Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire PDF Download

Author: Liang Cai
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438448511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This document, which is intended as a handbook for individuals who have been appointed to positions in United States (U.S.) governments, is a lengthy essay on understanding and fulfilling the responsibilities associated with accepting a position of leadership. The following are among the topics discussed in chapters 1-6: (1) joining the "governing class" (definition of the term "governing class," the U.S. system of government, the academic view, types of "inners" and "outers," the ethics of influence); (2) becoming and being a leader (selecting a political party, being political, demonstrating loyalty); (3) team building (B and A teams, subcabinets); (4) making policy (the budget process, the "planning-programming-budgeting" system, where new ideas originate); (5) policy implementation (implementation as exploration, advice for policy managers, strategies that work, and accountability); and (6) dealing with the media. Chapter 7 contains the following suggestions for appointed government officials: (1) remember that leaders are role models; (2) care about partnership; (3) always remember the hyperpluralism of the U.S. government and the great barrier reef of federalism, which can wreck voyages to accomplishment; (4) cultivate the press; (5) be careful about confidences; (6) be careful about jokes; (7) pace yourself; (8) be consistent; and (9) think about your future. (MN)

Author: Patrick Gray
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199359725
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Religious controversies frequently focus on origins, and at the origins of the major religious traditions one typically finds a seminal figure. Names such as Jesus, Muhammad, Confucius, and Moses are well known, yet their status as 'founders' has not gone uncontested. The aim of this book is to consider the subtexts of debates about these 'founders' as an exercise in comparative religion. As the contributors survey the landscape shaped by questions within each tradition, they provide an opportunity to map their contours from a novel perspective.

Author: N. Harry Rothschild
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824867823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China presents a rogues’ gallery of treacherous regicides, impious monks, cutthroat underlings, ill-bred offspring, and disloyal officials. It plumbs the dark matter of the human condition, placing front and center transgressive individuals and groups traditionally demonized by Confucian annalists and largely shunned by modern scholars. The work endeavors to apprehend the actions and motivations of these men and women, whose conduct deviated from normative social, cultural, and religious expectations. Early chapters examine how core Confucian bonds such as those between parents and children, and ruler and minister, were compromised, even severed. The living did not always reverently pay homage to the dead, children did not honor their parents with due filiality, a decorous distance was not necessarily observed between sons and stepmothers, and subjects often pursued their own interests before those of the ruler or the state. The elasticity of ritual and social norms is explored: Chapters on brazen Eastern Han (25–220) mourners and deviant calligraphers, audacious falconers, volatile Tang (618–907) Buddhist monks, and drunken Song (960–1279) literati reveal social norms treated not as universal truths but as debated questions of taste wherein political and social expedience both determined and highlighted individual roles within larger social structures and defined what was and was not aberrant. A Confucian predilection to “valorize [the] civil and disparage the martial” and Buddhist proscriptions on killing led literati and monks alike to condemn the cruelty and chaos of war. The book scrutinizes cultural attitudes toward military action and warfare, including those surrounding the bloody and capricious world of the Zuozhuan (Chronicle of Zuo), the relentless violence of the Five Dynasties and Ten States periods (907–979), and the exploits of Tang warrior priests—a series of studies that complicates the rhetoric by situating it within the turbulent realities of the times. By the end of this volume, readers will come away with the understanding that behaving badly in early and medieval China was not about morality but perspective, politics, and power.

Author: Robert L. Chard
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004465316
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This book presents extensive primary sources to reveal how Confucians in Early China parlay their knowledge of ritual into political power, from the ancient aristocratic culture of the Spring and Autumn era to the state religion of the Han empire.

Author:
Publisher: 聯合電子出版有限公司（代理）
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Zhao Lu
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438474911
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Examines the Great Peace (taiping), one of the first utopian visions in Chinese history, and its impact on literati lives in Han China. Through an examination of the Great Peace (taiping), one of the first utopian visions in Chinese history, Zhao Lu describes the transformation of literati culture that occurred during the Han Dynasty. Driven by anxiety over losing the mandate of Heaven, the imperial court encouraged classicism in order to establish the Great Peace and follow Heaven’s will. But instead of treating the literati as puppets of competing and imagined lineages, Zhao uses sociological methods to reconstruct their daily lives and to show how they created their own thought by adopting, modifying, and opposing the work of their contemporaries and predecessors. The literati who served as bureaucrats in the first century BCE gradually became classicists who depended on social networking as they traveled to study the classics. By the second century CE, classicism had dissolved in this traveling culture and the literati began to expand the corpus of knowledge beyond the accepted canon. Thus, far from being static, classicism in Han China was full of innovation, and ultimately gave birth to both literary writing and religious Daoism. “Zhao’s study presents a model of intellectual history. Smartly written, it excels in connecting the analysis of specific texts and concepts with broader trends in the social-political realm. His work helps demythologize Chinese thought and makes it legible to scholars around the world.” — Miranda Brown, University of Michigan

