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Explores the new literary and interpretive milieu that emerged in the years following the decline of China's Han dynasty. ... Read more

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This book examines Hsi Wang Mu, the greatest Taoist goddess of the T'ang Dynasty, who was known as the Queen Mother of the West. (World Religions) ... Read more

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Excellent study of a world-class goddess
Cahill's study explores the prehistoric roots and historic development of one of the world's greatest goddess cults. Starting with shamanic tales so paleolithic they echo with subconscious memory, the goddess Xi Wang Mu transmutes into a refined lady with powers over death, birth, and immortality. Her cult becomes a spiritual path for Daoist women which has influenced popular religion down to the present. This book is scholarly, but it could win converts. ... Read more

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In this fascinating and meticulously researched book on the Chinese landscape as a medium for literary inscription, Robert E. Harrist Jr. focuses on the period prior to the eighth century C.E. to demonstrate that the significance of inscriptions on stone embedded in nature depends on the interaction of words with topography. Visitors do not simply climb inscribed mountains, they read them, as the medium of the written word has transformed geological formations into landscapes of ideological and religious significance.

The widespread use of stone as a medium for writing did not begin in China until around the first century C.E. - later than in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome - but by the twentieth century, more inscriptions had been carved in natural stone in China than anywhere else in the world. The Landscape of Words is the first study in a Western language devoted to these texts, moya or moya shike, carved into the natural terrain on granite boulders and cliffs at thousands of sites of historic or scenic interest. Like the writing system itself, moya are one of the distinguishing features of Chinese civilization. Carved in large, bold characters, they constitute a vast repository of texts produced continuously for more than two thousand years and are an important form of public art.

Harrist draws on insights from the fields of art history, social and political history, literature, and religion to present detailed case studies of important moya sites, such as the Stone Gate tunnel in Shaanxi and Cloud Peak Mountain, Mount Tie, and Mount Tai in Shangdong. The inscriptions analyzed represent a range of literary genres and content, including poetry, Buddhist sutras, records of imperial rituals, and commemorations of virtuous conduct in public life. ... Read more

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Until the collapse of the socialist system in Mongolia in 1990, Mongolian social sciences was fundamentally schematised in accordance with the prevailing political ideology of socialism, considering the country's history in the theoretical framework of historical materialism, the theory of socio-economic formation, and the feudalism model. Here, however, the author adopts a fresh approach and criticises the theoretical adaptation of the feudalism concept to nomadic culture while treating the history of Mongolia in view of the structural and developmental particularities of nomadic society. The book shows the economic conditions and everyday life of mobile livestock keeping, tribal and political-administrative organisation and the social strata of nomadic society during the 13th-19th centuries, demonstrating that development of nomadic societies in Central Asia cannot and should not be evaluated in accordance with European norms. ... Read more

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In her study of medieval Chinese lay practices and beliefs, Valerie Hansen argues that social and economic developments underlay religious changes in the Southern Song. Unfamiliar with the contents of Buddhist and Daoist texts, the common people hired the practitioner or prayed to the god they thought could cure the ill or bring rain. As the economy rapidly developed, the gods, like the people who worshiped them, diversified: their realm of influence expanded as some gods began to deal on the national grain market and others advised their followers on business transactions. In order to trace this evolution, the author draws information from temple inscriptions, literary notes, the administrative law code, and local histories. By contrasting differing rates of religious change in the lowland and highland regions of the lower Yangzi valley, Hansen suggests that the commercial and social developments were far less uniform than previously thought. In 1100, nearly all people in South China worshiped gods who had been local residents prior to their deaths. The increasing mobility of cultivators in the lowland, rice-growing regions resulted in the adoption of gods from other places. Cults in the isolated mountain areas showed considerably less change. ... Read more

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The cave-temple complex popularly known as the Dunhuang caves is the world's largest extant repository of Tang Buddhist art. Among the best preserved of the Dunhuang caves is the Zhai Family Cave, built in 642. It is this remarkable cave-temple that forms the focus of Ning Qiang's cross-disciplinary exploration of the interrelationship of art, religion, and politics during the Tang. The author combines, in his careful examination of the paintings and sculptures found there, the historical study of pictures with the pictorial study of history.By employing this two-fold approach, he is able to refer to textual evidence in interpreting the formal features of the cave-temple paintings and to employ visual details to fill in the historical gaps inevitably left by text-oriented scholars. The result is a comprehensive analysis of the visual culture of the period and a vivid description of social life in medieval China.

