinese state. For many centuries it was a central work for anyone wishing to work for the Imperial administration, preserving as it does a fascinating mixture of key Confucian concepts as well as page after page of heroes, benevolent rulers, sagacious ministers, and struggles against flood, corruption and vicious, despotic rulers. The First Emperor tried in 213 BC to have all copies of the book destroyed because of its subversive implication that 'the Mandate of Heaven' could be withdrawn from rulers who failed their people. For similar reasons it was also banned by Chairman Mao. Extraordinarily, the values of The Most Venerable Book have been revived by the Chinese government of the 2010s.

One of the five classics of Confucianism, the I Ching or Book of Changes has exerted a living influence in China for three thousand years. Beginning in the dawn of history as a book of oracles, it became a book of wisdom--a common source for both Confucianist and Taoist philosophy. The I Ching was little known in the West before James Legge's English translation (1882), and the appearance of the late Richard Wilhelm's poetic translation into German in 1923 made to work available to a wider public. This was in turned published in Bollingen Series (1950) in the translation of Cary F. Baynes. Now Professor Hellmut Wilhelm, of the University of Washington, carries on his father's work with a group of related studies of the Book of Changes. Born and educated in China, Hellmut Wilhelm grew up in an atmosphere of Chinese classical tradition. During the winter of 1943, he delivered the first version of these lectures to a group of Europeans, isolated in Peking under Japanese occupation, who wished to study the I Ching. Besides presenting a lucid explanation and interpretation of the I Ching, Professor Willhelm brings forward new scholarship and insights. Mrs. Baynes is again responsible for the translation. Originally published in 1960. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.