Xinjiao Can Tiantai Wutai shan ji -The Record of a Pilgrimage to the Tiantai and Wutai Mountains, Newly Edited, by Jōjin, edited by Wang Liping. Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 2009

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-73
Author(s):  
Robert Borgen
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Laura Harrington

Mañjuśrī (“Gentle Glory”) is one of the oldest and most significant bodhisattvas of the Indian Mahāyāna Buddhist pantheon. Mañjuśrī is the personification of the Mahāyāna notion of prajñā (wisdom): discriminating insight into the nature of reality, and the hallmark philosophical insight that distinguished the Mahāyāna movement from earlier Buddhist schools (Nikāya) of thought. Like discriminating insight, Mañjuśrī is ever new. He is typically portrayed as a golden-complexioned, sixteen-year-old crown prince holding in one hand a flaming sword that cuts through ignorance, and a Perfection of Prajñā book (Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra) in the other. In Mahāyāna sutras, Mañjuśrī is often cast as the interlocutor whose pointed questions to the buddha elicit the teachings their audience needs to finally understand the subtlest points of doctrine. His earliest known appearance is in the corpus of early Mahāyāna works translated into Chinese by the Indo-Scythian monk Lokakṣema (b. 147 ce). In these, the vivid contrast between Mañjuśrī as wonder-working bodhisattva and the slower-witted Nikāya monks implicitly legitimates the early emerging Mahāyāna movement; clearly, Mañjuśrī’s insight into reality is superior even to that of the disciples who sat at Śākyamuni Buddha’s feet and heard him teach. This rhetorical strategy was developed in subsequent Indian Buddhist sūtras and commentaries, especially those that promulgated new or controversial teachings. Scholars from all of its schools claimed direct visions of the bodhisattva of wisdom; “to see Mañjuśrī” denoted the subject’s unmistaken insight into the buddha’s teaching. Mañjuśrī worship entered esoteric Buddhism (Tantra) in the 7th-century Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa—one of the earliest extant Indian Tantras—and reached its zenith in the early 8th-century Mañjuśrīnāmasaṃgīti, a liturgical text praising Mañjuśrī in all his forms. Its close association with the 10th-century Kālacakra Tantra, perhaps the last Tantric text to be composed in India, underscores how thoroughly Mañjuśrī pervaded esoteric Buddhism in South Asia. As a figure of cult worship, Mañjuśrī was most prominent outside of India. By the 5th century, the Chinese Wutai shan (“Five Terrace Mountain”) was understood to be his earthly residence, and a magnet for pilgrims who sought a vision of the crown prince. Mañjuśrī became identified as the patron deity of China during the Tang dynasty, thereby setting a pattern for subsequent rulers of China, who often linked their own legitimacy to Mañjuśrī, and visibly promoted his worship at Wutai shan. This practice crystallized during the long reign of the Manchus (1611–1912), who not only portrayed their rulers as emanations of the crown prince, but fostered the folk etymology of their ethnonym as deriving from Mañjuśrī. Tibetan Buddhism was at its apex there, and Mañjuśrī and his mountain home become important to Tibetans, Nepalese, Khotanese, and Mongols.


Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 2335
Author(s):  
Feng Gao ◽  
Yunpeng Wang ◽  
Xiaoling Chen ◽  
Wenfu Yang

Changes in rainfall play an important role in agricultural production, water supply and management, and social and economic development in arid and semi-arid regions. The objective of this study was to examine the trend of rainfall series from 18 meteorological stations for monthly, seasonal, and annual scales in Shanxi province over the period 1957–2019. The Mann–Kendall (MK) test, Spearman’s Rho (SR) test, and the Revised Mann–Kendall (RMK) test were used to identify the trends. Sen’s slope estimator (SSE) was used to estimate the magnitude of the rainfall trend. An autocorrelation function (ACF) plot was used to examine the autocorrelation coefficients at various lags in order to improve the trend analysis by the application of the RMK test. The results indicate remarkable differences with positive and negative trends (significant or non-significant) depending on stations. The largest number of stations showing decreasing trends occurred in March, with 10 out of 18 stations at the 10%, 5%, and 1% levels. Wutai Shan station has strong negative trends in January, March, April, November, and December at the level of 1%. In addition, Wutai Shan station also experienced a significant decreasing trend over four seasons at a significance level of 1% and 10%. On the annual scale, there was no significant trend detected by the three identification methods for most stations. MK and SR tests have similar power for detecting monotonic trends in rainfall time series data. Although similar results were obtained by the MK/SR and RMK tests in this study, in some cases, unreasonable trends may be provided by the RMK test. The findings of this study could benefit agricultural production activities, water supply and management, drought monitoring, and socioeconomic development in Shanxi province in the future.


2019 ◽  
Vol 320 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
YanJing Chen ◽  
WeiYu Chen ◽  
QiuGen Li ◽  
M. Santosh ◽  
JianRong Li
Keyword(s):  

1921 ◽  
Vol 58 (7) ◽  
pp. 324-329
Author(s):  
J. S. Lee

When Richthofen journeyed in the Wutai district, Shan-si, he found a mighty sequence of metamorphosed sedimentary strata which could not be classed as his Sinian or any series younger than the Sinian, nor could it be regarded as belonging to the Old Gneiss and Gneiss-granite group. They are apparently equivalent to similar strata occurring in eastern Shan-tung and Liao-tung. In descending the Wutai-shan along its southern flank, Richthofen first came across a thick series of green schists with alternating beds of grey slates and quartzites, and then several series of coarse quartzitic and felspathic well-stratified rocks, aggregating to a thickness of more than 5,900 feet. He calls the whole sequence of these strata the “Wutai Formation”, and parallels it with the Huronian. This term at once found a wide application in Chinese geology. Thus in the western Tsing-ling Range, south of Lioyang-hsien (about long. 106° E., lat. 33° 25′ N.), and in the high mountains west of Ta-tsien-lu (about long. 102° 10′ E., lat. 30° N.), Loczy distinguishes a series of highly metamorphosed sedimentary rocks, such as gneiss, schists, phyllites, crystalline limestone, etc., and assigns it to the Wutai Formation. The “Nan-shan Sandstone”a series of unfossiliferous grey and green sandstones with well-cleaved or even schistose clayslates, typically developed in the northern foothills of the Nan-shan Ranges—is also tentatively regarded by the same author as a Wutai Formation. Between Ping-liang and Men-chou, in the province of Kan-su, Futterer identified in several places the Nan-shan Sandstone, and found other metamorphosed sedimentary strata of the Wutai Formation, consisting of chlorite-schist, coarse-grained quartzite, slate, and graywacke. In all these cases the term Wutai evidently implies the analogy with the Algonkian of North America.


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