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This edited collection offers a comprehensive overview of the
different aspects of human-animal interactions in Asia throughout
history. With twelve thematically-arranged chapters, this book
examines the diverse roles that beasts, livestock, and fish - real
and metaphorical- have played in Asian history, society, and
culture. Ranging from prehistory to the present day, the authors
address a wealth of topics including the domestication of animals,
dietary practices and sacrifice, hunting, the use of animals in
war, and the representation of animals in literature and art.
Providing a unique perspective on human interaction with the
environment, the volume is cross-disciplinary in its reach,
offering enriching insights to the fields of animal ethics, Asian
studies, world history and more.
This edited collection offers a comprehensive overview of the
different aspects of human-animal interactions in Asia throughout
history. With twelve thematically-arranged chapters, this book
examines the diverse roles that beasts, livestock, and fish - real
and metaphorical- have played in Asian history, society, and
culture. Ranging from prehistory to the present day, the authors
address a wealth of topics including the domestication of animals,
dietary practices and sacrifice, hunting, the use of animals in
war, and the representation of animals in literature and art.
Providing a unique perspective on human interaction with the
environment, the volume is cross-disciplinary in its reach,
offering enriching insights to the fields of animal ethics, Asian
studies, world history and more.
India and China dominate the Asian continent but are separated
by formidable geographic barriers and language differences. For
many centuries, most of the information that passed between the two
lands came through Silk Route intermediaries in lieu of
first-person encounters--leaving considerable room for invention.
From their introduction to Indian culture in the first centuries
C.E., Chinese thinkers, writers, artists, and architects imitated
India within their own borders, giving Indian images and ideas new
forms and adapting them to their own culture. Yet India's impact on
China has not been greatly researched or well understood."India in
the Chinese Imagination" takes a new look at the ways the Chinese
embedded India in diverse artifacts of Chinese religious, cultural,
artistic, and material life in the premodern era. Leading Asian
studies scholars explore the place of Indian myths and storytelling
in Chinese literature, how Chinese authors integrated Indian
history into their conception of the political and religious past,
and the philosophical relationships between Indian Buddhism,
Chinese Buddhism, and Daoism. This multifaceted volume, illustrated
with over a dozen works of art, reveals the depth and subtlety of
the encounter between India and China, shedding light on what it
means to imagine another culture--and why it matters.Contributors:
Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Bernard Faure, John Kieschnick, Victor H.
Mair, John R. McRae, Christine Mollier, Meir Shahar, Robert H.
Sharf, Nobuyoshi Yamabe, Ye Derong, Shi Zhiru.
The Shaolin Monastery charts, for the first time in any language,
the history of the Shaolin Temple and the evolution of its
world-renowned martial arts. In this meticulously researched and
eminently readable study, Meir Shahar considers the economic,
political, and religious factors that led Shaolin monks to
disregard the Buddhist prohibition against violence and instead
create fighting techniques that by the twenty-first century have
spread throughout the world. He examines the monks' relations with
successive Chinese regimes, beginning with the assistance they lent
to the seventh-century Emperor Li Shimin and culminating more than
a millennium later with their complex relations with Qing rulers,
who suspected them of rebellion. He reveals the intimate connection
between monastic violence and the veneration of the violent
divinities of Buddhism and analyzes the Shaolin association of
martial discipline and the search for spiritual enlightenment.
Shahar's exploration of the evolution of Shaolin fighting
techniques serves as a prism through which to consider martial-art
history in general. He correlates the emergence of the famous
bare-handed techniques of Taiji Quan, Xingyi Quan, and Shaolin Quan
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the social,
political, and religious trends of that age. He then goes on to
argue that these techniques were created not only for fighting, but
also for religious and therapeutic purposes. Thus his work fills an
important gap in the understanding of Chinese religion and medicine
as well as the martial arts. The Shaolin Monastery is the most
exhaustive study to date on the topic and the most systematic
introduction to the history and the religious context of the
Chinese martial arts tradition. It will engage those interested in
Chinese religion and history and martial arts, illuminating for
specialists, martial artists, and general readers alike the history
and nature of a martial tradition that continues to grow in
popularity in its native land and abroad.
Oedipal Godoffers the most comprehensive account in any language of
the prodigal deity Nezha. Celebrated for over a millennium, Nezha
is among the most formidable and enigmatic of all Chinese gods. In
this theoretically informed study Meir Shahar recounts Nezha's
riveting tale-which culminates in suicide and attempted
patricide-and uncovers hidden tensions in the Chinese family
system. In deploying the Freudian hypothesis, Shahar does not imply
the Chinese legend's identity with the Greek story of Oedipus. For
one, in Nezha's story the erotic attraction to the mother is not
explicitly acknowledged. More generally, Chinese oedipal tales
differ from Freud's Greek prototype by the high degree of
repression that is applied to them. Shahar argues that, despite a
disastrous father-son relationship, Confucian ethics require that
the oedipal drive masquerade as filial piety in Nezha's story,
dictating that the child-god kill himself before trying to avenge
himself upon his father. Combining impeccable scholarship with an
eminently readable style, the book covers a vast terrain: it
surveys the image of the endearing child-god across varied genres
from oral and written fiction, through theater, cinema, and
television serials, to Japanese manga cartoons. It combines
literary analysis with Shahar's own anthropological field work,
providing a thorough ethnography of Nezha's flourishing cult.
Crossing the boundaries between China's diverse religious
traditions, it tracks the rebellious infant in the many ways he has
been venerated by Buddhist monks, Daoist priests, and possessed
spirit mediums, whose dramatic performances have served to
negotiate individual, familial, and collective tensions. Finally,
the book offers a detailed history of the legend and the cult
reaching back over two thousand years to its origins in India,
where Nezha began as a mythological being named Nalak?bara, whose
sexual misadventures were celebrated in the Sanskrit epics as early
as the first centuries BCE. Here Shahar reveals the long-term
impact that Indian mythology has exerted-through the medium of
esoteric Buddhism-upon the Chinese imagination of divinity. A tour
de force of literary analysis, ethnographic research, psychological
insight, and cross-cultural investigation, Oedipal God is a must
read for anyone interested in Chinese studies and the historical
connection between India and China. Shahar's broad reach and
engaging approach will appeal to specialists and students in a
variety of disciplines including Chinese religion, Chinese
literature, anthropology, Buddhist studies, psychology, Indian
studies, and cross-cultural history.
Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China is the first study in
English to offer a systematic introduction to the Chinese pantheon
of divinities. Until now, Chinese deities have often been presented
as mere functionaries and bureaucrats. The essays in this volume
eloquently document the existence of other images that allowed
Chinese gods to challenge the prevailing power structures and
traditional mores of Chinese society. Here are deities who kill
their parents, who refuse to marry, who depose their predecessors,
who demand cigarettes instead of incense - in short, who challenge
all preconceptions about Chinese divinity. The authors draw on a
variety of disciplines (history, anthropology, literary studies)
and methodologies to throw light on various aspects of the Chinese
supernatural. In addition to reflecting the existing order, Chinese
gods shaped it, transformed it, and compensated for it, and, as
such, this study offers fresh perspectives on the relations between
divinity and society in China.
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