Author: Wicky W. K. Tse
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131553231X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
In the Later Han period the region covering the modern provinces of Gansu, southern Ningxia, eastern Qinghai, northern Sichuan, and western Shaanxi, was a porous frontier zone between the Chinese regimes and their Central Asian neighbours, not fully incorporated into the Chinese realm until the first century BCE. Not surprisingly the region had a large concentration of men of martial background, from which a regional culture characterized by warrior spirit and skills prevailed. This military elite was generally honoured by the imperial centre, but during the Later Han period the ascendancy of eastern-based scholar-officials and the consequent increased emphasis on civil values and de-militarization fundamentally transformed the attitude of the imperial state towards the northwestern frontiersmen, leaving them struggling to achieve high political and social status. From the ensuing tensions and resentment followed the capture of the imperial capital by a northwestern military force, the deposing of the emperor and the installation of a new one, which triggered the disintegration of the empire. Based on extensive original research, and combining cultural, military and political history, this book examines fully the forging of military regional identity in the northwest borderlands and the consequences of this for the early Chinese empires.

Author: Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108911609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
In this major new study, Mark Edward Lewis traces how the changing language of honor and shame helped to articulate and justify transformations in Chinese society between the Warring States and the end of the Han dynasty. Through careful examination of a wide variety of texts, he demonstrates how honor-shame discourse justified the actions of diverse and potentially rival groups. Over centuries, the formally recognized political order came to be intertwined with groups articulating alternative models of honor. These groups both participated in the existing order and, through their own visions of what was truly honourable, paved the way for subsequent political structures. Filling a major lacuna in the study of early China, Lewis presents ways in which the early Chinese empires can be fruitfully considered in comparative context and develops a more systematic understanding of the fundamental role of honor/shame in shaping states and societies.

Author: Xiaoye You
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 080933898X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
A decolonial reading of Han Dynasty rhetoric reveals the logics and networks that governed early imperial China In Genre Networks and Empire, Xiaoye You integrates a decolonial and transnational approach to construct a rhetorical history of early imperial China. You centers ancient Chinese rhetoric by focusing on how an imperial matrix of power was established in the Han Dynasty through genres of rhetoric and their embodied circulation, and through epistemic constructs such as the Way, heaven, ritual, and yin-yang. Through the concept of genre networks, derived from both ancient Chinese and Western scholarship, You unlocks the mechanisms of early Chinese imperial bureaucracy and maps their far-reaching influence. He considers the communication of governance, political issues, court consultations, and the regulation of the inner quarters of empire. He closely reads debates among government officials, providing insight into their efforts to govern and legitimize the regime and their embodiment of different schools of thought. Genre Networks and Empire embraces a variety of rhetorical forms, from edicts, exam essays, and commentaries to instruction manuals and memorials. It captures a range of literary styles serving the rhetorical purposes of praise and criticism. In the context of court documentation, these genre networks reflect systems of words in motion, mediated governmental decisions and acts, and forms of governmental logic, strategy, and reason. A committed work of decolonial scholarship, Genre Networks and Empire shows, through Chinese words and writing, how the ruling elites of Han China forged a linguistic matrix of power, a book that bears implications for studies of rhetoric and empire in general.

Author: Paul R. Goldin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317681916
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 726

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Book Description
The study of early China has been radically transformed over the past fifty years by archaeological discoveries, including both textual and non-textual artefacts. Excavations of settlements and tombs have demonstrated that most people did not lead their lives in accordance with ritual canons, while previously unknown documents have shown that most received histories were written retrospectively by victors and present a correspondingly anachronistic perspective. This handbook provides an authoritative survey of the major periods of Chinese history from the Neolithic era to the fall of the Latter Han Empire and the end of antiquity (AD 220). It is the first volume to include not only a comprehensive review of political history but also detailed treatments of topics that transcend particular historical periods, such as: Warfare and political thought Cities and agriculture Language and art Medicine and mathematics Providing a detailed analysis of the most up-to-date research by leading scholars in the field of early Chinese history, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese history, Asian archaeology, and Chinese studies in general.