Biography of the Tripitaka Master of the Great Ci'en Monastery of the Great Tang Dynasty, A

Biography of the Tripitaka Master of the Great Ci'en Monastery of the Great Tang Dynasty, A PDF Author: 慧立
Publisher: BDK America
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
The Tripitaka Master Xuanzang (A.D. 600-64), whose deeds and career as a Buddhist monk are described in this biography, was a prominent figure not only in the history of Buddhist learning but also in other fields of culture. He played a role in the establishment of friendly contacts between China and the countries through which he traveled in search of more knowledge of Buddhism and incidentally but not insignificantly provided posterity with data of historical value in his detailed records about regions in central Asia and particularly in ancient India. He is thus respected not only by the Buddhists and people of China but also by the peoples of other eastern Asian countries who have benefited from the Buddhist lore that he acquired through many hardships and perils during his seventeen-year journey, from 629 to 645, in foreign lands. Because of his translation of Buddhist text into Chinese, Xuanzang was an epoch-making figure in the history of Buddhism in China. Huili, the author of this biography, was born in 614 and became a monk at the age of fifteen. Out of his admiration for the Venerable Xuanzang, he wrote this biography about how the Master went to India to seek Buddhist texts and translate them into Chinese. The biography relates events up to the Master's arrival in the capital at the conclusion of his return journey from India and was compiled and edited by the monk Yancong, who added five fascicles to the original to relate the Master's activities after his return to China up to his death. He thus produced a more complete biography of the Venerable Tripitaka Master Xuanzang, which is presented here in the English version.

Biography of the Tripitaka Master of the Great Ci'en Monastery of the Great Tang Dynasty, A

Biography of the Tripitaka Master of the Great Ci'en Monastery of the Great Tang Dynasty, A PDF Author: 慧立
Publisher: BDK America
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Get Book

Book Description
The Tripitaka Master Xuanzang (A.D. 600-64), whose deeds and career as a Buddhist monk are described in this biography, was a prominent figure not only in the history of Buddhist learning but also in other fields of culture. He played a role in the establishment of friendly contacts between China and the countries through which he traveled in search of more knowledge of Buddhism and incidentally but not insignificantly provided posterity with data of historical value in his detailed records about regions in central Asia and particularly in ancient India. He is thus respected not only by the Buddhists and people of China but also by the peoples of other eastern Asian countries who have benefited from the Buddhist lore that he acquired through many hardships and perils during his seventeen-year journey, from 629 to 645, in foreign lands. Because of his translation of Buddhist text into Chinese, Xuanzang was an epoch-making figure in the history of Buddhism in China. Huili, the author of this biography, was born in 614 and became a monk at the age of fifteen. Out of his admiration for the Venerable Xuanzang, he wrote this biography about how the Master went to India to seek Buddhist texts and translate them into Chinese. The biography relates events up to the Master's arrival in the capital at the conclusion of his return journey from India and was compiled and edited by the monk Yancong, who added five fascicles to the original to relate the Master's activities after his return to China up to his death. He thus produced a more complete biography of the Venerable Tripitaka Master Xuanzang, which is presented here in the English version.

Structures of the Earth

Structures of the Earth PDF Author: D. Jonathan Felt
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176441
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
The traditional Chinese notion of itself as the “middle kingdom”—literally the cultural and political center of the world—remains vital to its own self-perceptions and became foundational to Western understandings of China. This worldview was primarily constructed during the earliest imperial unification of China during the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BCE–220 CE). But the fragmentation of empire and subsequent “Age of Disunion” (220–589 CE) that followed undermined imperial orthodoxies of unity, centrality, and universality. In response, geographical writing proliferated, exploring greater spatial complexities and alternative worldviews. This book is the first study of the emergent genre of geographical writing and the metageographies that structured its spatial thought during that period. Early medieval geographies highlighted spatial units and structures that the Qin–Han empire had intentionally sought to obscure—including those of regional, natural, and foreign spaces. Instead, these postimperial metageographies reveal a polycentric China in a polycentric world. Sui–Tang (581–906 CE) officials reasserted the imperial model as spatial orthodoxy. But since that time these alternative frameworks have persisted in geographical thought, continuing to illuminate spatial complexities that have been incompatible with the imperial and nationalist ideal of a monolithic China at the center of the world.

