Hidden and Visible Realms

Hidden and Visible Realms PDF Author:
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547056
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Chinese culture of the Six Dynasties period (220–589) saw a blossoming of stories of the fantastic. Zhiguai, “records of the strange” or “accounts of anomalies,” tell of encounters with otherness, in which inexplicable and uncanny phenomena interrupt mundane human affairs. They depict deities, ghosts, and monsters; heaven, the underworld, and the immortal lands; omens, metamorphoses, and trafficking between humans and supernatural beings; and legendary figures, strange creatures, and natural wonders in the human world. Hidden and Visible Realms, traditionally attributed to Liu Yiqing, is one of the most significant zhiguai collections, distinguished by its varied contents, elegant writing style, and fascinating stories. It is also among the earliest collections heavily influenced by Buddhist beliefs, values, and concerns. Beyond the traditional zhiguai narratives, it includes tales of karmic retribution, reincarnation, and Buddhist ghosts, hell, and magic. In this annotated first complete English translation, Zhenjun Zhang gives English-speaking readers a sense of the wealth and wonder of the zhiguai canon. Hidden and Visible Realms opens a window into the lives, customs, and religious beliefs and practices of early medieval China and the cultural history of Chinese Buddhism. In the introduction, Zhang explains the key themes and textual history of the work.

Hidden and Visible Realms

Hidden and Visible Realms PDF Author:
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547056
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book

Book Description
Chinese culture of the Six Dynasties period (220–589) saw a blossoming of stories of the fantastic. Zhiguai, “records of the strange” or “accounts of anomalies,” tell of encounters with otherness, in which inexplicable and uncanny phenomena interrupt mundane human affairs. They depict deities, ghosts, and monsters; heaven, the underworld, and the immortal lands; omens, metamorphoses, and trafficking between humans and supernatural beings; and legendary figures, strange creatures, and natural wonders in the human world. Hidden and Visible Realms, traditionally attributed to Liu Yiqing, is one of the most significant zhiguai collections, distinguished by its varied contents, elegant writing style, and fascinating stories. It is also among the earliest collections heavily influenced by Buddhist beliefs, values, and concerns. Beyond the traditional zhiguai narratives, it includes tales of karmic retribution, reincarnation, and Buddhist ghosts, hell, and magic. In this annotated first complete English translation, Zhenjun Zhang gives English-speaking readers a sense of the wealth and wonder of the zhiguai canon. Hidden and Visible Realms opens a window into the lives, customs, and religious beliefs and practices of early medieval China and the cultural history of Chinese Buddhism. In the introduction, Zhang explains the key themes and textual history of the work.

Shinto in History

Shinto in History PDF Author: John Breen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136827048
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
This is the only book to date offering a critical overview of Shinto from early times to the modern era, and evaluating Shinto's place in Japanese religious culture. In recent years, a few books on medieval Shinto have appeared, but none has attempted to depict the broader picture, to examine critically Shinto's origins and its subsequent development through the medieval, pre-modern and modern periods. The essays in this book address such key topics as Shinto and Daoism in early Japan, Shinto and the natural environment, Shinto and state ritual in early Japan, Shinto and Buddhism in medieval Japan, and Shinto and the state in the modern period. All of the essays highlight the dynamic nature of Shinto and shrine history by focusing on the three-way relationship, often fraught, between local shrine cults, Shinto agendas and Buddhism.

Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds

Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds PDF Author: Jerome Clark
Publisher: Visible Ink Press
ISBN: 1578593409
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Claims of supernatural realms, parallel worlds, and lost civilizations are put to the test in this wellresearched guide to the unexplained. Firsthand accounts and historical documents are explored, and indepth coverage is provided on the mysteries of imagination, culture, perception, consciousness, being, and more. Included in this collection are Richard S. Shaver's personal experience of hell—replete with demons and ghouls—modern and ancient accounts of fairyland, life on Mars, alien worlds, parallel universes, and mystery airships. Also examined are the supernatural myths surrounding Mount Shasta, which include accounts of telepathic Lemurians living on its slopes, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. More than 40 beliefs, doctrines, experiences, and places are described and explored in this truly comprehensive guide to the wacky, weird, and otherworldly.

The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE - 800 CE

The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE - 800 CE PDF Author: Robert Ford Campany
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176425
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
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.

Sacred Light of The Blacks

Sacred Light of The Blacks PDF Author: Brice Parfait Ndzigou
Publisher: Brice Parfait Ndzigou
ISBN: 1616232447
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 117

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Book Description


Kupilikula

Kupilikula PDF Author: Harry G. West
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226894053
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
On the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, sorcerers are said to feed on their victims, sometimes "making" lions or transforming into lions to literally devour their flesh. When the ruling FRELIMO party subscribed to socialism, it condemned sorcery beliefs and counter-sorcery practices as false consciousness, but since undertaking neoliberal reform, the party—still in power after three electoral cycles—has "tolerated tradition," leaving villagers to interpret and engage with events in the idiom of sorcery. Now, when the lions prowl plateau villages ,suspected sorcerers are often lynched. In this historical ethnography of sorcery, Harry G. West draws on a decade of fieldwork and combines the perspectives of anthropology and political science to reveal how Muedans expect responsible authorities to monitor the invisible realm of sorcery and to overturn or, as Muedans call it, "kupilikula" sorcerers' destructive attacks by practicing a constructive form of counter-sorcery themselves. Kupilikula argues that, where neoliberal policies have fostered social division rather than security and prosperity, Muedans have, in fact, used sorcery discourse to assess and sometimes overturn reforms, advancing alternative visions of a world transformed.

The Cambridge History of Japan

The Cambridge History of Japan PDF Author: Marius B. Jansen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521223560
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 660

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Book Description
This volume covers the end of feudal society and the shogunate in Japan, and the growing power of the emperor.

The Emergence of Meiji Japan

The Emergence of Meiji Japan PDF Author: Marius B. Jansen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521484053
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This paperback edition brings together chapters from volume 5 of The Cambridge History of Japan. Japan underwent momentous changes during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This book chronicles the hardships of the Tempo era in the 1830s, the crisis of values and confidence during the last half century of Tokugawa rule, and the political process that finally brought down the Tokugawa regime and ended centuries of warrior rule. It goes on to discuss the samurai rebellions against the Meiji Restoration, and national movements for constitutional government which indirectly resulted in the Meiji Constitution of 1889. The significance of Japan's Meiji transformation for the rest of the world is the subject of the final chapter, in which Professor Akira Iriye discusses Japan's drive to Great Power status. 'Constitutional rule at home, imperialism abroad', became new goals for early twentieth-century Japan.

Philo and the Epistle to the Hebrews

Philo and the Epistle to the Hebrews PDF Author: Williamson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004331808
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Book Description


Transparency and Conspiracy

Transparency and Conspiracy PDF Author: Harry G. West
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822330240
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
DIVEthnographies of alienated, often occult, responses to economic globalization./div