A study of how to read and use each page of the Traditional Chinese Almanac, the Tung Shu

A volume exploring the history of medicine across continents and countries from ancient to modern times, examining the changing systems of medicine in Eastern and Western traditions, comparing alternative medical practices, and introducing readers to how historians have captured the multiple approaches to healing adopted by different cultures.

Ebbs and Flows of Ancient Imperial Power, 3000 BC-AD 900 provides a flow of history throughout the ancient world, describing the ebbs and flows of empires and their power. Author Will Slatyer presents empires in China and India in the same timeframes as Mediterranean empires to show patterns of similarity. During ancient times, wars were a vital part of power-building, focusing on gaining territory and wealth for ancient priests and kings who evolved into imperial leaders with absolute power. Religion was an important factor in allowing the popular power of leaders--until contamination of foreign religions diluted their authority. the financial evolution had its origins in the weights of precious metals owned by temples, which were then converted into gold and silver coins that could be used for retail purchases and to pay individual taxes. When governments took full control of the minting of coins, they also commenced the debasement of the value of money that continues to the present day. Ebbs and Flows of Ancient Imperial Power, 3000 BC-AD 900 shows that fear and greed experienced by the priest, kings, pharaohs, and emperors of ancient times have not changed from the fear and greed of modern leaders. Much can be learned from an overview of historic empires.

A five-volume translation of the classic sixteenth-century Chinese novel on the domestic life of a corrupt merchant

The third volume of a celebrated translation of the classic Chinese novel This is the third volume in David Roy's celebrated translation of one of the most famous and important novels in Chinese literature. The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei is an anonymous sixteenth-century work that focuses on the domestic life of Hsi-men Ch’ing, a corrupt, upwardly mobile merchant in a provincial town, who maintains a harem of six wives and concubines. The novel, known primarily for its erotic realism, is also a landmark in the development of the narrative art form—not only from a specifically Chinese perspective but in a world-historical context. Written during the second half of the sixteenth century and first published in 1618, The Plum in the Golden Vase is noted for its surprisingly modern technique. With the possible exception of The Tale of Genji (ca. 1010) and Don Quixote (1605, 1615), there is no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature. Although its importance in the history of Chinese narrative has long been recognized, the technical virtuosity of the author, which is more reminiscent of the Dickens of Bleak House, the Joyce of Ulysses, or the Nabokov of Lolita than anything in earlier Chinese fiction, has not yet received adequate recognition. This is partly because all of the existing European translations are either abridged or based on an inferior recension of the text. This translation and its annotation aim to faithfully represent and elucidate all the rhetorical features of the original in its most authentic form and thereby enable the Western reader to appreciate this Chinese masterpiece at its true worth. Replete with convincing portrayals of the darker side of human nature, it should appeal to anyone interested in a compelling story, compellingly told.

Feng Shui, the art of Wind and Water, emerged 3,000 years ago in China and gradually evolved over time as new theories and new models were introduced. While its development was driven by the primary needs of survival and defence, it would later be enhanced with concepts relating to culture, philosophy, the climate and the territory. Thanks to the work of Pierfrancesco Ros’ Accademia Italiana di Architettura Feng Shui, Feng Shui has been further expanded with ancient and modern knowledge relating to environmental well-being. Feng Shui Architecture offers the reader project guidelines for use in town planning, architecture, interior design and ecodesign. The first volume examines the key issues of the earth way and the sky way. The second and final volume, produced with the contribution of the Accademia di Psico Architettura, looks at the man way, establishing a global approach to various types of environmental analysis and design for a complete understanding of Holistic Architecture.

Numbers are an important feature of almost all known cultures. In this detailed anthropological study, Thomas Crump examines how people from a wide range of diverse cultures, and from different historical backgrounds, use and understand numbers. By looking at the logical, psychological and linguistic implications, he analyses how numbers operate within different contexts. The author goes on to consider the relationship of numbers to specific themes, such as ethnoscience, politics, measurement, time, money, music, games and architecture. The Anthropology of Numbers is an original contribution to scholarship, written in a clear and accessible style. It will be of interest to anthropologists who study cognition, symbolism, primitive thought and classification, and to those in adjacent disciplines of psychology, cognitive science and mathematical social science.

A five-volume translation of the classic sixteenth-century Chinese novel on the domestic life of a corrupt merchant.

The Poetics of Emptiness uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. This conceptual migration is detailed in two sections. The first focuses on "transpacific Buddhist poetics," while the second maps the less well-known terrain of "transpacific Daoist poetics." In Chapters 1 and 2, the author explores Ernest Fenollosa's "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry" as an expression of Fenollosa's distinctly Buddhist poetics informed by a two-decade-long encounter with a culturally hybrid form of Buddhism known as Shin Bukkyo ("New Buddhism"). Chapter 2 explores the classical Chinese poetics that undergirds the lost half of Fenellosa's essay. Chapter 3 concludes the first half of the book with an exploration of the didactic and soteriological function of "emptiness" in Gary Snyder's influential poetry and poetics. The second half begins with a critical exploration of the three-decades-long career of the poet/translator/critic Wai-lim Yip, whose "transpacific Daoist poetics" has been an important fixture in American poetic late modernism and has begun to gain wider notoriety in China. The last chapter engages the intertextual weave of poststructural thought and Daoist and shamanistic discourses in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's important body of heterocultural productions. By formulating interpretive frames as hybrid as the texts being read, this book makes available one of the most important yet still largely unknown stories of American poetry and poetics.