Bücher der Reihe Asian Thought and Culture

This volume engages with the work of E. Douglas Lewis, who has made major contributions to the understanding of Eastern Indonesia, ethnography, culture, and religion, as well as a neurobiologically informed anthropology.

The last century of Ming rule (1368-1644) in China saw an unparalleled and short-lived loosening of the restraints of conventional Confucian morality in both art and literature. This title presents a translation of two novellas that are representative of that trend.

Expressionism and Its Deformation in Contemporary Chinese Theatre is the first scholarly book to explore the deep and intricate relationship between Expressionism and contemporary Chinese drama, attempting to assume the critical task of challenging these dramatists while delineating the contours of the most recent trends of Chinese theatre.

This book is a collection of articles by one of the leading scholars in Japanese thought dealing with three areas of Japanese philosophy and religion: Dôgen's Zen view of liberation, including the key doctrines of casting off body-mind, being-time, and spontaneous manifestation of the kôan; the relation between Buddhism, literary aesthetics, and folk religion; and a comparison of Japanese and Western thought, particularly Heidegger, on science, language, and death. The central theme throughout these essays is the meaning of time and impermanence in Japanese religion and culture based on Buddhist contemplation. The book's title refers to a phrase used by Dôgen, the dramatist Chikamatsu, and others that plays on the twofold image of «dream» representing either the fleeting world of illusion or the nonsubstantial realm of ultimate reality. One of the articles is a new annotated translation of Dôgen's Shôbôgenzô «Muchû setsumu» («Disclosing a Dream Within a Dream») fascicle. Other essays offer novel interpretations of Chikamatsu and Kyoto-school thinkers Kuki Shûzô and Nishitani Keiji in addition to Japanese folk religion.

The cyclic myth is a temporal schema of the unity of man and the cosmos. It identifies man with the periodic becoming and perpetual regeneration in nature, and guarantees personal duration against the flux of time. It has imprints on every sphere of human experience in Chinese and Western cultures. The author first traces the origin, formation, abstraction and presentation of the cyclic myth in Chinese mythology, ritual, philosophy and literature, and confirms that the cyclic ontology is the core of Chinese culture. He then adumbrates the transmutation of the cyclic mentality in the linear eschatology of the Western culture and its impact in literature from Dante, Milton, Defoe, Sterne, Goethe, Shelley and Yeats to Joyce and Beckett. The author concludes with the assertion that the cyclic myth is an informing structure of literary works and an index of cultures.

«Nuogao ji» (Records of Nuogao) is the title of five juan of the ninth-century miscellany entitled Youyang zazu, by Duan Chengshi (c. 800-863). «Nuogao ji» is made up of anecdotes and notices that focus on the strange or supernatural. Simultaneously reminiscent of earlier zhiguai works and characteristic of Tang xiaoshuo writing, this book is an important text for the study of both change and continuity in Chinese informal narratives. This is the first complete English translation of «Nuogao ji.»

Marriage as Political Strategy and Cultural Expression is the first comprehensive study of Mongolian royal marriages from World Empire (1206-1279) to the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) in Asia. This study examines the Mongolian royal family¿s marriage strategies and the political implications of these royal marriages, specifically, the intermarriages between the Mongolian royal house and its allies, including the Onggirat, the Oirat, and other Mongol peoples as well as the Uighur State and Korea in Central and East Asia. This book concludes that the short lifespans of Mongol royalty after Khubilai Khan were the result of consanguineous marriage and inbreeding ¿ genetic factors that contributed to the collapse of the Mongol dynasty.

How and why do some places in the world become symbols of illusive paradise, and what does this mean for their residents? This book examines the origins of a Euro-American fascination with places imagined to exist outside of Modernity. It offers a lens on the politics of development, modernization, and cultural preservation.

Language of Images is the result of a long and sustained engagement with Tantric practitioners and philosophical and exegetical texts. Due to its synthetic approach of utilizing multiple ways to read cultural artifacts, this work stands alone in its attempt to unravel the esoteric domains of Tantric practice by means of addressing the culture of visualization.

This book guides the reader to the emerging Ecozoic Era when humans will be present upon the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner. Indeed, this book calls for an Ecozoic spirituality that is timely and much needed. It also illustrates an important direction for theology and spirituality and for deep ecumenism that is yet to be fully realized and opens more doors for such dialogue.

The fascinating story of Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) changing himself while trying to change the religious faith of the Chinese has been told many times. As a Jesuit, Ricci pushed Christian evangelism by claiming a theistic affinity with Confucianism and by presenting himself as a defender of Confucian orthodoxy from Buddhism.