This book pays critical homage to the eminent comparatist of Chinese and Western literature and religion, Anthony C. Yu of The University of Chicago. Broadly comparative, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary in scope, the volume consists of an introductory essay on Yu's scholarly career, and thirteen additional essays on topics such as literary texts and traditions of varying provenance and periods, ranging from ancient Greece, medieval Europe, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and America, to China from the classical to modern periods. The disciplines and areas of research that the essays draw into constructive engagement with one another include comparative literature, religion and literature, history of religions, (or comparative religion), religion and social thought, and the study of myth. Eric Ziolkowski is Professor and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at Lafayette College.
Explore a rigorous but accessible guide to contemporary approaches to the study of religion from leading voices in the field The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion delivers an expert and insightful analysis of modern perspectives on the study of religion across the humanities and the social sciences. Presupposing no knowledge of the approaches examined in the collection, the book is ideal for undergraduate students who have yet to undertake extensive study in the humanities or social sciences. The book includes perspectives from those in fields as diverse as globalization, cognitive science, the study of emotion, law, esotericism, sex and gender, functionalism, terror, the comparative method, modernism, and postmodernism. Many of the topics covered in the book clearly hail from religious studies, while others are grounded in other areas of academia. All of the chapters contained within are written by recognized authors who show how their chosen discipline contributes to the understanding of the phenomenon of religion. This book also includes topics like: A comprehensive exploration of multiple approaches to religious study, including anthropology, economics, literature, phenomenology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theology A review of various topics germane to the study of religion, including the study of the body, cognitive science, the comparative method, death and the afterlife, law, magic, music, and myth A selection of subjects touching on modern trends in extremism and violence, including chapters on terror and violence, fundamentalism, and nationalism A discussion of the influence of modernism and postmodernism in religion Ideal for undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students in humanities and social science programs taking courses on religion and myth, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion will also earn a place in the libraries of specialists working in the fields of Religious Studies, Theology, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Political Science, History, and Philosophy.
Yu's essays juxtapose Chinese and Western texts - Cratylus next to Xunzi,for example - and discuss their relationship to language and subjects, such as liberal Greek education against general education in China. He compares a specific Western text and religion to a specific Chinese text and religion. He considers the Divina Commedia in the context of Catholic theology alongside The Journey to the West as it relates to Chinese syncretism, united by the theme of pilgrimage. Yet Yu's focus isn't entirely tied to the classics. He also considers the struggle for human rights in China and how this topic relates to ancient Chinese social thought and modern notions of rights in the West.
This is the first comprehensive companion to the study of Daoism as a philosophical tradition. It provides a general overview of Daoist philosophy in various thinkers and texts from 6th century BCE to 5th century CE and reflects the latest academic developments in the field. It discusses theoretical and philosophical issues based on rigorous textual and historical investigations and examinations, reflecting both the ancient scholarship and modern approaches and methodologies. The themes include debates on the origin of the Daoism, the authorship and dating of the Laozi, the authorship and classification of chapters in the Zhuangzi, the themes and philosophical arguments in the Laozi and Zhuangzi, their transformations and developments in Pre-Qin, Han, and Wei-Jin periods, by Huang-Lao school, Heguanzi, Wenzi, Huainanzi, Wang Bi, Guo Xiang, and Worthies in bamboo grove, among others. Each chapter is written by expert(s) and specialist(s) on the topic discussed.
This monograph takes an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to 20th and 21st -century Canadian Daoist poetry, fiction and criticism in comparative, innovative and engaging ways. Of particular interest are the authors’ refreshing insights into such holistic and topical issues as the globalization of concepts of the Dao, the Yin/Yang, the Heaven-Earth-Humanity triad, the Four Greats, Five Phases, Non-action and so on, as expressed in Canadian literature and criticism – which produces Canadian-constructed Daoist poetics, ethics and aesthetics. Readers will come to understand and appreciate the social and ecological significance of, formal innovations, moral sensitivity, aesthetic principles and ideological complexity in Canadian-Daoist works.
