The Body, Self-Cultivation, and Ki-Energy

The Body, Self-Cultivation, and Ki-Energy

Author: Yasuo Yuasa

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1993-09-06

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1438424698

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This book is an inquiry into ki-energy, its role within Eastern mind-body theory, and its implications for our contemporary Western understanding of the body. Yuasa examines the concept of ki-energy as it has been used in such areas as acupuncture, Buddhist and Taoist meditation, and the martial arts. To explain the achievement of mind-body oneness in these traditions he offers an innovative schematization of the lived body. His approach is interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, offering insights into Western philosophy, religion, medical science, depth psychology, parapsychology, theater, and physical education. To substantiate the relationship that ki-energy forms between the human body and its environment, Yuasa introduces contemporary scientific research on ki-energy in China and Japan, as well as evidence from acupuncture medicine and from the experience of meditators and martial arts practitioners. This evidence requires not only a rethinking of the living human body and of the mind-body and mind-matter relation, but also calls into question the adequacy of the existing scientific paradigm. Yuasa calls for an epistemological critique of modern science and explores the issue of the relation of teleology to science.


The Body, Self-Cultivation, and Ki-Energy

The Body, Self-Cultivation, and Ki-Energy

Author: Yasuo Yuasa

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780791416235

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This book is an inquiry into ki-energy, its role within Eastern mind-body theory, and its implications for our contemporary Western understanding of the body. Yuasa examines the concept of ki-energy as it has been used in such areas as acupuncture, Buddhist and Taoist meditation, and the martial arts. To explain the achievement of mind-body oneness in these traditions he offers an innovative schematization of the lived body. His approach is interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, offering insights into Western philosophy, religion, medical science, depth psychology, parapsychology, theater, and physical education. To substantiate the relationship that ki-energy forms between the human body and its environment, Yuasa introduces contemporary scientific research on ki-energy in China and Japan, as well as evidence from acupuncture medicine and from the experience of meditators and martial arts practitioners. This evidence requires not only a rethinking of the living human body and of the mind-body and mind-matter relation, but also calls into question the adequacy of the existing scientific paradigm. Yuasa calls for an epistemological critique of modern science and explores the issue of the relation of teleology to science.


The Body

The Body

Author: Yasuo Yuasa

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1987-07-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 143842468X

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This book explores mind-body philosophy from an Asian perspective. It sheds new light on a problem central in modern Western thought. Yuasa shows that Eastern philosophy has generally formulated its view of mind-body unity as an achievement a state to be acquired—rather than as essential or innate. Depending on the individual's own developmental state, the mind-body connection can vary from near dissociation to almost perfect integration. Whereas Western mind-body theories have typically asked what the mind-body is, Yuasa asks how the mind-body relation varies on a spectrum from the psychotic to the yogi, from the debilitated to the athletic, from the awkward novice to the master musician. Yuasa first examines various Asian texts dealing with Buddhist meditation, kundalini yoga, acupuncture, ethics, and epistemology, developing a concept of the "dark consciousness" (not identical with the psychoanalytic unconscious) as a vehicle for explaining their basic view. He shows that the mind-body image found in those texts has a striking correlation to themes in contemporary French phenomenology, Jungian psychoanalysis, psychomatic medicine, and neurophysiology. The book clears the ground for a provocative meeting between East and West, establishing a philosophical region on which science and religion can be mutually illuminating.


Reconsidering the Life of Power

Reconsidering the Life of Power

Author: James Garrison

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2021-03-01

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1438482124

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Reconsidering the Life of Power examines Chinese perspectives on bodily self-cultivation and explores how these can be resources for working past the ritual scripts of everyday life. In recent decades, European and American thinkers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have called attention to the way that people live out ritual scripts in order to be recognized by other people such that they might survive. Philosophers in China, however, have a long history of considering ritual not just in terms of confining power structures but also in terms of empowering artistic self-cultivation. Out of this convergence, a response to Butler's The Psychic Life of Power becomes possible, along with fascinating implications for improving real-world experience. James Garrison looks at art and aesthetics as a way of responding positively to the vicissitudes of everyday life. This means reframing ritual practice in domains like meditation, yoga, tai chi chuan, dance, calisthenics, fashion, and beyond as a kind of work that delves into and unearths society's long-accruing unconscious habits in a way that makes conscious one's everyday speech, comportment, countenance, and presence. The everyday body thus becomes an artwork, speaking in novel ways to the everyday self by revealing an alternative to the programmed ritual scripts through which most of us tend to survive. Reconsidering the Life of Power offers a compelling contemporary intercultural perspective on body, art, self, and society that bridges theory and practice by providing an actionable yet deeply philosophical approach to enhancing life.