The original Zhai Family Cave pictures were painted over in the tenth century and remained hidden until the early 1940s. Once exposed, the early artwork appeared fresh and colorful in comparison with other Tang paintings at Dunhuang. The relatively fine condition of the Zhai Family Cave is crucial to our understanding of the original pictorial program found there and offers a unique opportunity to investigate the visual details of the original paintings and sculptures in the cave. At the same time, the remaining traces of reconstruction and redecoration provide a new perspective on how, for over three centuries, a wealthy Chinese clan used its familial cave as a political showcase.

Art, Religion, and Politics in Medieval China: The Dunhuang Cave of the Zhai Family is an in-depth study of the meaning and function of an exemplary Tang memorial cave and an important contribution to studies of Chinese religion, politics, sociology, literature, and folklore as well as to Chinese art history. ... Read more

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Largely unstudied until now, the religious festivals that attracted Chinese people from all walks of life provide the most instructive examples of the interaction between Chinese forms of social life and the Indian tradition of Buddhism. Stephen Teiser examines one of the most important of such annual celebrations. He provides a comprehensive interpretation of the festivities of the seventh lunar month, in which laypeople presented offerings to Buddhist monks to gain salvation for their ancestors. Teiser uncovers a wide range of sources, many translated or analyzed for the first time in any language, to demonstrate how the symbolism, rituals, and mythology of the ghost festival pervaded the social landscape of medieval China. ... Read more

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One man's ancestor is another man's ghost.
Students (of all ages) of Chinese culture and religion have at some point probably wondered how China reconciled some of the Indian roots of Buddhism with both Confucianism and China's own popular folk religions. Or conversely, why there seem to be Indian or Sanskrit elements in Chinese practices. This book, which is virtually a case study using the "Ghost Festival" (yulanpen in Pinyin), explains how.

The Chinese have always, as far as we are able to determine, believed in ancestor worship, in the ties that bind an individual into a larger collective group identity (remember that the original purpose of all those bronze ritual vessels one sees in museums today was to hold the offerings one made to one's ancestors). Confucianism merely built upon this belief, elaborating a system based upon relationships between "seniors" and juniors" -- sometimes referred to as filial piety-- but extending beyond parents and children to emperor-subject, husband-wife, older brother-younger brother, older friend-younger friend. But such a structure was one of the biggest challenges Buddhism faced. How can you convince young men to leave their families to become monks when their role is to marry and bear more sons for a family? How can you teach families and villages the importance of feeding and supporting monastic communities even if it means forsaking the immediate needs of one's own family or village? You tell a convincing story.

The story in this case was a ghost story, the story of a "filial" son (Mu-lien) who tries in vain by himself to save his mother, who by being ungenerous in spirit during her lifetime, has ended up in the deepest of hells (the Avici Hell) as a hungry ghost. It is through the intervention of the Buddha, and the monastic community that Mu-lien is able, in the end, to liberate her.

The story of how he saves her, and the development of this very popular Chinese festival, is the story told in this excellent book, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China. How does the story of Mu-lien and the hells he finds link in with the 10 traditional hells of Chinese Buddhism today? What role does the bodhisattva Dizang play? What are the anguishes of hell? Are there paintings of hell in the Dunhuang caves? If you want to know how the Chinese reconcile "the two voices of the ghost festival--one expressing fear of ghosts, the other proclaiming admiration for ancestors"--read this book.

My one criticism is that it should have been edited down into a less academic, more general volume, losing some of the repetitiveness and putting more of the academic details into foot or endnotes. Its current academic format will have assuredly lost it some readership when it deserves far more.

