Buddhist Healing in Medieval China and Japan

Editors:
C. Pierce Salguero and Andrew Macomber

Publication date:
August 2020

Publisher:
University of Hawaii Press

Abstract:
From its inception in northeastern India in the first millennium BCE, the Buddhist tradition has advocated a range of ideas and practices that were said to ensure health and well-being. As the religion developed and spread to other parts of Asia, healing deities were added to its pantheon, monastic institutions became centers of medical learning, and healer-monks gained renown for their mastery of ritual and medicinal therapeutics. In China, imported Buddhist knowledge contended with a sophisticated, state-supported system of medicine that was able to retain its influence among the elite. Further afield in Japan, where Chinese Buddhism and Chinese medicine were introduced simultaneously as part of the country’s adoption of civilization from the “Middle Kingdom,” the two were reconciled by individuals who deemed them compatible. In East Asia, Buddhist healing would remain a site of intercultural tension and negotiation. While participating in transregional networks of circulation and exchange, Buddhist clerics practiced locally specific blends of Indian and indigenous therapies and occupied locally defined social positions as religious and medical specialists.

In this diverse and compelling collection, an international group of scholars analyzes the historical connections between Buddhism and healing in medieval China and Japan. Contributors focus on the transnationally conveyed aspects of Buddhist healing traditions as they moved across geographic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. Simultaneously, the chapters also investigate the local instantiations of these ideas and practices as they were reinvented, altered, and re-embedded in specific social and institutional contexts. Investigating the interplay between the macro and micro, the global and the local, this book demonstrates the richness of Buddhist healing as a way to explore the history of cross-cultural exchange.

Table of Contents:

"A Flock of Ghosts Bursting Forth and Scattering": Healing Narratives in a Sixth-Century Chinese Buddhist Hagiography / C. Pierce Salguero

Teaching from the Sickbed: Ideas of Illness and Healing in the Vimalakīrti Sūtra and Their Reception in Medieval Chinese Literature / Antje Richter

Lighting Lamps to Prolong Life: Ritual Healing and the Bhaiṣajyaguru Cult in Fifth- and Sixth-Century China / Shi Zhiru 釋智如

Buddhist Healing Practices at Dunhuang in the Medieval Period / Catherine Despeux

Empowering the Pregnancy Sash in Medieval Japan / Anna Andreeva

Ritualizing Moxibustion in the Early Medieval Tendai-Jimon Lineage / Andrew Macomber

Liangzhu Culture Society, Belief and Art in Neolithic China

Editor:
Bin Liu, Ling Qin & Zhuang Yijie

Publisher:
Routledge

Abstract:

The Liangzhu Culture (5,300-4,300 BP) represented the peak of prehistoric cultural and social development in the Yangtze Delta. With a wide sphere of influence centred near present day Hangzhou City, Liangzhu City is considered one of the earliest urban centres in prehistoric China. Although it remains a mystery for many in the West, Liangzhu is well known in China for its fine jade-crafting industry; its enormous, well-structured earthen compound and recently discovered hydraulic system; and its far-flung impact on contemporary and succeeding cultures. The archaeological ruins of Liangzhu City was successfully enlisted for the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage in July 2019.

Liangzhu Culture contextualises Liangzhu in broad socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds and provides new, first-hand data to help explain the development and structure of this early urban centre. Among its many insights, the volume reveals how elites used jade as a means of acquiring social power, and how Liangzhu and its centre stand in comparison to other prehistoric urban centres in the world.

This book, the first of its kind published in the English language, will be a useful guide to students at all levels interested in the material culture and social structures of prehistoric China and beyond.

Table of Contents:

Preface

Chapter One: Situating the Liangzhu Culture in Late Neolithic China: An Introduction

Chapter Two: The Liangzhu City: New Discoveries and Research

Chapter Three: Power and Belief: Reading the Liangzhu Jade and Society

Chapter Four: A Controlled Fine Craft: Jade Production Techniques in the Liangzhu Culture

Chapter Five: From the ‘Songze Style’ to the ‘Liangzhu Mode’

Chapter Six: Shamanistic, Historic and Virtuous Jade: Continuity and Change in Early Chinese Jade Traditions

ACTA ASIATICA: Bulletin of the Institute of Eastern Culture No. 119

Publication date:
August 2020

Sogdians in Sogdiana, China, and Turfan during the Sixth Century

Table of Contents:

YOSHIDA Yutaka吉田豊: Introduction

Alisher BEGMATOV, Amtriddin BERDIMURODOV, Gennadiy BOGOMOLOV, MURAKAMI Tomomi村上智見, TERA-MURA Hirofumi寺村裕史, UNO Takao宇野隆夫, and USAMI Tomoyuki宇佐美智之: New Discoveries from Kafir-kala: Coins, Sealings, and Wooden Cravings

Frantz GRENET: The Wooden Panels from Kafir-kala: A Group Portrait of the Samarkand nāf (Civic Body)

