The Everlasting Empire:The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy

《永恆的帝國: 古代中國的政治文化及其遺產》

作者 Author:
Yuri Pines

出版社 Publisher:
Princeton Press

出版年 Publication Year:
2012

內容簡介 Abstract:
Established in 221 BCE, the Chinese empire lasted for 2,132 years before being replaced by the Republic of China in 1912. During its two millennia, the empire endured internal wars, foreign incursions, alien occupations, and devastating rebellions--yet fundamental institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural features of the empire remained intact. The Everlasting Empire traces the roots of the Chinese empire's exceptional longevity and unparalleled political durability, and shows how lessons from the imperial past are relevant for China today.

Yuri Pines demonstrates that the empire survived and adjusted to a variety of domestic and external challenges through a peculiar combination of rigid ideological premises and their flexible implementation. The empire's major political actors and neighbors shared its fundamental ideological principles, such as unity under a single monarch--hence, even the empire's strongest domestic and foreign foes adopted the system of imperial rule. Yet details of this rule were constantly negotiated and adjusted. Pines shows how deep tensions between political actors including the emperor, the literati, local elites, and rebellious commoners actually enabled the empire's basic institutional framework to remain critically vital and adaptable to ever-changing sociopolitical circumstances. As contemporary China moves toward a new period of prosperity and power in the twenty-first century, Pines argues that the legacy of the empire may become an increasingly important force in shaping the nation's future trajectory.


目錄 Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments vi i
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: The Ideal of "Great Unity" 11
Chapter 2: The Monarch 44
Chapter 3: The Literati 76
Chapter 4: Local Elite 104
Chapter 5: The People 134
Chapter 6: Imperial Political Culture in the Modern Age 162
Notes 185
Bibliography 209
Index 233

Riding the Wind with Liezi: New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic 《列子》

Editors:
Ronnie Littlejohn & Jeffrey Dippmann

Publisher:
SUNY Press

Publication Year:
2012

Abstract:


The Liezi is the forgotten classic of Daoism. Along with the Laozi (Daodejing) and the Zhuangzi, it’s been considered a Daoist masterwork since the mid-eighth century, yet unlike those well-read works, the Liezi is little known and receives scant scholarly attention. Nevertheless, the Liezi is an important text that sheds valuable light on the early history of Daoism, particularly the formative period of sectarian Daoism. We do not know exactly what shape the original text took, but what remains is replete with fantastic characters, whimsical tales, paradoxical aphorisms, and philosophically sophisticated reflection on the nature of the world and humanity’s place within it. Ultimately, the Liezi sees the world as one of change and indeterminacy.

Arguing for the Liezi’s historical, philosophical, and literary significance, the contributors to this volume offer a fresh look at this text, using contemporary approaches and providing novel insights. The volume is unique in its attention to both philosophical and religious perspectives.

Table of Content:

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I The Liezi Text

1. Reading the Liezi: The First Thousand Years

2.The Liezi’s Use of the Lost Zhuangzi

3. Is the Liezi an Encheiridion?

Part II  Interpretive Essays

1.Torches of Chaos and Doubt: Themes of Process and Transformations in the Liezi

2. The That-Beyond-Which of the Pristine Dao: Cosmogony in the Liezi

3.The Theme of Unselfconsciousness in the Liezi

4. Reading the Zhuangzi in Liezi: Redefining Xianship

Part III  Applying the Teachings of the Liezi

1. Body and Identity

2. I, Robot: Self as Machine in the Liezi

3. Dancing with Yinyang: The Art of Emergence

4. How To Fish Like a Daoist

5. When Butterflflies Change into Birds: Life and Death in the Liezi

Contributors
Index

《辨古集》・Warring States Papers: Studies in Chinese and Comparative Philology

Editors:
Alvin P. Cohen, Donald E. Gjertson, and E. Bruce Brooks

Publication Year:
2012

Abstract:
The first volume of the scholarly journal Warring States Papers. Includes leading research from scholars around the world, including Stephen C. Angle, E. Bruce Brooks, A. Taeko Brooks, Scott Cook, Robert Eno, Chris Fraser, Paul Goldin, Dennis Grafflin, Eric Henry, Manyul Im, John V. Lombardi, David Nivison, Dan Robins, Karen Turner, Keith Yoder, and the late Gilbert Mattos. The journal subjects center on classical Sinology, but also include the philological and historical study of texts from other traditions, including classical India and Greece, with special emphasis on the New Testament.


As to the content, please click the link below:
http://www.upne.com/series/WSPS.html

[Dissertation] Embodying the Way: Bio-spiritual Practices and Ritual Theories in Early and Medieval China

作者 Author:

Ori Tavor

系所 School: 
University of Pennsylvania, East Asian Languages and Civilization

指導教授 Supervisor:

Paul R. Goldin

摘要 Abstract:

The recent emergence of Ritual Studies as an interdisciplinary academic field has engendered a renewed interest in ritual practices. In Chinese Studies, this has led to a surge in research devoted to the reconstruction of ancient rituals through textual resources. It has also resulted in the examination of contemporary practices through anthropological field work. Painting a clear picture of the rich history of ritual in China entails more than studying ritual practices using modern methodologies, however; it also involves understanding the ritual theories that helped shape them.

