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Building A Religious Empire - Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy, And The Rise Of The Gelukpa

by Brenton Sullivan

86,13€ + 10% CARD

 The vast majority of monasteries in Tibet and nearly all of the monasteries in Mongolia belong to the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, best known through its symbolic head, the Dalai Lama. Historically, these monasteries were some of the largest in the world, and even today some Geluk monasteries house thousands of monks, both in Tibet and in exile in India. In Building a Religious Empire, Brenton Sullivan examines the school''s expansion and consolidation of power along the frontier with China and Mongolia from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries to chart how its rise to dominance took shape. In contrast to the practice in other schools of Tibetan Buddhism, Geluk lamas devoted an extraordinary amount of effort to establishing the institutional frameworks within which everyday aspects of monastic life, such as philosophizing, meditating, or conducting rituals, took place. In doing so, the lamas drew on administrative techniques usually associated with state-making—standardization, record-keeping, the conscription of young males, and the concentration of manpower in central cores, among others—thereby earning the moniker "lama official," or "Buddhist bureaucrat." The deployment of these bureaucratic techniques to extend the Geluk "liberating umbrella" over increasing numbers of lands and peoples leads Sullivan to describe the result of this Geluk project as a "religious empire." The Geluk lamas'' privileging of the monastic institution, Sullivan argues, fostered a common religious identity that insulated it from factionalism and provided legitimacy to the Geluk project of conversion, conquest, and expansion. Ultimately, this system succeeded in establishing a relatively uniform and resilient network of thousands of monasteries stretching from Nepal to Lake Baikal, from Beijing to the Caspian Sea.
ENGLISH

Early Modern Travels Of Manchu - A Script And Its Study In East Asia And Europe

by Marten Soderblom Saarela

112,63€ + 10% CARD

 A linguistic and historical study of the Manchu script in the early modern world Manchu was a language first written down as part of the Qing state-building project in Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth century. After the Qing invasion of China in 1644, and for the next two and a half centuries, Manchu was the language of state in one of the early modern world''s great powers. Its prominence and novelty attracted the interest of not only Chinese literati but also foreign scholars. Yet scholars in Europe and Japan, and occasionally even within China itself, were compelled to study the language without access to a native speaker. Jesuit missionaries in Beijing sent Chinese books on Manchu to Europe, where scholars struggled to represent it in an alphabet compatible with Western pedagogy and printing technology. In southern China, meanwhile, an isolated phonologist with access to Jesuit books relied on expositions of the Roman alphabet to make sense of the Manchu script. When Chinese textbooks and dictionaries of Manchu eventually reached Japan, scholars there used their knowledge of Dutch to understand Manchu. In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, Mårten Söderblom Saarela focuses on outsiders both within and beyond the Qing empire who had little interaction with Manchu speakers but took an interest in the strange, new language of a rising world power. He shows how—through observation, inference, and reference to received ideas on language and writing—intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Chosn Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and explores the uses to which it was put for recording sounds and arranging words.
ENGLISH

Buddha'S Footprint - An Environmental History Of Asia

by Johan Elverskog

79,43€ + 10% CARD

 A corrective to the contemporary idea that Buddhism has always been an environmentally friendly religion In the current popular imagination, Buddhism is often understood to be a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment. The Dharma, the name given to Buddhist teachings by Buddhists, states that all things are interconnected. Therefore, Buddhists are perceived as extending compassion beyond people and animals to include plants and the earth itself out of a concern for the total living environment. In The Buddha''s Footprint, Johan Elverskog contends that only by jettisoning this contemporary image of Buddhism as a purely ascetic and apolitical tradition of contemplation can we see the true nature of the Dharma. According to Elverskog, Buddhism is, in fact, an expansive religious and political system premised on generating wealth through the exploitation of natural resources. Elverskog surveys the expansion of Buddhism across Asia in the period between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, when Buddhist institutions were built from Iran and Azerbaijan in the west, to Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north, Japan in the east, and Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the south. He examines the prosperity theology at the heart of the Dharma that declared riches to be a sign of good karma and the means by which spritiual status could be elevated through donations bequeathed to Buddhist institutions. He demonstrates how this scriptural tradition propelled Buddhists to seek wealth and power across Asia and to exploit both the people and the environment. Elverskog shows the ways in which Buddhist expansion not only entailed the displacement of local gods and myths with those of the Dharma—as was the case with Christianity and Islam—but also involved fundamentally transforming earlier social and political structures and networks of economic exchange. The Buddha''s Footprint argues that the institutionalization of the Dharma was intimately connected to agricultural expansion, resource extraction, deforestation, urbanization, and the monumentalization of Buddhism itself.
ENGLISH

