These translations of The Precious Scroll of the Three Lives of Mulian and Woman Huang Recites the Diamond Sutra are late-nineteenth-century examples of baojuan (literally, "precious scrolls"), a Chinese folk genre featuring alternating verse and prose that was used by monks to illustrate religious precepts for lay listeners. They represent only two of numerous versions, composed in a variety of genres, of these legends, which were once popular all over China. While the seeds of the Mulian legend, in which a man rescues his mother from hell, can be found in Indian Buddhist texts, the story of Woman Huang, who seeks her own salvation, appears to be indigenous to China. With their graphic portrayals of the underworld; dramatization of Buddhist beliefs about death, salvation, and rebirth; and frank discussion of women's responsibility for sin, these texts provide detailed and powerful descriptions of popular religious beliefs and practices in late imperial China, especially as they relate to women.

This book employs a broad analysis of Chinese patriliny to propose a distinctive theoretical conceptualization of the role of desire in culture. It utilizes a unique synthesis of Marxian and psychoanalytic insights in arguing that Chinese patriliny is best understood as, simultaneously, “a mode of production of desire” and as “instituted fantasy.” The argument advances through discussions and analyses of kinship, family, gender, filial piety, ritual, and (especially) mythic narratives. In each of these domains, P. Steven Sangren addresses the complex sentiments and ambivalences associated with filial relations. Unlike most earlier studies which approach Chinese patriliny and filial piety as irreducible markers of cultural difference, Sangren argues that Chinese patriliny is better approached as a topic of critical inquiry in its own right.

This book offers a thorough investigation of the recent surge of webtoons and manga/animation as the sources of transmedia storytelling for popular culture, not only in East Asia but in the wider global context. An international team of experts employ a unique theoretical framework of media convergence supported by transmedia storytelling, alongside historical and textual analyses, to examine the ways in which webtoons and anime become some of the major sources for transmedia storytelling. The book historicizes the evolution of regional popular culture according to the surrounding digital media ecology, driving the change and continuity of the manhwa industry over the past 15 years, and discusses whether cultural products utilizing transmedia storytelling take a major role as the primary local cultural product in the cultural market. Offering new perspectives on current debates surrounding transmedia storytelling in the cultural industries, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of media studies, East Asian studies and cultural studies.

Civil society groups can strengthen an autocratic state's coercive capacity, helping to suppress dissent and implement far-reaching policies.

Covering the historical, social, political, and cultural contexts, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy and Gender presents a comprehensive overview of the complexity of gender disparity in Chinese thought and culture. Divided into four main sections, an international group of experts in Chinese Studies write on Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist approaches to gender relations. Each section includes a general introduction, a set of authoritative articles written by leading scholars and comprehensive bibliographies, designed to provide the non-specialist with a practical and broad overview. Beginning with the Ancient and Medieval period before moving on to Modern and Contemporary approaches, specially commissioned chapters include Pre-Qin canonical texts, women in early Chinese ethics, the yin-yang gender dynamic and the Buddhist understanding of the conception of gender. Considering why the philosophy of women and gender dynamics in Chinese thought is rarely confronted, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Chinese Philosophy and Gender is a pioneering cross-disciplinary introduction to Chinese philosophy's intersection with gender studies. By bridging the fields of Chinese philosophy, religion, intellectual history, feminism, and gender studies, this cutting-edge volume fills a great need in the current literature on Chinese philosophy and provides student and scholars with an invaluable research resource to a growing field.