New Light on the Dark Regions
This is the book that started a revolution in imagining the place of Buddhism in Chinese society.A compelling story and a great read.Shows how and why Buddhism mattered to Chinese people from all walks of life.

A vey good book about chinese buddhism history
If you want know what'sthe meaning of Yu-lan-pen festival in Chinese Buddhism history and medieval China,you must read it....

Concise presentation of the ghost festival
This is a very scholarly work, persumably written for students of eastern religion. In the Far East, where I am from, we simply observe the rites and rules of the festivals without quite knowning why. This book analyses in a very detailed manner the customs and particularly the myths that lie behindthe festival. Much attention is lavished on the tale of Mulien who saveshis mother from the underworld. This book will provide a comprehensivepresentation of the topic, but I think it is aimed at academics rather thanthe general public. ... Read more

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The Lotus Sutra has been the most widely read and most revered Buddhist scripture in East Asia since the third century. The miracles and parables in the "king of sutras" inspired a variety of images in China, in particular the sweeping compositions known as transformation tableaux that developed between the seventh and ninth centuries. Surviving examples painted on cave walls or carved in relief on Buddhist monuments depict celestial journeys, bodily metamorphoses, cycles of rebirth, and the achievement of nirvana. Yet the cosmos revealed in these tableaux is strikingly different from that found in the text of the sutra.Challenging long-held assumptions about Buddhist art, Eugene Wang treats it as a window to an animated and spirited world. Rather than focus on individual murals as isolated compositions, Wang views the entire body of pictures adorning a cave shrine or a pagoda as a visual mapping of an imaginary topography that encompasses different temporal and spatial domains. He demonstrates that the text of the Lotus Sutra does not fully explain the pictures and that a picture, or a series of them, constitutes its own "text." In exploring how religious pictures sublimate cultural aspirations, he shows that they can serve both political and religious agendas and that different social forces can co-exist within the same visual program. These pictures inspired meditative journeys through sophisticated formal devices such as mirroring, mapping, and spatial programming - analytical categories newly identified by Wang.Eugene Wang examines cave murals at Binglingsi and Dunhuang in northwestern China and relief sculptures in the grottoes of Yungang in Shanxi, stelae from Sichuan, and the Dragon-and-Tiger pagoda in Shandong, among other sites. By tracing formal impulses in medieval Chinese picture-making, such as topographic mapping and pictorial illusionism, the author pieces together a wide range of visual evidence and textual sources to reconstruct the medieval Chinese cognitive style and mental world. The book is ultimately a history of the Chinese imagination. ... Read more

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For advanced students of Chinese Buddhism
This is an excellent treatment of the Lotus Sutra in Chinese art, primarily focusing on Dunhuang but of use to anyone who wants to gain a further understanding of medieval Chinese murals and sculpture. A basic knowledge of both Buddhism and Buddhist iconography is almost essential but a fast learning, highly motivated beginner would also find this book extremely helpful. No one going to all the trouble to visit the Dunhuang caves should go without reading this book, and anyone who finds this book hard reading or uninteresting with a trip to Dunhuang on their agenda, should choose another destination. For those interested in medieval Chinese Buddhist iconography and pictorial art, this book "pulls it all together" and is both readable and scholarly in its approach. Excellent photographs and detailed drawings to help one interpret the ancient paintings make this book an invaluable guidebook to Dunhuang or to any armchair traveller. A true find and a book one will be able to reread over and over again as one becomes an increasingly advanced student of the subject. ... Read more

