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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Oriental religions
Ancestral ritual in early China was an orchestrated dance between
what was present (the offerings and the living) and what was absent
(the ancestors). The interconnections among the tangible elements
of the sacrifice were overt and almost mechanical, but extending
those connections to the invisible guests required a medium that
was itself invisible. Thus in early China, ancestral sacrifice was
associated with focused thinking about the ancestors, with a
structured mental effort by the living to reach out to the absent
forebears and to give them shape and existence. Thinking about the
ancestors-about those who had become distant-required active
deliberation and meditation, qualities that had to be nurtured and
learned. This study is a history of the early Chinese ancestral
cult, particularly its cognitive aspects. Its goals are to excavate
the cult's color and vitality and to quell assumptions that it was
no more than a simplistic and uninspired exchange of food for
longevity, of prayers for prosperity. Ancestor worship was not, the
author contends, merely mechanical and thoughtless. Rather, it was
an idea system that aroused serious debates about the nature of
postmortem existence, served as the religious backbone to
Confucianism, and may even have been the forerunner of Daoist and
Buddhist meditation practices.
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Tao Te King
(Paperback)
Lao zi; Contributions by Mint Editions
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R159
R149
Discovery Miles 1 490
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