Gu Hongming'S Eccentric Chinese Odyssey

by Chunmei Du

99,31€ + 10% CARD

 Known for his ultraconservatism and eccentricity, Gu Hongming (1857-1928) remains one of the most controversial figures in modern Chinese intellectual history. A former member of the colonial elite from Penang who was educated in Europe, Gu, in his late twenties, became a Qing loyalist and Confucian spokesman who also defended concubinage, footbinding, and the queue. Seen as a reactionary by his Chinese contemporaries, Gu nevertheless gained fame as an Eastern prophet following the carnage of World War I, often paired with Rabindranath Tagore and Leo Tolstoy by Western and Japanese intellectuals. Rather than resort to the typical conception of Gu as an inscrutable eccentric, Chunmei Du argues that Gu was a trickster-sage figure who fought modern Western civilization in a time dominated by industrial power, utilitarian values, and imperialist expansion. A shape-shifter, Gu was by turns a lampooning jester, defying modern political and economic systems and, at other times, an avenging cultural hero who denounced colonial ideologies with formidable intellect, symbolic performances, and calculated pranks. A cultural amphibian, Gu transformed from an "imitation Western man" to "a Chinaman again," and reinterpreted, performed, and embodied "authentic Chineseness" in a time when China itself was adopting the new identity of a modern nation-state. Gu Hongming''s Eccentric Chinese Odyssey is the first comprehensive study in English of Gu Hongming, both the private individual and the public cultural figure. It examines the controversial scholar''s intellectual and psychological journeys across geographical, national, and cultural boundaries in new global contexts. In addition to complicating existing studies of Chinese conservatism and global discussions on civilization around the World War I era, the book sheds new light on the contested notion of authenticity within the Chinese diaspora and the psychological impact of colonialism.
ENGLISH

Steppe And The Sea - Pearls In The Mongol Empire

by Thomas T. Allsen

66,18€ + 10% CARD

 In 1221, in what we now call Turkmenistan, a captive held by Mongol soldiers confessed that she had swallowed her pearls in order to safeguard them. She was immediately executed and eviscerated. On finding several pearls, Chinggis Qan (Genghis Khan) ordered that they cut open every slain person on the battlefield. Pearls, valued for aesthetic, economic, religious, and political reasons, were the ultimate luxury good of the Middle Ages, and the Chingissid imperium, the largest contiguous land empire in history, was their unmatched collector, promoter, and conveyor. Thomas T. Allsen examines the importance of pearls, as luxury good and political investment, in the Mongolian empire—from its origin in 1206, through its unprecedented expansion, to its division and decline in 1370—in order to track the varied cultural and commercial interactions between the northern steppes and the southern seas. Focusing first on the acquisition, display, redistribution, and political significance of pearls, Allsen shows how the very act of forming such a vast nomadic empire required the massive accumulation, management, and movement of prestige goods, and how this process brought into being new regimes of consumption on a continental scale. He argues that overland and seaborne trade flourished simultaneously, forming a dynamic exchange system that moved commodities from east to west and north to south, including an enormous quantity of pearls. Tracking the circulation of pearls across time, he highlights the importance of different modes of exchange—booty-taking, tributary relations, market mechanisms, and reciprocal gift-giving. He also sheds light on the ways in which Mongols'' marketing strategies made use of not only myth and folklore but also maritime communications networks created by Indian-Buddhist and Muslim merchants skilled in cross-cultural commerce. In Allsen''s analysis, pearls illuminate Mongolian exceptionalism in steppe history, the interconnections between overland and seaborne trade, recurrent patterns in the employment of luxury goods in the political cultures of empires, and the consequences of such goods for local and regional economies.
ENGLISH

Teleology Of The Modern Nation-State - Japan And China

105,93€ + 10% CARD

 Although we may be aware that China and Japan were not nation-states until relatively recently, we still speak and write about Han dynasty China or Jomon Japan. And almost all historians refer to prehistoric China or Japan. Thus imposing the national story on the local, the authors contend, harms the historical record.
ENGLISH

Food And Environment In Early And Medieval China

by E. N. Anderson

112,56€ + 10% CARD

 Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China provides an account of the development of food systems, agriculture, and trade in China's imperial era, connecting those foodways to the global phenomenon of Chinese cuisine today.
ENGLISH

India In The Chinese Imagination - Myth, Religion, And Thought

99,31€ + 10% CARD

 In this collection of original essays, leading Asian studies scholars take a new look at the way the Chinese conceived of India in their literature, art, and religious thought in the premodern era.
ENGLISH

