Emperor Wu Zhao And Her Pantheon Of Devis Divinities And Dynastic Mothers

Author : N. Harry Rothschild
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2015-06-16
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780231539180

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Emperor Wu Zhao and Her Pantheon of Devis, Divinities, and Dynastic Mothers by N. Harry Rothschild Pdf

Wu Zhao (624–705), better known as Wu Zetian or Empress Wu, is the only woman to have ruled China as emperor over the course of its 5,000-year history. How did she—in a predominantly patriarchal and androcentric society—ascend the dragon throne? Exploring a mystery that has confounded scholars for centuries, this multifaceted history suggests that China's rich pantheon of female divinities and eminent women played an integral part in the construction of Wu Zhao's sovereignty. Wu Zhao deftly deployed language, symbol, and ideology to harness the cultural resonance, maternal force, divine energy, and historical weight of Buddhist devis, Confucian exemplars, Daoist immortals, and mythic goddesses, establishing legitimacy within and beyond the confines of Confucian ideology. Tapping into powerful subterranean reservoirs of female power, Wu Zhao built a pantheon of female divinities carefully calibrated to meet her needs at court. Her pageant was promoted in scripted rhetoric, reinforced through poetry, celebrated in theatrical productions, and inscribed on steles. Rendered with deft political acumen and aesthetic flair, these affiliations significantly enhanced Wu Zhao's authority and cast her as the human vessel through which the pantheon's divine energy flowed. Her strategy is a model of political brilliance and proof that medieval Chinese women enjoyed a more complex social status than previously known.

Author : N. Harry Rothschild
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Ancestor worship
ISBN : 0231169388

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Emperor Wu Zhao and Her Pantheon of Devis, Divinities, and Dynastic Mothers by N. Harry Rothschild Pdf

N. Harry Rothschild is associate professor of Asian history at the University of North Florida. He specializes in Tang history and the study of women and gender in China and East Asia. He is also the author of Wu Zhao, China's Only Female Emperor.

Author : N. Harry Rothschild
Publisher : Pearson
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : STANFORD:36105124032926

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Wu Zhao by N. Harry Rothschild Pdf

The story chronicles Wu Zhao's humble beginnings as the daughter of a provincial official and follows her path to the inner palace, where she improbably rose from a fifth-ranked concubine to emperor. Using Buddhist rhetoric, architecture, court rituals, and a network of "cruel officials" to cow her many opponents in court, Wu Zhao inaugurated a new dynasty in 690, the Zhou. She ruled as emperor for fifteen years, proving eminently competent in the art of governance, balancing factions in court, staving off the encroachment of Turks and Tibetans, and fostering the state's economic growth.

Author : Valerie M. Hudson,Donna Lee Bowen,Perpetua Lynne Nielsen
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 657 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2020-03-17
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780231550932

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The First Political Order by Valerie M. Hudson,Donna Lee Bowen,Perpetua Lynne Nielsen Pdf

Global history records an astonishing variety of forms of social organization. Yet almost universally, males subordinate females. How does the relationship between men and women shape the wider political order? The First Political Order is a groundbreaking demonstration that the persistent and systematic subordination of women underlies all other institutions, with wide-ranging implications for global security and development. Incorporating research findings spanning a variety of social science disciplines and comprehensive empirical data detailing the status of women around the globe, the book shows that female subordination functions almost as a curse upon nations. A society’s choice to subjugate women has significant negative consequences: worse governance, worse conflict, worse stability, worse economic performance, worse food security, worse health, worse demographic problems, worse environmental protection, and worse social progress. Yet despite the pervasive power of social and political structures that subordinate women, history—and the data—reveal possibilities for progress. The First Political Order shows that when steps are taken to reduce the hold of inequitable laws, customs, and practices, outcomes for all improve. It offers a new paradigm for understanding insecurity, instability, autocracy, and violence, explaining what the international community can do now to promote more equitable relations between men and women and, thereby, security and peace. With comprehensive empirical evidence of the wide-ranging harm of subjugating women, it is an important book for security scholars, social scientists, policy makers, historians, and advocates for women worldwide.