Scholarly interest in print culture and in the study of religion in modern China has increased in recent years, propelled by maturing approaches to the study of cultural history and by a growing recognition that both were important elements of China's recent past. The influence of China in the contemporary world continues to expand, and with it has come an urgent need to understand the processes by which its modern history was made. Issues of religious freedom and of religion's influence on the public sphere continue to be contentious but important subjects of scholarly work, and the role of print and textual media has not dimmed with the advent of electronic communication. This book, Religious Publishing and Print Culture in Modern China 1800-2012, speaks to these contemporary and historical issues by bringing to light the important and abiding connections between religious development and modern print culture in China. Bringing together these two subjects has a great deal of potential for producing insights that will appeal to scholars working in a range of fields, from media studies to social historians. Each chapter demonstrates how focusing on the role of publishing among religious groups in modern China generates new insights and raises new questions. They examine how religious actors understood the role of printed texts in religion, dealt with issues of translation and exegesis, produced print media that heralded social and ideological changes, and expressed new self-understandings in their published works. They also address the impact of new technologies, such as mechanized movable type and lithographic presses, in the production and meaning of religious texts. Finally, the chapters identify where religious print culture crossed confessional lines, connecting religious traditions through links of shared textual genres, commercial publishing companies, and the contributions of individual editors and authors. This book thus demonstrates how, in embracing modern print media and building upon their longstanding traditional print cultures, Christian, Buddhist, Daoist, and popular religious groups were developed and defined in modern China. While the chapter authors are specialists in religious traditions, they have made use of recent studies into publishing and print culture, and like many of the subjects of their research, are able to make connections across religious boundaries and link together seemingly discrete traditions.

This important study provides the only comprehensive survey of Chinese women during the early medieval period of disunion, which lasted from the fall of the Eastern Han dynasty in 220 AD to the reunification of China by the Sui dynasty in 581 AD, also known as the Six Dynasties. Bret Hinsch offers rich descriptions of the most important aspects of female life in this era, including family and marriage, motherhood, political power, work, inheritance, education, and religious roles. He traces women’s lived experiences as well as the emotional life and the ideals they pursued. Building on the best Western and Japanese scholarship, Hinsch also draws heavily on Chinese primary sources and scholarship, most of which is unknown outside China. As the first study in English about women in the early medieval era, this groundbreaking book will open a new window into Chinese history for Western readers.

Where are the dead? What are they doing? What kind of a process is dying? What relationships exist among the dead themselves, and between the dead and those in the world they have left behind? Modern philosophers argue that the idea of disembodied survival - to which many believers pay lip service - is incoherent, and that there can be evidence neither for nor against something incoherent. By contrast, this book argues, the idea of an embodied survival (albeit a form of embodiment differing from our present embodiment) makes perfect sense in itself and fits much better with the alleged evidence for post-mortem survival. Exploring post-mortem survival, Where are the Dead? uses a variety of empirical data, alongside mythological, legendary and purely fictional material, to illustrate how the less familiar idea of embodied post-mortem survival might actually ’work’ in some real afterlife environment. By asking questions about the nature and whereabouts of the afterlife, and about what it might be like to be dead, the book explores themes nowadays relatively neglected even in disciplines explicitly concerned with ideas about death, dying and life after death.

The voices of three female Zen masters reverberate in this much-needed collection. Too often the history of Zen seems to be written as an unbroken masculine line: male teacher to male student. In this timely volume, Beata Grant shows us that women masters do exist—and have always existed. Zen Echoes is a collection of classic koans from Zen’s Chinese history that were first collected and commented on by Miaozong, a twelfth-century nun so adept that her teacher, the legendary Dahui Zonggao, used to tell other students that perhaps if they practiced hard enough, they might be as realized as her. Nearly five hundred years later, the seventeenth-century nuns Baochi and Zukui added their own commentaries to the collection. The three voices—distinct yet harmonious—remind us that enlightenment is at once universal and individual. In her introduction to this shimmering translation, Professor Grant tells us that the verses composed by these women provide evidence that “in a religious milieu made up overwhelmingly of men, there were women who were just as dedicated to Chan practice, just as advanced in their spiritual realization, and just as gifted at using language to convey that which is beyond language.”

Foundational theories of epistemic justice, such as Miranda Fricker's, have cited literary narratives to support their case. But why have those narratives in particular provided the resource that was needed? And is cultural production always supportive of epistemic justice? This essay collection, written by experts in literary, philosophical, and cultural studies working in conversation with each other across a range of global contexts, expands the emerging field of epistemic injustice studies. The essays analyze the complex relationship between narrative, aesthetics, and epistemic (in)justice, referencing texts, film, and other forms of cultural production. The authors present, without seeking to synthesize, perspectives on how justice and injustice are narratively and aesthetically produced. This volume by no means wants to say the last word on epistemic justice and creative agency. The intention is to open out a productive new field of study, at a time when understanding the workings of injustice and possibilities for justice seems an ever more urgent project.