Bringing together Mishima's preoccupations with violence, desire, religious life and the history of Japan, this novel is based on an actual incident, the burning of a celebrated temple. The novel is a meditation on the state of Japan in the post-war period.
"Today Yoshimasa is remembered primarily as the builder of the Temple of the Silver Pavilion and as the ruler at the time of the Onin War (1467-1477), after which the authority of the shogun all but disappeared. Unable to control the daimyos - provincial military governors - he abandoned politics and devoted himself to the quest for beauty. It was then, after Yoshimasa resigned as shogun and made his home in the mountain retreat now known as the Silver Pavilion, that his aesthetic taste came to define that of the Japanese: the no theater flourished, Japanese gardens were developed, and the tea ceremony had its origins in a small room at the Silver Pavilion. Flower arrangement, ink painting, and shoin-zukua-i architecture began or became of major importance under Yoshimasa. Poets introduced their often barely literate warlord-hosts to the literary masterpieces of the past and taught them how to compose poetry.
The Gold Pavilion: Taoist Ways to Peace, Health, and Long Life is a step-by-step instruction of Taoist meditation from ancient China. The writings of the ancient Chinese Taoist masters tell us that when the mind, heart, and body are in tune with the harmonics of nature, a new inner peace emerges. This peace can be achieved through Taoist meditation, which is revealed in this fascinating book. Author Michael Saso provides a concise introduction to the history of and many sources from which Taoism is drawn. he outlines the essential Taoist texts, the Ching, the Tao-te Ching and the Chuang-tzu, as well as the different forms of Taoist and Tibetan Tantric meditation. he then offers an engaging translation of the Gold Pavilion classic, a Taoist meditation first practiced by a great forth-century mystic, Lady Wei Huacun, founder of a special kind of Taoism called the Highest Pure School. This important text teaches how to find Tao, "the Way," within by emptying the mind and heart of all desires and concepts. Combining discussions of Chinese philosophy, history and healing arts, The Golden Pavilion reveals a way to find inner peace and harmony in a world with little time for quiet contemplation.
This volume accompanies a major international loan exhibition featuring more than three hundred works of art, many rarely or never before seen in the United States. It traces the development of gold working and other luxury arts in the Americas from antiquity until the arrival of Europeans in the early sixteenth century. Presenting spectacular works from recent excavations in Peru, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico, this exhibition focuses on specific places and times—crucibles of innovation—where artistic exchange, rivalry, and creativity led to the production of some of the greatest works of art known from the ancient Americas. The book and exhibition explore not only artistic practices but also the historical, cultural, social, and political conditions in which luxury arts were produced and circulated, alongside their religious meanings and ritual functions. Golden Kingdoms creates new understandings of ancient American art through a thematic exploration of indigenous ideas of value and luxury. Central to the book is the idea of the exchange of materials and ideas across regions and across time: works of great value would often be transported over long distances, or passed down over generations, in both cases attracting new audiences and inspiring new artists. The idea of exchange is at the intellectual heart of this volume, researched and written by twenty scholars based in the United States and Latin America.
A book about pure being, singular will, beauty, and relating to the good in a world of seeming ugliness and mundanity, all through various connected essays and short stories.
Huell Howser, the exuberant, hugely popular host of California Gold and other California public-television shows, was always exclaiming to the camera, "Louie, take a look at this!" Now, three years after Howser's death, Louie—aka Luis Fuerte, a 5-time-Emmy-winning cameraman—shares all the great stories of their adventures exploring California, making great television, and showcasing Howser's infectious love for the Golden State.
Apartheid's Festival highlights the conflicts and debates that surrounded the 1952 celebration of the 300th anniversary of the landing of Jan Van Riebeeck and the founding of Cape Town, South Africa. Taking place at the height of the apartheid era, the festival was viewed by many as an opportunity for the government to promote its nationalist, separatist agenda in grand fashion. Leslie Witz's fine-grained examination of newspapers, brochures, pamphlets, and advertising materials reveals the expectations of the festival planners as well as how the festival was engineered, historical figures were reconstructed, and the ANC and other anti-apartheid organizations mounted opposition to it. While laying open the darker motives of the apartheid regime, Witz shows that the production of local history is part of a global process forged by the struggle between colonialism and resistance. Readers interested in South Africa, representations of nationalism, and the making of public history will find Apartheid's Festival to be an important study of a society in transition.
“Pomp, pageantry and epic showing-off: a vivid re-creation of the 1520 peace-promoting rally between the kings of England and France.”—The Sunday Times Glenn Richardson provides the first history in more than four decades of a major Tudor event: an extraordinary international gathering of Renaissance rulers unparalleled in its opulence, pageantry, controversy, and mystery. Throughout most of the late medieval period, from 1300 to 1500, England and France were bitter enemies, often at war or on the brink of it. In 1520, in an effort to bring conflict to an end, England’s monarch, Henry VIII, and Francis I of France agreed to meet, surrounded by virtually their entire political nations, at “the Field of Cloth of Gold.” In the midst of a spectacular festival of competition and entertainment, the rival leaders hoped to secure a permanent settlement between them, as part of a European-wide “Universal Peace.” Richardson offers a bold new appraisal of this remarkable historical event, describing the preparations and execution of the magnificent gathering, exploring its ramifications, and arguing that it was far more than the extravagant elitist theater and cynical charade it historically has been considered to be. “A sparkling new account of the Field of Cloth of Gold as an extraordinary demonstration of ostentatious rivalry.”—Suzannah Lipscomb, author of A Journey Through Tudor England “Richardson’s book seeks to throw new light on what we know of the Field itself: from how it was organized, provisioned and enacted, to the reasons such a sensational junket should have mattered—and in this it undoubtedly succeeds.”—London Review of Books
For more than two hundred years after its establishment in 1392, the Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with neighboring Ming China, which dwarfed it in size, population, and power. This remarkably long period of sustained peace was not an inevitable consequence of Chinese cultural and political ascendancy. In this book, Sixiang Wang demonstrates how Chosŏn political actors strategically deployed cultural practices, values, and narratives to carve out a place for Korea within the Ming imperial order. Boundless Winds of Empire is a cultural history of diplomacy that traces Chosŏn’s rhetorical and ritual engagement with China. Chosŏn drew on classical Chinese paradigms of statecraft, political legitimacy, and cultural achievement. It also paid regular tribute to the Ming court, where its envoys composed paeans to Ming imperial glory. Wang argues these acts were not straightforward affirmations of Ming domination; instead, they concealed a subtle and sophisticated strategy of diplomatic and cultural negotiation. He shows how Korea’s rulers and diplomats inserted Chosŏn into the Ming Empire’s legitimating strategies and established Korea as a stakeholder in a shared imperial tradition. Boundless Winds of Empire recasts a critical period of Sino-Korean relations through the Korean perspective, emphasizing Korean agency in the making of East Asian international relations.