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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Buddhism
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Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China (Hardcover)
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Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China (Hardcover)
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Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China presents a rogues'
gallery of treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat
underlings, ill-bred offspring, and disloyal officials. It plumbs
the dark matter of the human condition, placing front and center
transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized by
Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. The
work endeavors to apprehend the actions and motivations of these
men and women, whose conduct deviated from normative social,
cultural, and religious expectations. Early chapters examine how
core Confucian bonds such as those between parents and children,
and ruler and minister, were compromised, even severed. The living
did not always reverently pay homage to the dead, children did not
honor their parents with due filiality, a decorous distance was not
necessarily observed between sons and stepmothers, and subjects
often pursued their own interests before those of the ruler or the
state. The elasticity of ritual and social norms is explored:
Chapters on brazen Eastern Han (25-220) mourners and deviant
calligraphers, audacious falconers, volatile Tang (618-907)
Buddhist monks, and drunken Song (960-1279) literati reveal social
norms treated not as universal truths but as debated questions of
taste wherein political and social expedience both determined and
highlighted individual roles within larger social structures and
defined what was and was not aberrant. A Confucian predilection to
"valorize [the] civil and disparage the martial" and Buddhist
proscriptions on killing led literati and monks alike to condemn
the cruelty and chaos of war. The book scrutinizes cultural
attitudes toward military action and warfare, including those
surrounding the bloody and capricious world of the Zuozhuan
(Chronicle of Zuo), the relentless violence of the Five Dynasties
and Ten States periods (907-979), and the exploits of Tang warrior
priests-a series of studies that complicates the rhetoric by
situating it within the turbulent realities of the times. By the
end of this volume, readers will come away with the understanding
that behaving badly in early and medieval China was not about
morality but perspective, politics, and power.
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