Moving Spaces

Moving Spaces PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004410996
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Moving Spaces: Creolisation and Mobility in Africa, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean brings new perspectives on issues of creolisation, mobility, and migration of ideas, songs, stories, people, and plants, in parts of Africa, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean worlds.

Chinese Buddhism and the Scholarship of Erik Zürcher

Chinese Buddhism and the Scholarship of Erik Zürcher PDF Author: Jonathan A. Silk
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004522158
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Since Erik Zürcher's landmark Buddhist Conquest of China, the study of earlier phases of Chinese Buddhist history has made great progress with new materials, new interpretations and new problematizations. This volume brings together 12 contributions from the leading scholars in the field offering new perspectives on this old tradition.

The Life of Hsuan-tsang

The Life of Hsuan-tsang PDF Author: Huili
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Buddhist priests
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description


Records, Recoveries, Remnants and Inter-Asian Interconnections

Records, Recoveries, Remnants and Inter-Asian Interconnections PDF Author: Anjana Sharma
Publisher: Flipside Digital Content Company Inc.
ISBN: 9814786438
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Records, Recoveries, Remnants and Inter-Asian Interconnections: Decoding Cultural Heritage has its conceptual core in the inter-regional networks of Nalanda Mahavihara and its unique place in the Asian imaginary. The revival of Nalanda university in 2010 as a symbol of a shared inter-Asian heritage is this collection's core narrative. The multidisciplinary essays interrogate ways in which ideas, objects, texts, and travellers have shaped - and in turn have been shaped by - changing global politics and the historical imperative that underpins them. The question of what constitutes cultural authenticity and heritage valuation is inscribed from positions that support, negate, or reframe existing discourses with reference to Southeast and East Asia. The essays in this collection offer critical, scholarly, and nuanced views on the vexed questions of regional and inter-regional dynamics, of racial politics and their flattening hegemonic discourses in relation to the rich tangible and intangible heritage that defines an interconnected Asia.

The Heart Sutra

The Heart Sutra PDF Author: Kazuaki Tanahashi
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 1611803128
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
An illuminating in-depth study of one of the most well-known and recited Buddhist texts, by a renowned modern translator The Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra is among the best known of all the Buddhist scriptures. Chanted daily by many Zen practitioners, it is also studied extensively in the Tibetan tradition, and it has been regarded with interest more recently in the West in various fields of study—from philosophy to quantum physics. In just a few lines, it expresses the truth of impermanence and the release of suffering that results from the understanding of that truth with a breathtaking economy of language. Kazuaki Tanahashi’s guide to the Heart Sutra is the result of a life spent working with it and living it. He outlines the history and meaning of the text and then analyzes it line by line in its various forms (Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan, Mongolian, and various key English translations), providing a deeper understanding of the history and etymology of the elusive words than is generally available to the non-specialist—yet with a clear emphasis on the relevance of the text to practice. This book includes a fresh and meticulous new translation of the text by the author and Roshi Joan Halifax.

Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade

Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade PDF Author: Tansen Sen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442254734
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Relations between China and India underwent a dramatic transformation from Buddhist-dominated to commerce-centered exchanges in the seventh to fifteenth centuries. The unfolding of this transformation, its causes, and wider ramifications are examined in this masterful analysis of the changing patterns of the interaction between the two most important cultural spheres in Asia. Tansen Sen offers a new perspective on Sino-Indian relations during the Tang dynasty (618–907), arguing that the period is notable not only for religious and diplomatic exchanges but also for the process through which China emerged as a center of Buddhist learning, practice, and pilgrimage. Before the seventh century, the Chinese clergy—given the spatial gap between the sacred Buddhist world of India and the peripheral China—suffered from a “borderland complex.” A close look at the evolving practice of relic veneration in China (at Famen Monastery in particular), the exposition of Mount Wutai as an abode of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, and the propagation of the idea of Maitreya’s descent in China, however, reveals that by the eighth century China had overcome its complex and successfully established a Buddhist realm within its borders. The emergence of China as a center of Buddhism had profound implications on religious interactions between the two countries and is cited by Sen as one of the main causes for the weakening of China’s spiritual attraction toward India. At the same time, the growth of indigenous Chinese Buddhist schools and teachings retrenched the need for doctrinal input from India. A detailed examination of the failure of Buddhist translations produced during the Song dynasty (960–1279), demonstrates that these developments were responsible for the unraveling of religious bonds between the two countries and the termination of the Buddhist phase of Sino-Indian relations. Sen proposes that changes in religious interactions were paralleled by changes in commercial exchanges. For most of the first millennium, trading activities between India and China were closely connected with and sustained through the transmission of Buddhist doctrines. The eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, witnessed dramatic changes in the patterns and structure of mercantile activity between the two countries. Secular bulk and luxury goods replaced Buddhist ritual items, maritime channels replaced the overland Silk Road as the most profitable conduits of commercial exchange, and many of the merchants involved were followers of Islam rather than Buddhism. Moreover, policies to encourage foreign trade instituted by the Chinese government and the Indian kingdoms contributed to the intensification of commercial activity between the two countries and transformed the China-India trading circuit into a key segment of cross-continental commerce.

Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China

Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China PDF Author: Stuart H. Young
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824841204
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Aśvaghoṣa, Nāgārjuna, and Āryadeva are among the most celebrated Indian patriarchs in Asian Buddhist traditions and modern Buddhist studies scholarship. Scholars agree that all three lived in first- to third-century C.E. India, so most studies have focused on locating them in ancient Indian history, religion, or society. To this end, they have used all available accounts of the Indian patriarchs' lives—in Sanskrit, Tibetan, various Central Asian languages, and Chinese, produced over more than a millennium—and viewed them as bearing exclusively on ancient India. Of these sources, medieval Chinese hagiographies are by far the earliest and most abundant. Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China is the first attempt to situate the medieval Chinese hagiographies of Aśvaghoṣa, Nāgārjuna, and Āryadeva in the context of Chinese religion, culture, and society of the time. It examines these sources not as windows into ancient Indian history but as valuable records of medieval Chinese efforts to define models of Buddhist sanctity. It explores broader questions concerning Chinese conceptions of ancient Indian Buddhism and concerns about being Buddhist in latter-day China. By propagating the tales and texts of Aśvaghoṣa, Nāgārjuna, and Āryadeva, leaders of the Chinese sangha sought to demonstrate that the means and media of Indian Buddhist enlightenment were readily available in China and that local Chinese adepts could thereby rise to the ranks of the most exalted Buddhist saints across the Sino-Indian divide. Chinese authors also aimed to merge their own kingdom with the Buddhist heartland by demonstrating congruency between Indian and Chinese ideals of spiritual attainment. This volume shows, for the first time, how Chinese Buddhists adduced the patriarchs as evidence that Buddhist masters from ancient India had instantiated the same ideals, practices, and powers expected of all Chinese holy beings and that the expressly foreign religion of Buddhism was thus the best means to sainthood and salvation for latter-day China. Rich in information and details about the inner world of medieval Chinese Buddhists, Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China will be welcomed by scholars and students in the fields of Buddhist studies, religious studies, and China studies.

Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China

Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China PDF Author: C. Pierce Salguero
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812209699
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The transmission of Buddhism from India to China was one of the most significant cross-cultural exchanges in the premodern world. This cultural encounter involved more than the spread of religious and philosophical knowledge. It influenced many spheres of Chinese life, including the often overlooked field of medicine. Analyzing a wide variety of Chinese Buddhist texts, C. Pierce Salguero examines the reception of Indian medical ideas in medieval China. These texts include translations from Indian languages as well as Chinese compositions completed in the first millennium C.E. Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China illuminates and analyzes the ways Chinese Buddhist writers understood and adapted Indian medical knowledge and healing practices and explained them to local audiences. The book moves beyond considerations of accuracy in translation by exploring the resonances and social logics of intercultural communication in their historical context. Presenting the Chinese reception of Indian medicine as a process of negotiation and adaptation, this innovative and interdisciplinary work provides a dynamic exploration of the medical world of medieval Chinese society. At the center of Salguero's work is an appreciation of the creativity of individual writers as they made sense of disease, health, and the body in the context of regional and transnational traditions. By integrating religious studies, translation studies, and literature with the history of medicine, Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China reconstructs the crucial role of translated Buddhist knowledge in the vibrant medical world of medieval China.