Translating Buddhist Medicine In Medieval China

by C. Pierce Salguero

99,38€ + 10% CARD

 This interdisciplinary study examines the reception of Ayurvedic knowledge and other Indian medical teachings in medieval China through analysis of Buddhist texts, including translations from Indian languages as well as Chinese compositions between the second and ninth centuries.
ENGLISH

Asian Medicine And Globalization

79,43€ + 10% CARD

 As more and more Asian medical practices cross into Western culture through the popularity of yoga and herbalism, and as Western medicine finds its way east in the form of plastic surgery, these systems of meaning become inextricably interrelated. The essays in this volume consider the larger implications of transmissions between cultures.
ENGLISH

China In The Early Bronze Age - Shang Civilization

by Robert L. Thorp

112,56€ + 10% CARD

 Students of the history and archaeology of early civilizations will find China in the Early Bronze Age the most up-to-date and wide-ranging introduction to its topic now in print. Scholars in Chinese studies will use this work as a handbook and research guide. For all readers, this volume makes fascinating reading in the formative stages of Chinese culture accessible.
ENGLISH

Writing On The Wall - How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity

by William C. Hannas

112,56€ + 10% CARD

 Based on the latest scholarship in cognitive science and linguistics, and the author's intimate experience with East Asian languages, The Writing on the Wall provides a balanced and thoughtful account of one of the most important problems facing modern Asia in the age of globalization.
ENGLISH

The Royal Hunt In Eurasian History

by Thomas T. Allsen

81,11€ + 10% CARD

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 From antiquity to the nineteenth century, the royal hunt was a vital component of the political cultures of the Middle East, India, Central Asia, and China.
ENGLISH

Empires Of God - Religious Encounters In The Early Modern Atlantic

36,49€ + 10% CARD

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 Focusing on the formative period of European exploration, settlement, and conquest in the Americas, from roughly 1500 to 1760, Empires of God brings together literary scholars and historians of the English, French, and Spanish Americas to demonstrate the power of religious ideas and narratives to create kingdoms both imagined and real.
ENGLISH

Multicultural China In The Early Middle Ages

by Sanping Chen

112,56€ + 10% CARD

 Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages exposes a number of long-hidden "foreign" elements in Chinese culture that represent the legacy of the Tuoba, a former nomadic group originally from central Asia.
ENGLISH

Blacks Of Premodern China

by Don J. Wyatt

99,31€ + 10% CARD

 The Blacks of Premodern China describes the earliest Chinese encounters with peoples regarded as black. It focuses on the first exposure of Chinese to blacks hailing from East Africa, chiefly from today's Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, who arrived in China as slaves between the seventh and seventeenth centuries C.E.
ENGLISH

Ethnic Identity In Tang China

by Marc S. Abramson

92,68€ + 10% CARD

 Drawing on political writings, religious texts, and other cultural artifacts, as well as comparative examples from other empires and frontiers, this book explores the construction of ethnicity during the Tang dynasty, which reigned for roughly three centuries from 618-907. It offers insights on East Asian and Inner Asian history.
ENGLISH

Tongking Gulf Through History

106,00€ + 10% CARD

 This two-thousand-year history of the Tongking Gulf draws on fresh archaeological and historical insights to bridge a significant gap in studies on Southeast Asia and China.
ENGLISH

Royal Hunt In Eurasian History

by Thomas T. Allsen

99,31€ + 10% CARD

 From antiquity to the nineteenth century, the royal hunt was a vital component of the political cultures of the Middle East, India, Central Asia, and China.
ENGLISH

Birth Of Orientalism

by Urs App

79,43€ + 10% CARD

 Modern Orientalism was born in the eighteenth century after a very long gestation period defined less by economic or political motives than by religious ideology. The Birth of Orientalism presents a completely new picture of the Western encounter with Asia, its underlying dynamics, and the discovery of Buddhism and Hinduism.
ENGLISH

Buddhism And Islam On The Silk Road

by Johan Elverskog

52,93€ + 10% CARD

 This groundbreaking work challenges contemporary stereotypes by revealing how both Buddhist and Muslim religious traditions were shaped by a millennium of cross-cultural exchange along the Silk Road from Iran to China.
ENGLISH

Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion

by Shin'Ichi Yamamuro

83,82€ + 10% CARD

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 From 1932 until the end of World War II, the Japanese established and maintained by bloody rule a puppet regime in the Chinese region of Manchuria. Yamamuro Shin'ichi's extraordinary book rereads this occupation under new light.
ENGLISH

The Early Modern Travels Of Manchu - A Script And Its Study In East Asia And Europe

by Marten Soderblom Saarela

91,93€ + 10% CARD

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ENGLISH

The Steppe And The Sea - Pearls In The Mongol Empire

by Thomas T. Allsen

54,08€ + 10% CARD

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