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"This broad-ranging study is the first book-length treatment in English or any other European language of Chinese travel literature (youji) as a genre. The material addressed, most of which was written by members of the scholar-official class, extends from the Six Dynasties period (220-581), when the essential, characteristic elements of prose travel literature in China emerged, to fluorescence in the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644), after which the tremendous physical expansion of the Chinese empire fundamentally changed the nature of travel. James Hargett identifies and examines the works that constitute the core of China's travel-literature tradition and traces the dynamic process through w...
Animals play crucial roles in Buddhist thought and practice. However, many symbolically or culturally significant animals found in India, where Buddhism originated, do not inhabit China, to which Buddhism spread in the medieval period. In order to adapt Buddhist ideas and imagery to the Chinese context, writers reinterpreted and modified the meanings different creatures possessed. Medieval sources tell stories of monks taming wild tigers, detail rituals for killing snakes, and even address the question of whether a parrot could achieve enlightenment. Huaiyu Chen examines how Buddhist ideas about animals changed and were changed by medieval Chinese culture. He explores the entangled relations...
Winner of the Foundation Council Award of the Georg-August-University of Göttingen Public Law Foundation in the category of “Outstanding Publications of Young Scientists”, 2017. In Nation and Ethnicity: Chinese Discourses on History, Historiography, and Nationalism (1900s-1920s) Julia C. Schneider give an analysis of nationalist and historiographical discourses among late imperial and early republican Chinese thinkers. In particular, she researches their approaches towards non-Chinese people within the Qing Empire and the question on how to integrate them into a Chinese nation-state. Non-Chinese people, mainly Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, and Turkic Muslims, (Uyghurs), have not been considered as important factors in the history of early Chinese nationalism so far. But Chinese nationalist and historiographical discourses tell not only a lot about the Chinese image of the Other, but also shed new light on the images of the Chinese Self and its assumed ability to assimilate and integrate other ethnicities.
Fan Chengda (1126-1193) was a high-ranking Chinese government official in Guangxi, an experienced traveler, a keen observer, and a gifted writer. His observations on a wide range of subjects are always interesting and revealing, and constitute an important contribution to the literature on Song dynasty China’s frontier peoples. Originally written in direct, unadorned, and allusion-free classical Chinese prose, the complete and annotated English translation of Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea (Guihai yuheng zhi) captures its charm and significance.
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Chinese Esoteric Buddhism is generally held to have been established as a distinct and institutionalized Buddhist school in eighth-century China by “the Three Great Masters of Kaiyuan”: Śubhākarasiṃha, Vajrabodhi, and Amoghavajra. Geoffrey C. Goble provides an innovative account of the tradition’s emergence that sheds new light on the structures and traditions that shaped its institutionalization. Goble focuses on Amoghavajra (704–774), contending that he was the central figure in Esoteric Buddhism’s rapid rise in Tang dynasty China, and the other two “patriarchs” are known primarily through Amoghavajra’s teachings and writings. He presents the scriptural, mythological, a...