The Holy Spirit, Chi, and the Other

The Holy Spirit, Chi, and the Other

Author: Grace Ji-Sun Kim

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-09-20

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0230339409

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There appears to be a hierarchy of cultures with the West perceiving the East as inferior, so much so that it is referred to simply as 'the Other'. Because today's world is globally interdependent, inter-woven, and integrative, it is pertinent to be open to the cultural, spiritual, and religious understandings of the East


Transformational Embodiment in Asian Religions

Transformational Embodiment in Asian Religions

Author: George Pati

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-28

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1000735443

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This volume examines several theoretical concerns of embodiment in the context of Asian religious practice. Looking at both subtle and spatial bodies, it explores how both types of embodiment are engaged as sites for transformation, transaction and transgression. Collectively bridging ancient and modern conceptualizations of embodiment in religious practice, the book offers a complex mapping of how body is defined. It revisits more traditional, mystical religious systems, including Hindu Tantra and Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, Bon, Chinese Daoism and Persian Sufism and distinctively juxtaposes these inquiries alongside analyses of racial, gendered, and colonized bodies. Such a multifaceted subject requires a diverse approach, and so perspectives from phenomenology and neuroscience as well as critical race theory and feminist theology are utilised to create more precise analytical tools for the scholarly engagement of embodied religious epistemologies. This a nuanced and interdisciplinary exploration of the myriad issues around bodies within religion. As such it will be a key resource for any scholar of Religious Studies, Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Gender Studies.


Attunement Through the Body

Attunement Through the Body

Author: Shigenori Nagatomo

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2016-02-24

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1438414080

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Preparatory to restoring humaneness,Attunement Through the Body offers an innovative, philosophical model for overcoming mind-body dualism and its negative consequences through a systematic elucidation of the concept and the phenomenon of attunement. It invites readers to re-evaluate an undue emphasis placed on the cognitive, intellectual knowledge in the West. The book examines the concept of the lived body and then articulates the transformative dimension of our everyday mode of living our bodies vis-a-vis Yuasa Yasuo's concept of body-scheme, demonstrating that the unity disclosed can be brought to a higher degree. The book further describes the transformative dimension of our bodies in theoretical and practical aspects through the concept of the body emerging in the course of meditational self-cultivation that was practiced by Dogen Kigen, a medieval Japanese Zen master. It then develops an original philosophical theory that differs from various Western theories such as Idealism, Empiricism, and Materialism. This theory articulates modes of attunement reflecting degrees of somatic knowledge. The theory implies a lifestyle appropriate for the coming century.


Overcoming Modernity

Overcoming Modernity

Author: Yasuo Yuasa

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 079147867X

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In Overcoming Modernity, which contains the last writings from Yuasa, the prominent Japanese scholar reconsiders the modern Western paradigm of thinking and in its place proposes a more holistic worldview. A wide range of topics are examined, including the relationships between language, being, psychology, and logic; Jung's concept of synchronicity; the Yijing (Book of Changes); paranormal phenomena; physics and metaphysics; mind and body; and teleology. Through these explorations, engaging a wide range of Western and East Asian thought, Yuasa offers an alternative to the scientific worldview inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This new paradigm involves the integration of space-and-time and mind-and-body, thematics brought together through what Yuasa calls "image-thinking," a mode of thinking that incorporates image-experience.


The Japanese Arts and Self-Cultivation

The Japanese Arts and Self-Cultivation

Author: Robert Edgar Carter

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2008-01-01

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9780791472545

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Explores how spiritual values are learned and mind and body developed through the practice of the Japanese arts.


Sensational Knowledge

Sensational Knowledge

Author: Tomie Hahn

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2007-05-07

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780819568359

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DVD contains: Examples of performances.