Author : Ho-fung Hung
Publisher : Contemporary Asia in the World
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2017-03-07
Category : Capitalism
ISBN : 023116419X

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The China Boom by Ho-fung Hung Pdf

A systematic investigation into the origins and unraveling of China's economic miracle.

Author : Tan Chung
Publisher : Gyan Publishing House
Page : 608 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 1998-12
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 8121206170

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Across the Himalayan Gap by Tan Chung Pdf

An anthology of 40 Indian authors that parades various Indian perspectives on China, her civilization, history, society and development. It is a fruition of a project launched by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) where Sino-Indian studies is a special window. A scholarly work.

Author : Yuhang Li
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 365 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2020-02-18
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780231548731

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Becoming Guanyin by Yuhang Li Pdf

Winner, 2024 Geiss-Hsu Book Prize for Best First Book, Society for Ming Studies The goddess Guanyin began in India as the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, originally a male deity. He gradually became indigenized as a female deity in China over the span of nearly a millennium. By the Ming (1358–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. In Becoming Guanyin, Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. Li focuses on the power of material things to enable women to access religious experience and transcendence. In particular, she examines how secular Buddhist women expressed mimetic devotion and pursued religious salvation through creative depictions of Guanyin in different media such as painting and embroidery and through bodily portrayals of the deity using jewelry and dance. These material displays expressed a worldview that differed from yet fit within the Confucian patriarchal system. Attending to the fabrication and use of “women’s things” by secular women, Li offers new insight into the relationships between worshipped and worshipper in Buddhist practice. Combining empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies, Becoming Guanyin is a field-changing analysis that reveals the interplay between material culture, religion, and their gendered transformations.

Author : Phyllis Birnbaum
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2017-01-03
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0231152191

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Manchu Princess, Japanese Spy by Phyllis Birnbaum Pdf

Aisin Gioro Xianyu (1907-1948) was the fourteenth daughter of a Manchu prince and a legendary figure in China's bloody struggle with Japan. After the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1912, Xianyu's father gave his daughter to a Japanese friend who was sympathetic to his efforts to reclaim power. This man raised Xianyu, now known as Kawashima Yoshiko, to restore the Manchus to their former glory. Her fearsome dedication to this cause ultimately got her killed. Yoshiko had a fiery personality and loved the limelight. She shocked Japanese society by dressing in men's clothes and rose to prominence as Commander Jin, touted in Japan's media as a new Joan of Arc. Boasting a short, handsome haircut and a genuine military uniform, Commander Jin was credited with many daring exploits, among them riding horseback as leader of her own army during the Japanese occupation of China. While trying to promote the Manchus, Yoshiko supported the puppet Manchu state established by the Japanese in 1932-one reason she was executed for treason after Japan's 1945 defeat. The truth of Yoshiko's life is still a source of contention between China and Japan: some believe she was exploited by powerful men, others claim she relished her role as political provocateur. China holds her responsible for unspeakable crimes, while Japan has forgiven her transgressions. This biography presents the richest and most accurate portrait to date of the controversial princess spy, recognizing her truly novel role in conflicts that transformed East Asia.

Author : Nicola Di Cosmo,Michael Maas
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 542 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2020-08-20
Category : History
ISBN : 1107476127

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Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity by Nicola Di Cosmo,Michael Maas Pdf

Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity offers an integrated picture of Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppes during a formative period of world history. In the half millennium between 250 and 750 CE, settled empires underwent deep structural changes, while various nomadic peoples of the steppes (Huns, Avars, Turks, and others) experienced significant interactions and movements that changed their societies, cultures, and economies. This was a transformational era, a time when Roman, Persian, and Chinese monarchs were mutually aware of court practices, and when Christians and Buddhists criss-crossed the Eurasian lands together with merchants and armies. It was a time of greater circulation of ideas as well as material goods. This volume provides a conceptual frame for locating these developments in the same space and time. Without arguing for uniformity, it illuminates the interconnections and networks that tied countless local cultural expressions to far-reaching inter-regional ones.

