Unusual Sculptures of Buddhist Deities in Japan in the Halo of Legends and Historical Facts

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 72-81
Author(s):  
Yurii L. Kuzhel ◽  
Tatiana I. Breslavets

Diverse, unusual images of Buddhist deities are ubiquitous in Japan. In a number of ways, they differ from traditional temple images, demonstrating a deviation from the canon, which dictates certain, centuries-old norms and rules regarding postures, position of feet, fingers, gestures, symbols. Simplification of expressive means, a stylized image become the predominant features in the image of extraordinary images. The appearance of unusual Buddhist sculptures in the plastic field of the country is often associated with the existence of legends, traditions, and also facts that took place throughout the history of Japan among the population. The iconography of unusual Buddhas is very diverse and encompasses both the Buddhas themselves and the bodhisattvas, Kings of Light, Heavenly Kings, and so on. Six-armed Jizō, Rope-tied Jizō, Yata Jizō, Child-giving Jizō are added to the familiar images of the Bodhisattva Jizō. Amida Buddha, who is habitually portrayed as sitting frontally, appears in a new form – standing and in profile or with his head bowed. A very colourful group is represented by deities sitting on zoomorphic thrones – lions, elephants, riding birds – knocked out of the canonical image. The traditional images of the Eleven-headed, Thousand-armed Bodhisattva Kannon always seemed unusual, although they became familiar. However, placing the bodhisattva on a mount bird – a four-legged, eight-headed raven gives reason to consider this sculpture unusual. In unusual sculptures, there is a deviation from the norm, an abstraction from the traditional image. Aesthetic ideals are not realized through a complex of canons, rather through a new figurative language, not yet fixed by tradition.

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wetherell

Every discipline which deals with the land question in Canaan-Palestine-Israel is afflicted by the problem of specialisation. The political scientist and historian usually discuss the issue of land in Israel purely in terms of interethnic and international relations, biblical scholars concentrate on the historical and archaeological question with virtually no reference to ethics, and scholars of human rights usually evade the question of God. What follows is an attempt, through theology and political history, to understand the history of the Israel-Palestine land question in a way which respects the complexity of the question. From a scrutiny of the language used in the Bible to the development of political Zionism from the late 19th century it is possible to see the way in which a secular movement mobilised the figurative language of religion into a literal ‘title deed’ to the land of Palestine signed by God.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-83
Author(s):  
Sorcha De Brún

Abstract The publication of the Irish-language translation of Dracula in 1933 by Seán Ó Cuirrín was a landmark moment in the history of Irish-language letters. This article takes as its starting point the idea that language is a central theme in Dracula. However, the representation of Transylvania in the translation marked a departure from Bram Stoker’s original. A masterful translation, one of its most salient features is Ó Cuirrín’s complex use of the Irish language, particularly in relation to Eastern European language, character, and landscapes. The article examines Ó Cuirrín’s prose and will explore how his approaches to concrete and abstract elements of the novel affect plot, character, and narration. The first section explores how Dracula is treated by Ó Cuirrín in the Irish translation and how this impacts the Count’s persona and his identity as Transylvanian. Through Ó Cuirrín’s use of idiom, alliteration, and proverb, it will be shown how Dracula’s character is reimagined, creating a more nuanced narrative than the original. The second section shows how Ó Cuirrín translates Jonathan Harker’s point of view in relation to Dracula. It shows that, through the use of figurative language, Ó Cuirrín develops the gothic element to Dracula’s character. The article then examines Ó Cuirrín’s translations of Transylvanian landscapes and soundscapes. It will show how Ó Cuirrín’s translation matched Stoker’s original work to near perfection, but with additional poetic techniques, and how Ó Cuirrín created a soundscape of horror throughout the entirety of the translation.


Sociologija ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalibor Petrovic

The aim of the paper is to understand the role of Internet in creating new forms of sociability in the modern society. In the first part the history of social studies of Internet is reviewed, and the conclusion put forward that the anti-social role of the Internet cannot be proved. In the theoretical part of the paper the author presents his idea of two basic roles of Internet as interpersonal interaction tool: transmissional and procreative. These two Internet functions are very important means for reproducing a new form of sociability known as networked individualism.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-492
Author(s):  
J. C. N. Coulston

The paper explores the cultural components of Late Roman military equipment through the examination of specific categories: waist belts, helmets, shields and weaponry. Hellenistic, Roman, Iron Age European, Mesopotamian- Iranian and Asiatic steppe nomad elements all played a part. The conclusion is that the whole history of Roman military equipment involved cultural inclusivity, and specifically that Late Roman equipment development was not some new form of ‘degeneration’ or ‘barbarisation’, but a positive acculturation.


Author(s):  
David Faflik

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.


