Exorcising the Body Politic

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew King
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Therapeutic Intervention ◽  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Military Leader ◽  
The Song Dynasty ◽  
Eastern Tibet

This study examines thirteenth to twentieth century Tibetan and Mongolian monastic memorializations of the bodily violence enacted upon Köten Ejen at the center of the “Buddhist conversion of the Mongols.” Koten Ejen (Tib. Lha sras go tan rgyal po, 1206–1251) was Chinggis Khan’s grandson and a military leader involved in Mongol campaigns against the Song Dynasty and against Buddhist monasteries in eastern Tibet. In 1240, Koten famously summoned the Central Tibetan Buddhist polymath Sakya Pandita, by then already an old man, to his court at Liangzhou. Examining Tibetan and Mongolian accounts about their meeting from the last seven centuries, this study shows that it was neither compelling philosophy nor some turn of faith that converted the Mongols. It was, rather, Sakya Pandita’s violent therapeutic intervention into the space of Koten’s ill body that wrenched the Mongol body politic into the Dharmic fold.

Core Texts of the Sŏn Approach

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Broughton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Song Dynasty ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
The West ◽  
Mental Operation ◽  
The Song Dynasty ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Partial Translation

The book is a study and partial translation of Core Texts of the Sŏn Approach (Sŏnmun ch’waryo), a Korean anthology of key texts foundational to Korean Sŏn (Chan/Zen) Buddhism. This anthology provides a convenient entrée to two fundamental themes of Korean Sŏn: Sŏn vis-à-vis the doctrinal teachings (in which Sŏn is shown to be superior); and the huatou (Korean hwadu) method of practice-work popularized by the Song dynasty Chan master Dahui Zonggao (1089–1163). This method consists of “lifting to awareness” or “keeping an eye on” the huatou or phrase, usually the word wu無‎/No (Korean mu). No mental operation whatsoever is to be performed upon the huatou. The practitioner simply lifts the huatou to awareness constantly, twenty-four hours a day. Core Texts of the Sŏn Approach, which was published in Korea during the first decade of the twentieth century, attempts to encapsulate the entire Korean Sŏn tradition in one convenient volume (and thus functions as a sort of vade mecum). It contains eight Chan texts by Chinese authors and seven Sŏn texts by Korean authors, showing the organic relationship between the parent Chinese Chan tradition and its heir Korean Sŏn. Due to the circumstances of modern East Asian history, Korean Sŏn is much less well-known in the West than Japanese Zen. This book will give readers access to a broad sweep of texts of the Korean branch of this school of East Asian Buddhism.

Nourishing Life, Cultivation and Material Culture in the Late Ming: Some Thoughts on Zunsheng bajian (Eight Discourses on Respecting Life, 1591)

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chen Hsiu-fen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
The Song Dynasty ◽  
Late Ming

AbstractThis article sets out to explore the ideas and practices of yangsheng (nourishing life or health preservation) in the late Ming, i.e. late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century China. Yangsheng had long played a key role in the traditions of Chinese medicine, religions and court societies. Initially restricted to certain social classes and milieux, knowledge of yangsheng began to spread much more widely from the Song dynasty (960–1279) onwards, mostly owing to rapid social and economic change. In this context, the theories and practices of yangsheng attracted the attention and curiosity of many scholars. The popularisation of yangsheng peaked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Numerous literary works, essay collections and household encyclopaedias for everyday use have passages and sections on yangsheng. They describe various ideas and techniques of yangsheng by means of regulating the body in daily life, involving sleeping, exercising, washing, eating, drinking, etc. Through a survey of the most famous late Ming work on yangsheng, Zunsheng bajian (1591), this article attempts to highlight how yangsheng came to dominate the scholarly lifestyle. It will give a clear picture of the ideas of a late Ming literatus on prolonging life and replenishing the body, while showing how these practices were inspired by the flourishing material culture of the late Ming as a whole.

The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia: Observations on the Commentaries by Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg

Slavic Review ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 512-517
Author(s):  
Leopold h. Haimson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Revolution

Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg have greatly contributed by their respective commentaries to broadening the scope of the issues addressed in my discussion of “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia” (see Slavic Review [Spring 1988]: 1-20). They have also helped bring out the complexity of the processes involved, after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, in the shaping and reshaping of the representations that individuals and groups entertained of themselves, of one another, and of the body politic as a whole.

“The Crusade Is Now Begun in Philadelphia”: Municipal Reformers, Southern Moderates, and African American Politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-168
Author(s):  
Julie Davidow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Corruption ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The Body ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Political Machine ◽  
Full Participation

As the twentieth century dawned, social and political reformers increasingly identified the growing black population in Philadelphia as an important underpinning of the city’s corrupt Republican political machine. This article explores the ways in which Philadelphia’s urban political corruption narrative, with its pointed attacks on black partisanship and electoral participation, developed in dialogue with white southerners’ campaigns to frame Reconstruction as a perversion of democracy. Rather than simply solidifying Jim Crow in the South, northern reformers and southern moderates borrowed from each other to shape and articulate an emerging national consensus that African Americans were unfit for full participation in the body politic.

