Until now, China has been scarcely represented in the burgeoning comparative literature on pilgrimage. This volume remedies that omission, discussing the interaction between pilgrims and sacred sites from the tenth century to the present. From the perspectives of literature, art, history, religion, politics, and anthropology, the essays focus on China's most famous pilgrimage mountains as well as lesser known sites.
Until now, China has been scarcely represented in the burgeoning comparative literature on pilgrimage. This volume remedies that omission, discussing the interaction between pilgrims and sacred sites from the tenth century to the present. From the perspectives of literature, art, history, religion, politics, and anthropology, the essays focus on China's most famous pilgrimage mountains as well as lesser known sites.
The ancient Chinese developed building techniques that are astounding in their ability to match nature and endure for centuries. China's Sacred Sites presents a vision of architecture as a harmonious interaction of human culture and the natural world. Over 300 color photos and architectural drawings document some of the most remarkable achievements of mountainscape feng shui. The wisdom of these ancient builders is particularly relevant today as sustainable building practices and green design take architecture in new directions.
This book examines the pilgrimages to China from Taiwan in the late 1980s and early 1990s and offers a wide-ranging account of urban planning statements, arguments about ritual propriety, and the material culture of pilgrimage. Taiwanese Pilgrimage to China argues that as Taiwanese pilgrims and their Chinese hosts translated values produced in ritual contexts into the terms of economic and political reform, they became complicit in a shared project of composing historical truth. With its attention to pilgrimages at a possible center of geopolitical conflict, Taiwanese Pilgrimage to China provides an account of how shared frameworks for action grow and advances anthropological understandings of conflict resolution.
Excerpt from Sacred Places in China The chief reason for producing this little volume is to give to the thoughtful reader of China and the Chinese a clearer conception of the readiness of the people to accept, with full credence, such whimsical and mythological stories as are here related, of their susceptibility of spiritual influences, and of the decay of intellectual vigor among the Buddhist and Taoist priests, as the inevitable result of monasticism. The intellectual vigor of the Chinese is found among the Confucianists, who hold the controlling power in the government, while Buddhism and Taoism seem past any hope of resurrection to real life. They have had their age of faith. But no one need to doubt the spiritual susceptibility, nor despair of the intellectual progress of all classes. Christianity fosters mental growth and science stimulates thought and is eminently fitted to drive out all fear and superstition. Christian education is not failing in accomplishing this. The response is abundantly gratifying. However, the struggle with Buddhism and Taoism is not yet ended, it has scarcely begun. The reader finds himself here in the midst of the Asiatic world of nearly two thousand years ago, when Buddhist priests had entered actively upon their pilgrim life. To this day all foot-worn mountain paths lead to some monastery or sacred shrine. The information recorded in this little volume is the fruit of hard labor. The writer traveled to distant mountains in the Mid-China hot summer months, visiting monasteries, and living with monks in the hope of gaining some knowledge of their inner life and hope of the future. Most of this information was obtained verbally, some through Chinese reading. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
From the PREFACE. The chief reason for producing this little volume is to give to the thoughtful reader of China and the Chinese a clearer conception of the readiness of the people to accept, with full credence, such whimsical and mythological stories as are here related, of their susceptibility of spiritual influences, and of the decay of intellectual vigor among the Buddhist and Taoist priests, as the inevitable result of monasticism. The intellectual vigor of the Chinese is found among the Confucianists, who hold the controlling power in the government, while Buddhism and Taoism seem past any hope of resurrection to real life. They have had their age of faith. But no one need to doubt the spiritual susceptibility, nor despair of the intellectual progress of all classes. Christianity fosters mental growth and science stimulates thought and is eminently fitted to drive out all fear and superstition. Christian education is not failing in accomplishing this. The response is abundantly gratifying. However, the struggle with Buddhism and Taoism is not yet ended, it has scarcely begun. The reader finds himself here in the midst of the Asiatic world of nearly two thousand years ago, when Buddhist priests had entered actively upon their pilgrim life. To this day all foot-worn mountain paths lead to some monastery or sacred shrine. The information recorded in this little volume is the fruit of hard labor. The writer traveled to distant mountains in the Mid-China hot summer months, visiting monasteries, and living with monks in the hope of gaining some knowledge of their inner life and hope of the future. Most of this information was obtained verbally, some through Chinese reading.
For 250 years, the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr—the vast desert region to the northwest of Tibet—have led an uneasy existence under Chinese rule. Today they call themselves Uyghurs, and they have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s official national narrative. Rian Thum argues that the roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage dominated understandings of the past. Beyond broadening our knowledge of tensions between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government, this meditation on the very concept of history probes the limits of human interaction with the past. Uyghur historical practice emerged from the circulation of books and people during the Qing Dynasty, when crowds of pilgrims listened to history readings at the tombs of Islamic saints. Over time, amid long journeys and moving rituals, at oasis markets and desert shrines, ordinary readers adapted community-authored manuscripts to their own needs. In the process they created a window into a forgotten Islam, shaped by the veneration of local saints. Partly insulated from the rest of the Islamic world, the Uyghurs constructed a local history that is at once unique and assimilates elements of Semitic, Iranic, Turkic, and Indic traditions—the cultural imports of Silk Road travelers. Through both ethnographic and historical analysis, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History offers a new understanding of Uyghur historical practices, detailing the remarkable means by which this people reckons with its past and confronts its nationalist aspirations in the present day.