Even with growing popularity in the United States, there existed no English-language scholarly introduction to Marguerite Porete or her sole-surviving work Mirror of Simple Souls until now. The study of Marguerite and her work touches on so many disciplines – from religious and secular histories to theological and literary readings of her book – that the scholarship had often been lost in the divides between the disciplines. Our contributors are chosen from both sides of the Atlantic and from an array of disciplines in order to bridge this geographical and linguistic divide. The interdisciplinary nature of the interest in Marguerite and the Mirror and the implications her book has on medieval scholarship make a collection such as this companion ideal. Contributors are Marleen Cré, Imke De Gier, Dávid Falvay, Sean Field, Geneviève Hasenohr (with Zan Kocher), Jonathan Juilfs, Zan Kocher, Joanne Robinson, Elizabeth Scarborough, Robert Stauffer, Wendy R. Terry, and Justine Trombley.
Macao, the former Portuguese colony in southeast China from the 1550s until its return to China in 1999, has a long and very interesting history of cultural interaction between China and the West. As an entity with independent political power and a unique social setting and cultural development, the identity of Macao’s people is not only indicative of the legacy and influence of the region’s socio-historical factors and forces, but it has also been altered, transformed and maintained because of the input, action, interaction and stimulation of creative arts and literatures. Held together by racial accommodation and tolerance and active cultural interactions, Macao’s phenomenon can be characterized as hybridization. This book is a presentation of the ongoing hybridization of Macao and is in itself a hybrid, covering a wide range of issues. Putting forward substantial new research findings, the book explores the nature of cultural interaction in Macao, and how the city has been constructed and perceived through literature and other art forms. It is a companion volume to Macao – The Formation of a Global City .
Western Buddhist travel narratives are autobiographical accounts of a journey to a Buddhist culture. Dozens of such narratives have since the 1970s describe treks in Tibet, periods of residence in a Zen monastery, pilgrimages to Buddhist sites and teachers, and other Asian odysseys. The best known of these works is Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard; further reflections emerge from thirty writers including John Blofeld, Jan Van de Wetering, Thomas Merton, Oliver Statler, Robert Thurman, Gretel Ehrlich, and Bill Porter. The Buddhist concept of 'no-self' helps these authors interpret certain pivotal experiences of 'unselfing' and is also a catalyst that provokes and enables such events. The writers' spiritual memoirs describe how their journeys brought about a new understanding of Buddhist enlightenment and so transformed their lives. Showing how travel can elicit self-transformation, this book is a compelling exploration of the journeys and religious changes of both individuals and Buddhism itself.
Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience? In Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE, Robert Ford Campany examines how dreaming was addressed in texts produced and circulated by practitioners of Daoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and other self-cultivational disciplines. Working through a wide range of scriptures, essays, treatises, biographies, commentaries, fictive dialogues, diary records, interpretive keys, and ritual instructions, Campany uncovers a set of discrete paradigms by which dreams were viewed and responded to by practitioners. He shows how these paradigms underlay texts of diverse religious and ideological persuasions that are usually treated in mutual isolation. The result is a provocative meditation on the relationship between individuals’ nocturnal experiences and one culture’s persistent attempts to discipline, interpret, and incorporate them into waking practice.
Dreaming is a near-universal human experience, but there is no consensus on why we dream or what dreams should be taken to mean. In this book, Robert Ford Campany investigates what people in late classical and early medieval China thought of dreams. He maps a common dreamscape—an array of ideas about what dreams are and what responses they should provoke—that underlies texts of diverse persuasions and genres over several centuries. These writings include manuals of dream interpretation, scriptural instructions, essays, treatises, poems, recovered manuscripts, histories, and anecdotes of successful dream-based predictions. In these many sources, we find culturally distinctive answers to questions peoples the world over have asked for millennia: What happens when we dream? Do dreams foretell future events? If so, how might their imagistic code be unlocked to yield predictions? Could dreams enable direct communication between the living and the dead, or between humans and nonhuman animals? The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE – 800 CE sheds light on how people in a distant age negotiated these mysteries and brings Chinese notions of dreaming into conversation with studies of dreams in other cultures, ancient and contemporary. Taking stock of how Chinese people wrestled with—and celebrated—the strangeness of dreams, Campany asks us to reflect on how we might reconsider our own notions of dreaming.