New Frankensteins; or, the Body Politic

2017 ◽  
pp. 195-207
Author(s):  
Timothy C. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gothic Novels

In the introduction to his 2001 anthology of ‘New Scottish Gothic Fiction’, Alan Bissett argues that Gothic ‘has always acted as a way of re-examining the past, and the past is the place where Scotland, a country obsessed with re-examining itself, can view itself whole, vibrant, mythic’ (2001: 6). While virtually every contemporary Scottish author has made use of Gothic elements or tropes in some part of their work, many of the most important recent texts to be labelled ‘Scottish Gothic’ are centrally concerned with such a re-examination of the past. For many authors, however, the past is not to be found in historical events or cultural contexts, but specifically in the interrelation between established Scottish and Gothic literary traditions. Beginning with Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978), one of numerous twentieth-century reworkings of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), many contemporary Gothic novels have explicitly relied on earlier texts; adapting the work of Hogg, Stevenson or even Shelley becomes a way of challenging preconceived notions of stable national and individual identities.

scholarly journals METALLIC ARCHITECTURE OF CHINA IN LATE MIDDLE AGES: TYPOLOGY AND ARTISTRY

2020 ◽  
pp. 12-12
Author(s):  
Ren Nianchen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Song Dynasty ◽  
Analysis Method ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Casting Technique ◽  
The Qing Dynasty ◽  
The Song Dynasty ◽  
Casting Technology ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Architectural Structures

The article considers the use of copper-alloy and iron casting technology in China from the Song dynasty (960–1279 AD) to the Qing dynasty (1644–1912 AD) inclusive. The architectural typology covers cult buildings – Buddhist and Tibetan-Buddhist pagodas, Taoist temples, and secular park pavilions. The specifics of the technology and artistic expressiveness distinguishing Chinese metallic architectural structures are identified based on concrete examples using the formal stylistic method of art analysis and technical analysis method. It is concluded that the metallic architecture did not work out new structural and art forms, the casting technique reproducing the structures and décor of wooden prototypes. This was associated with both the conservatism of visual perception and centuries-long standardized forms of cult and palace architecture. The casting technology potentialities enabled the structural and decorative features of wooden prototypes to be reproduced in every detail.

Bare Life and the Resurrection of the Body

2019 ◽  
pp. 344-364
Author(s):  
Gavin Flood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Life Itself

Vital materialism imbues life with positive value and interfaces with environmentalism. But there is another kind of vitalism in which the political colonizes life in a way that brings into question the value of life itself and brings life into proximity with nihilism. We might call this a dark vitalism, which we see emerging in the European body politic in the twentieth century. While this stream of thought can be read as an attempt to heal the past through creating a utopian and messianic future, it nevertheless negates the values of life and undermines its healing project because fundamentally locked into a form of nihilism, thereby negating life-affirming values. By contrast, spiritual philosophies of life offer a counter-narrative to the dark vitalism that has held such a grip on nations in the last hundred years.

scholarly journals The Persistence of Character in Twentieth-century British Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 002200942092258
Author(s):  
Jeremy Nuttall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Moral Politics ◽  
State Expansion ◽  
Moral Growth

Politicians across parties repeatedly agreed that their visions of social improvement rested as much on the promotion of character virtues as on the efficacy of economic systems. Character posed recurring political dilemmas. Ideological dispute over character, as to whether it is formed best through individual exertion or collective support, lies at the heart of the division of politics between right and left. Further, the limits to the people’s character were seen as a constraint upon social progress. Yet, contrary to much historiography, this is not a story of decline from a supposed Victorian heyday of ‘moral politics’. British politics proved notably adaptive in forging updated, optimistic visions, in which the forces of modernity which might have seemed to threaten the moral calibre of the body politic, or of society, whether democracy, state expansion, or, later, ‘individualism’, were recast instead as supportive foundations for the people’s moral growth. If the century has seen a steadily ‘quieter’, less loudly moralizing, more nurturing approach to the encouragement of character, this reflected a growth in the sophistication of the method of advancing character, not a decline in either the political importance accorded to it, or the people’s possession of it.

Poetic Hells and Pacific Edens

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Fulford
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Poetry ◽  
Proper Role ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Long Poems ◽  
Rival Models ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Abstract The subject of this article is the vicious public dispute between Southey and Byron—the well-known argument that centred on the two poets’ Visions of Judgment. Precipitated by Southey’s call for censorship of immoral literature and punishment of “Satanic” authors, the dispute was won—according to twentieth-century critics—by Byron, whose devastating parody undermined the credibility of Southey’s political poetry. It has long been understood that the dispute was about more than personal enmity, that what was in question was literature’s relationship to power and its proper role in the body politic. What has received less attention is the fact that the dispute concerned not only the domestic scene (literature’s relationship to Church and State in Britain) but also the widening sphere of empire. It is my intention to focus on the imperial sphere in what follows so as to reveal that Southey and Byron were arguing in and for a new context. They were setting out rival models of colonialist and Orientalist poetry for an age in which empire was being expanded and imperialism redefined. These models include two long poems that scholars have hitherto failed to relate to the poets’ dispute—Byron’s The Island (1823) and Southey’s Tale of Paraguay (1825). Both these poems look different when we understand their place in the poets’ contest to make their own colonialist representations of native peoples prevail over the hearts and minds of the British public.

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