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Both Western and Chinese intellectuals have long derided filial piety tales as an absurd and grotesque variety of children’s literature. Selfless Offspring offers a fresh perspective on the genre, revealing the rich historical worth of these stories by examining them in their original context: the tumultuous and politically fragmented early medieval era (A.D. 100–600). At a time when no Confucian virtue was more prized than filial piety, adults were moved and inspired by tales of filial children. Men eager to earn the regard of their peers avidly read them and even asked to be buried with them. Imperial princes authored collections to burnish their credentials, and elite families used them to justify their position in society. The emotional impact of even the most outlandish actions portrayed in the stories was profound, a measure of the directness with which they spoke to major concerns of the early medieval Chinese elite. In a period of weak central government and powerful local clans, the key to preserving a household’s privileged status was maintaining a cohesive extended family. Here were essential stories of children willing to sacrifice everything for their parents, the unconditional obedience of sons, and families content to stay together for generations no matter what.Keith Knapp begins this far-ranging and persuasive study by describing two related historical trends that account for the narrative’s popularity: the growth of extended families and the rapid incursion of Confucianism among China’s learned elite. Extended families were better at maintaining their status and power, so patriarchs found it expedient to embrace Confucianism to keep their large, fragile households intact. Knapp then focuses on the filial piety stories themselves—their structure, historicity, origin, function, and transmission—and argues that most stem from the oral culture of these elite extended families. After examining collections of filial piety tales, known as Accounts of Filial Children, he shifts from text to motif, exploring the most common theme: the "reverent care" and mourning of parents. In the final chapter, Knapp looks at the relative burden that filiality placed on men and women and concludes that, although women largely performed the same filial acts as men, they had to go to greater extremes to prove their sincerity.Selfless Offspring is the only in-depth study of filial piety tales in their original development; it is also one of the few works on early medieval Confucianism. It will be of substantial interest to scholars of Chinese social history, intellectual history, and literature. ... Read more

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The institution of the Retired Emperor forms the innovative angle from which this study analyzes Classical Chinese political history (4th to 7th centuries A.D.). With the help of the ensuing insights the volume develops into a portal through which to gain understanding of broader patterns of political and social action relevant to the Classical Chinese monarchy. In this truly interdisciplinary approach Weberian historical sociological concepts are engaged as a means of bringing specific historical actions into a wider cross cultural comparative perspective and lays the basis for a new framework to think about kingship and succession in East Asia. ... Read more

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While the customary path to achievement in traditional China was through service to the state, from the earliest times certain individuals had been acclaimed for repudiating an official career. This book traces the formulation and portrayal of the practice of reclusion in China from the earliest times through the sixth century, by which time reclusion had taken on its enduring character.

Those men who decided to withhold their service to state governance fit the dictum from the Book of Changes of a man who "does not serve a king or lord; he elevates in priority his own affairs." This characterization came to serve as a byword of individual and voluntary withdrawal, the image of the man whose lofty resolve could not be humbled for service to a temporal ruler. Men who eschewed official appointments in favor of pursuing their own personal ideals were known by such appellations as "hidden men" (yinshi), "disengaged persons" (yimin), "high-minded men" (gaoshi), and "scholars-at-home" (chushi).

What distinguished these men was a particular strength of character that underlay their conduct: they received approbation for maintaining their resolve, their mettle, their integrity, and their moral and personal values in the face of adversity, threat, or temptation. This book reveals that those who opted for a life of reclusion had a variety of motivations for their decisions and conducted widely divergent ways of life. The lives of these men epitomize the distinctive nature of substantive reclusion, differentiating them from those of the intelligentsia who, on occasion, voiced their desire for disengagement or for retreat, but who nevertheless found or retained their places in government office. Throughout, the author places the recluse and reclusion within the social, political, intellectual, religious, and literary contexts of the time. ... Read more

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The Way of Highest Clarity was a Daoist religious movement that flourished for a thousand years in medieval China. This book explains its chief religious ideas and practices through three key texts, translated into English for the first time. Together with the introductory essays on the concepts of nature, vision and revelation, the book provides an overview of a unique and fascinating religious imagination, which will be of interest to anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of China s cultural heritage. ... Read more