ARAKAWA Masaharu 荒川正晴: The Kao-ch‘ang Kingdom’s Rule of Turfan and Its Sogdian Colonies in the Sixth Century

BI Bo 畢波: The New Bilingual Sogdian and Chinese Epitaph from Yeh 鄴 and the Sogdians in the Northern Ch‘i Dynasty

YAMASHITA Shōji 山下将司: Sogdians during the Period of Division in North China in the Sixth Century as Depicted in Chinese-Language Epitaphs

Link:
http://www.tohogakkai.com/actaback101-new.html

Silk Roads: From Local Realities to Global Narratives

Editors:
Jeffrey D. Lerner & Yaohua Shi

Publication date:
August 2020

Publisher:
Oxbow Books

Abstract:
In recent decades, there has been a new surge of interest in the history and legacies of the Silk Roads both within academic and public discourses. A field of Silk Roads Studies has come into its own. Consciously mirroring the temperament of its subject, the field has moved out of the narrow niches of particular disciplines to become a truly interdisciplinary endeavor. New research findings about the historical operations of the Silk Roads and interpretations of their legacies for the modern and contemporary world have broken down geographical and temporal divides that once demarcated the Silk Roads as primarily pre-modern and Old World-centered conduits of globalization. In light of these developments, the time is ripe to begin formulating a new definition of the contour of Silk Roads Studies and laying a new foundation for further work in this field.

Silk Roads: From Local Realities to Global Narratives brings together leading scholars in multiple disciplines related to Silk Roads studies. It highlights the multiplicity of networks that constituted the Silk Roads, including land and maritime routes, and approaches the Silk Roads from Antiquity to China’s One Belt One Road Initiative from Afro-Eurasia to the Americas. This holistic approach to understanding ancient globalization, exchanges, transformations, and movements - and their continued relevance to the present - is in line with contemporary academic trends toward interdisciplinarity. Indeed, the Silk Roads is such an expansive topic that many approaches to its study must be included to represent accurately its many facets.

The volume emphasizes exchange and transformation along the Silk Roads - moments of acculturation or hybridization that contributed to novel syncretic forms. It highlights the multiplicity of networks that constituted the Silk Roads, including land and maritime routes, and approaches to the Silk Roads from Antiquity to China’s One Belt One Road Initiative from Afro-Eurasia to the Americas.

Table of Contents:
Introduction

Section One: Acculturation and Hybridization
1. The “Birth” of the Silk Road Between Ecological Frontiers and Military Innovation
Nicola Di Cosmo

2. Sogdians in Shanxi (386 CE-618 CE): Literary and Archeological Evidence
Xiaoyan Qi

3. From Exotic Toys to Objects of Scientific Inquiry: A Special Way of Transmitting European Optical Knowledge in the Qing Dynasty
Yunli Shi

4. The Karakorum Highway: Gateway of Empires, Religions, and Commerce
Saba Samee

Section Two: Understanding Spice Through Interdisciplinarity
 5. A TRP Along the Silk Roads: How and Why We Detect and Use Spices
Wayne Silver and Cecil J. Saunders

6. Silk Road Pharmacy: Debating Theriac and Defining the Natural World
Monique O’Connell

7. Spice and Taste in the Culinary World of the Early Modern Mediterranean
Eric Dursteler

Section Three: Tradition as Continuity and Change
8. Devotional Prints and Practice: Woodcuts from the Library Cave at Dunhuang
Bernadine Barnes

9. Dome of Heaven: From the Lantern Ceiling to the Chinese Wooden Dome
Di Luo

10. “Malacca” – From Fabled Port to Muddy Lagoon: A Cautionary Tale of Ecological Disaster
Margaret Sarkissian

11. Twenty-first Century Trading Routes in Mongolia: Changing Pastoral Soundscapes and Lifeways
Jennifer Post

12. Erasing the Local, Celebrating the Local: Tracing the Contradictions of the Silk Road in Pakistan
Chad Haines

Section Four: Cultural Transactions
13. Arsacid Economic Activity on the Silk Road
Touraj Daryaee

14. Pearls and Power: Chōla's Tribute Mission to the Northern Song Court within the Maritime Silk Road Trade Network
James A. Anderson

15. “Flying Cash”: Credit Instruments on the Silk Roads
Dan Du

Section Five: Long-Distance Commodity Trade
16. The Case for Shipwrecked Indians in Germany
Jeffrey D. Lerner

17. Samuel Shaw’s ‘Maritime Silk Road’ from American Independence towards Monopoly, 1784–1794
John A. Ruddiman

中国職官辞典: 秦から南宋まで

Editor:
吉田 誠夫（Yoshida Nobuo)

Publication date:
July 2020

Publisher:
Nichigai Associates (日外アソシエーツ)

Abstract:
秦から南宋までの中国各王朝における職官・官署を、中央の上級官僚から地方の下級官吏まで1.2万件を網羅した専門辞典。設置時代、職掌、定員人数、位階等級などについて、基本的な知識を得ることができる。「逆引き索引」付き。