My dissertation surveys a variety of texts from the Warring States to the Early Medieval periods that can all be read as attempts to "theorize" ritual. I examine three theories, written by the Confucian philosopher Xunzi, a group of Western Han literati, and the Daoist liturgist Lu Xiujing, against the backdrop of contemporaneous individual self-cultivation practices. I demonstrate that ritual was often depicted as a technology of the body, a technique of self-cultivation that allows man, through the medium of his own body, to assert his influence on the world or even transcend it. By tracing the similarities and transformations in ritual theory over a period of a thousand years, I demonstrate that, despite the evident differences in their sociopolitical and religious agendas, all three ritual theorists shared a common belief in the ultimate efficacy of ritual over the individual self-cultivation techniques advocated by their rivals.

I conclude by situating Chinese ritual theory in the broader context of Ritual Studies and demonstrate how the insights I have obtained open up new ways of thinking about ritual, the body, and the relationship between them. I argue that the distinctive philosophical and cosmological assumptions that surfaced in Early and Medieval China have produced ritual theories that are fundamentally different from their Western counterparts. Distilling a Chinese approach to the theorization of ritual can thus offer alternative solutions to the challenges faced by contemporary scholars, such as the role and meaning of ritual in the modern world.

Early Buddhist Art of China and Central Asia, Vol. 3: The Western Ch'in in Kansu in the Sixteen Kingdoms Period and Inter-relationships with the Buddhist Art of Gandhara

Author:
Marylin Martin Rhie

Publisher:
Brill

Publication Year:

2010

Abstract:

This book, third in a series on the early Buddhist art of China and Central Asia, centers on Buddhist art from the Western Ch'in (385-431 A.D.) 西秦 in eastern Kansu (northwest China), primarily from the cave temples of Ping-ling ssu 炳靈寺 and Mai-chi shan 麥積山. A detailed chronological and iconographic study of sculptures and wall paintings in Cave 169 at Ping-ling ssu particularly yields a chronological framework for unlocking the difficult issues of dating early fifth century Chinese Buddhist art, and offers some new insights into textual sources in the Lotus, Hua-yen and Amitabha sutras. Further, … read morethis study introduces the iconographpy of the five Buddhas and its relation to the art of Gandhara and the famous five colossal T'an-yao caves at Yün-kang.

Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li

Author:
Brook Ziporyn

Publisher:
SUNY Press

Publication Year:
2012

Abstract:


Providing a bracing expansion of horizons, this book displays the unsuspected range of human thinking on the most basic categories of experience. The way in which early Chinese thinkers approached concepts such as one and many, sameness and difference, self and other, and internal and external stand in stark contrast to the way parallel concepts entrenched in much of modern thinking developed in Greek and European thought. Brook Ziporyn traces the distinctive and surprising philosophical journeys found in the works of the formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers back to a prevailing set of assumptions that tends to see questions of identity, value, and knowledge—the subject matter of ontology, ethics, and epistemology in other traditions—as all ultimately relating to questions about coherence in one form or another. Mere awareness of how many different ways human beings can think and have thought about these categories is itself a game changer for our own attitudes toward what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiential expansion.


Table of Content:

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Rethinking Same and Different

Coherence and Li: Plan Method of This Book and Its Sequel

1. Essences, Universals, and Omnipresence: Absolute Sameness and Difference

Essences, Universals, Categories, Ideas: Simple Location and the Disjunction of Same and Different in in Mainstream Western Philosophy
Same and Different in Form Matter
Two Opposite Derivations of Omnipresent

2. What Is Coherence? Chinese Paradigms

Coherence As Opposed to Law, Rule, Principle,Pattern: Harmony Versus Repeatability
Is White Horse Horse?
Qian Mu’s Pendulum
Ironic and Non-Ironic Coherence

3. Non-Ironic Coherence and Negotiable Continuity

Coherence and Omniavailability of Value in Confucius and Mencius
Coherence and Heaven in Analects
Ritual Versus Law: Cultural Grammar
Rectification of Names: Negotiated Identity as a Function of Ritual
Classes and Types in Mencius
Omnipresence in Mencius
Transition to Ironic Coherence: Qi-Omnipresence and the Empty Center in Pre-Ironic Proto-Daoism

4. Ironic Coherence and the Discovery of the “Yin”

The Laozi Tradition: Desiring Wholes
Overview of Ironic Coherence in the LaoziThe Five Meanings of the Unhewn: Omnipresence and Ironic Coherence in the Laozi
Zhuangzi’s Wild Card: Thing as Perspective
Using the Wild Card
The Wild Card Against Both Objective Truth and Subjective Solipsism
Conclusion to Chapter 4: Ironic Coherence

5. Non-Ironic Responses to Ironic Coherence in Xunzi and the Record of Ritual

Xunzi and the Regulation of Sameness and Difference
Omnipresence and Coherence in Xunzi
Two Texts from the Record of Ritual (Liji): “The Great Learning,” and “The Doctrine of the Mean”

6. The Yin-Yang Compromise

Yin-Yang Theism in Dong Zhongshu: The Metastasis of Harmony Irony
An Alternate Yin-Yang Divination System: Yang Xiong’s Taixuanjing

Conclusion and Summary: Toward Li

Notes
Bibliography
Index