Author : Paul Rouzer
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2015-12-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780295806136

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On Cold Mountain by Paul Rouzer Pdf

In this first serious study of Hanshan (“Cold Mountain”), Paul Rouzer discusses some seventy poems of the iconic Chinese poet who lived sometime during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Hanshan’s poems gained a large readership in English-speaking countries following the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums (1958) and Gary Snyder’s translations (which began to appear that same year), and they have been translated into English more than any other body of Chinese verse. Rouzer investigates how Buddhism defined the way that believers may have read Hanshan in premodern times. He proposes a Buddhist poetics as a counter-model to the Confucian assumptions of Chinese literary thought and examines how texts by Kerouac, Snyder, and Jane Hirshfield respond to the East Asian Buddhist tradition.

Author : Carl Gottlieb Pfander
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 154 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 1866
Category : Christianity and other religions
ISBN : OXFORD:N13215292

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The Mizan Ul Haqq, Or, Balance of Truth by Carl Gottlieb Pfander Pdf

Author : John Powers
Publisher : Shambhala Publications
Page : 593 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2007-11-09
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781559392822

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Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism by John Powers Pdf

This is the most comprehensive and authoritative introduction to Tibetan Buddhism available to date, covering a wide range of topics, including history, doctrines, meditation, practices, schools, religious festivals, and major figures. The revised edition contains expanded discussions of recent Tibetan history and tantra and incorporates important new publications in the field. Beginning with a summary of the Indian origins of Tibetan Buddhism and how it eventually was brought to Tibet, it explores Tibetan Mahayana philosophy and tantric methods for personal transformation. The four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as Bön, are explored in depth from a nonsectarian point of view. This new and expanded edition is a systematic and wonderfully clear presentation of Tibetan Buddhist views and practices.

Author : Dong Wang
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2020-06-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9781538141120

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Longmen's Stone Buddhas and Cultural Heritage by Dong Wang Pdf

This thoroughly researched book provides the first comprehensive history of how a UNESCO World Heritage site on the Central China Plain, Longmen’s caves and the Buddhist statuary of Luoyang, was rediscovered in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on original research and archival sources in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, and Swedish, as well as extensive fieldwork, Dong Wang traces the ties between cultural heritage and modernity, detailing how this historical monument has been understood from antiquity to the present. She highlights the manifold traffic and expanded contact between China and other countries as these nations were reorienting themselves in order to adapt their own cultural traditions to newly industrialized and industrializing societies. Unknown to much of the world, Longmen and its mesmerizing modern history takes readers to the heartland of China, known as “Chinese Babylon” a century ago. With remarkable depth and breadth, this book unravels both a bygone and a continuing human pursuit of artefacts—shared, spiritual, modern, and above all beautiful that have linked so many lives, Chinese and foreign.

Author : Xiran Jay Zhao
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2022-05-10
Category : Juvenile Fiction
ISBN : 9781665900720

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Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor by Xiran Jay Zhao Pdf

Percy Jackson meets Tristan Strong in this hilarious middle grade “edge-of-your-seat adventure” (James Ponti, New York Times bestselling author of City Spies) that follows a young boy as he journeys across China to seal the underworld shut and save the mortal realm. Zachary Ying never had many opportunities to learn about his Chinese heritage. His single mom was busy enough making sure they got by, and his schools never taught anything except Western history and myths. So Zack is woefully unprepared when he discovers he was born to host the spirit of the First Emperor of China for a vital mission: sealing the leaking portal to the Chinese underworld before the upcoming Ghost Month blows it wide open. The mission takes an immediate wrong turn when the First Emperor botches his attempt to possess Zack’s body and binds to Zack’s AR gaming headset instead, leading to a battle where Zack’s mom’s soul gets taken by demons. Now, with one of history’s most infamous tyrants yapping in his headset, Zack must journey across China to heist magical artifacts and defeat figures from history and myth, all while learning to wield the emperor’s incredible water dragon powers. And if Zack can’t finish the mission in time, the spirits of the underworld will flood into the mortal realm, and he could lose his mom forever.

Author : Kidder Smith,Mike Zhai
Publisher : punctum books
Page : 501 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2021-03-25
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781953035424

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Li Bo Unkempt by Kidder Smith,Mike Zhai Pdf