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The empire of the Qara Khitai, which was one of the least known and most fascinating dynasties in the history of Central Asia, existed for nearly a century before it was conquered by the Mongols in 1218. Arriving in Central Asia from China, the Qara Khitai ruled over a mostly Muslim population. Their history affords a unique window onto the extensive cross-cultural contacts between China, Inner Asian nomads and the Muslim world in the period preceding the rise of Chinggis Khan. Using an extensive corpus of Muslim and Chinese sources, Michal Biran comprehensively examines the political, institutional and cultural histories of the Qara Khitai. Her book explores a range of topics including the organization of the army, the position of women, the image of China in Muslim Central Asia,the religions of the Qara Khitai and the legacy they left for the Mongols. Crucially she asks why they did not, unlike their predecessors and successors in Central Asia, embrace Islam. The book represents a groundbreaking contribution to the field of Eurasian history for students of the Islamic world, China and Central Asia. ... Read more

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This is the first book in any language offering a comprehensive study that places Daoxuan (596–667), one of the most important scholarly monks, in the context of medieval Chinese Buddhist history. In presenting a fresh image of medieval monastic life of Chinese Buddhism, it focuses on several key issues in Daoxuan’s work, including the veneration of Buddha’s relics, the re-creation of the ordination platform and ordination ritual, and how the Buddhist community reclassified and dealt with monastic property. It is indispensable for all those who are interested in the religions and history of medieval China and comparative monasticism. ... Read more

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China's role in world history has been controversial, especially as seen through an economic lens. This book presents an alternative interpretation of that role, less exclusively economic, more broadly based, and focused on the T'ang period, one of China's acknowledged golden ages. It shows how a different China, Buddhist or Taoist rather than Confucian, aristocratic as much as meritocratic, achieved, through openness to the outside world and partnership with its elites, a multiple preeminence in politics, economics, society and the intellect, not unlike that enjoyed by the United States today. Within a looser web of globalization, the T'ang period and its dynamics offers a distant mirror of our own time, casting a new light on issues in contemporary politics.
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A balanced sinocentric view of world history
The description on the approach of the book provided by the "Book reviews" is fairly accurate. Therefore, I will only point out that rethinking world history has become a major concern of a significant number of historians over recent decades, and, in particular, China's role in world history is again controversial thanks to Andre Gunder Frank's Re Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. In this book Adshead looks at the forces which have shaped China throughout its history in order to offer an alternative interpretation of that role. He offers a survey of T'ang China, with the aim of asking questions such as how China came to occupy a central place in the world economy in pre-modern times; what forces helped shape China during this period, or how these forces may alter China's place in the Twenty-First century. More broadly, the book explores the ways in which regional changes have, throughout history, shifted the balance of the world. In order to achieve that, Adshead covers much of the political, cultural and economical history of Eurasia over the last two millenia. Besides, the book is not a difficult reading (content: 5 starts; pleasure of reading: 3).

Other books I would recommend to read are the following: "The History of Gov-ernment" by S.E. Finer; "The world economy. A millennial perspective" by Angus Maddison; "The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy", by Kennetz Pomeranz; "Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland : Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830", by Victor Lieberman; and "The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation" by John M. Hobson.

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Poetry and Painting in Song ChinaThe Subtle Art of DissentAlfreda MurckThroughout the history of imperial China, the educated elite used various means to criticize government policies and actions. During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some members of this elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting. By examining literary archetypes, the titles of paintings, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Alfreda Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions--some transparent, others deliberately concealed. She argues that the coding of messages in seemingly innocuous paintings was an important factor in the growing respect for painting among the educated elite and that the capacity of painting's systems of reference to allow scholars to express dissent with impunity contributed to the art's vitality and longevity.Alfreda Murck is an independent scholar living in Beijing.Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, 50May 81/2x 11 44 illus., 2 maps 400 pp. ... Read more

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Great Book!
Many translation about Chinese poetry that translators missed to reveal the hidden method and metaphor in Chinese poetry, but these author truly understand ancient Chinese art, why Chinese poetry is a painting with words, and Song painting is poem done by brush. This book should be required in school or for anyone who wants to understand Chinese poetry that done with character or brush. ... Read more