After saving Free Market City from an army of monsters and a confused fire dragon, Nacht and Aisha are living the high life! Now famous heroes, they’ve become the talk of the town and have nobles waiting on them hand and foot. The kingdom’s second princess herself is even requesting a meeting with them—no doubt to discuss the war rumored to be brewing with the neighboring kingdom of Estoll. But Nacht has zero interest in being drawn into human politics. She’d much rather track down Aisha’s missing mother, the elf Floria. Maybe she can help Aisha find closure by finding the woman who abandoned her long ago.
After having been summoned to the world of Disboard, where a boyish god has declared that all conflicts must be resolved via games, the genius gamer siblings Sora and Shiro have ascended to rule over the strange world's embattled humans. Now brother and sister must challenge the other races directly, and the games are afoot! Will Sora and Shiro be able to stand against the might of the angelic Flügel race? The next chapter in the hit fantasy series begins here!
Written by one of the leading scholars of Japanese religion, Protectors and Predators is the second installment of a multivolume project that promises to be a milestone in our understanding of the mythico-ritual system of esoteric Buddhism—specifically the nature and roles of deities in the religious world of medieval Japan and beyond. Bernard Faure introduces readers to medieval Japanese religiosity and shows the centrality of the gods in religious discourse and ritual. Throughout he engages theoretical insights drawn from structuralism, post-structuralism, and Actor-Network Theory to retrieve the “implicit pantheon” (as opposed to the “explicit orthodox pantheon”) of esoteric Japanese Buddhism (Mikkyō). His work is particularly significant given its focus on the deities’ multiple and shifting representations, overlappings, and modes of actions rather than on individual characters and functions. In Protectors and Predators Faure argues that the “wild” gods of Japan were at the center of the medieval religious landscape and came together in complex webs of association not divisible into the categories of “Buddhist,” “indigenous,” or “Shinto.” Furthermore, among the most important medieval gods, certain ones had roots in Hinduism, others in Daoism and Yin-Yang thought. He displays vast knowledge of his subject and presents his research—much of it in largely unstudied material—with theoretical sophistication. His arguments and analyses assume the centrality of the iconographic record as a complement to the textual record, and so he has brought together a rich and rare collection of more than 170 color and black-and-white images. This emphasis on iconography and the ways in which it complements, supplements, or deconstructs textual orthodoxy is critical to a fuller comprehension of a set of medieval Japanese beliefs and practices and offers a corrective to the traditional division of the field into religious studies, which typically ignores the images, and art history, which oftentimes overlooks their ritual and religious meaning. Protectors and Predators and its companion volumes should persuade readers that the gods constituted a central part of medieval Japanese religion and that the latter cannot be reduced to a simplistic confrontation, parallelism, or complementarity between some monolithic teachings known as “Buddhism” and “Shinto.” Once these reductionist labels and categories are discarded, a new and fascinating religious landscape begins to unfold.
The chapters in this book explore the transcultural, multi-ethnic, and cross-regional contexts and connections between the Buddhāvataṃsaka-sūtra, Mount Wutai and the veneration of Mañjuśrī that contributed to the establishment and successive transformations of the cult centered on Mount Wutai – and reduplications elsewhere. The contributions reflect on the literature, architecture, iconography, medicine, society, philosophy and several other aspects of the Wutai cult and its significant influence across several Asian cultures, such as Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, Mongolian and Korean. This book is a significant new contribution to the study of the Wutai cult, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Religion, Philosophy, History, Architecture, Literature and Art. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Studies in Chinese Religions.
In an effort to rid herself of the curse that gave her animal ears, Neneko is working as a priestess at a clinic that exorcises evil spirits. Thanks to the power of magic, Neneko manages to conceal her ears and go to school normally, but she's still not used to people. There, she happens upon a girl who looks just like the priestess she encountered before, but the girl insists they've never met. However, something strange is happening to Neneko's ears...!