2021 ◽  
pp. 74-99
Author(s):  
Alison Rice

None of the writers in my study can call French, without hesitation and qualification, a mother tongue. Some of them didn’t start studying the language until they arrived in Paris in their twenties and grappled with learning a new form of expression at a relatively late age. When they recall their initial exposure to this foreign tongue, they describe a fascinating apprenticeship involving dictionaries and renowned works of French literature, and they often shed light on the distinction between oral and written competence in their experience. It is crucial to note that even those authors who have long been fluent in French underscore their non-native relationship to it. Chapter 3 addresses the approaches of these worldwide women writers to French and examines their inventive literary publications in this tongue. It is sensitive to the history of this language and its inextricable connection to a colonial past that many of these writers experienced or became aware of in their homeland. It also focuses on the reality that, for almost all of these authors, this is not the only tongue with which they are familiar. For multilingual individuals, selecting French as their language of literary creation is often the result of a conscious choice motivated by a particular affinity. What comes through in their reflections is most often a passion for this language and a confirmation of the freedom it affords them, as well as an affirmation of its inimitable music that makes it especially well-suited for creative compositions.


1989 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 100-112
Author(s):  
Timothy Rowe

Theropods have traditionally been portrayed as extinct bipedal predators built along the lines of such celebrated terrors as Tyrannosaurus, Deinonychus, and Allosaurus. The earliest theropods indeed fit that image, and all of them are decidedly extinct. However, it has become increasingly apparent that living birds trace their genealogy to those extinct theropods (Ostrom, 1976; Gauthier, 1986; Gauthier and Padian, 1985 and this volume), and that any adequate consideration of the evolutionary history of Theropoda must assess the lineage as a whole, instead of arbitrarily focusing on the Mesozoic forms alone. When the approximately 8,600 living avian descendants of the ancestral theropod are taken into account, together with the various extinct Mesozoic and Cenozoic taxa, theropods display a far greater range of size, form, behavior, and diet than we ever pictured in our traditional image.


2018 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 149-181
Author(s):  
Iwona Cybula

Purpose. This issue attempts to identify “Wędrowiec” [The Wanderer] as a source of knowledge about the history of tourism and to define the editorial team’s approach to this subject. Method. The study covers the information related to tourism in general, its types and development, and promotion among the Polish society published in “Wędrowiec” [The Wanderer] for 44 years when the magazine was being published, i.e. from 1863 until 1906. 2,289 issues of the magazine were published. Historical methodology has been applied. Findings. Analysis of the material led to the conclusion that “Wędrowiec” [The Wanderer] proved to be an appreciated and involved witness of the emergence and development of tourism. For 44 years, the subject was handled with varying levels of intensity. Nevertheless, the publications helped restore the picture of the conditions and problems faced by the tourism of those days. Research limitations and conclusions. Conclusions were based on analysis of the collected source material. An interesting complement would be to compare the collected material with the remaining contents of the magazine (as indicated in the article, topics related to tourism are just a small part of the issues presented in “Wędrowiec” [The Wanderer]). Practical implications. Conclusions from analysis of the collected material are very important for the existing knowledge about the history of tourism in the latter part of the second half of the 19th and early beginnings of the 20th century. Originality. Approaching the subject from the perspective of a specialist magazine and analysis of the collected material included in “Wędrowiec” [The Wanderer] that has not been analysed within the context of the influence it could have on the development and promotion of tourism among the Polish society in the second half of the 19th and the early part of the 20th century. Type of paper. Monographic article.


Author(s):  
Ronny Regev

A history of the Hollywood film industry as a modern system of labor, this book reveals an important untold story of an influential twentieth-century workplace. Ronny Regev argues that the Hollywood studio system institutionalized creative labor by systemizing and standardizing the work of actors, directors, writers, and cinematographers, meshing artistic sensibilities with the efficiency-minded rationale of industrial capitalism. The employees of the studios emerged as a new class: they were wage laborers with enormous salaries, artists subjected to budgets and supervision, stars bound by contracts. As such, these workers—people like Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, and Anita Loos—were the outliers in the American workforce, an extraordinary working class. Through extensive use of oral histories, personal correspondence, studio archives, and the papers of leading Hollywood luminaries as well as their less-known contemporaries, Regev demonstrates that, as part of their contribution to popular culture, Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Warner Bros., and MGM cultivated a new form of labor, one that made work seem like fantasy.


1947 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-413
Author(s):  
A. G. Willis

The present paper records an investigation into a new and unusual suctorian, found epizoic on the cuticle of the Cirripede, Conchoderma aurita. The Cirripede host was obtained from a Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus), in the S. Pacific. The collection was made at the Whaling Factory Ship Southern Empress, by the Whaling Inspector, Commander H. Buckle, and the material was then sent to Britain with the collections of H.M.R.S. Discovery. The new form, Metephelota coronata, was first discovered by Professor H. Graham Cannon in the course of an anatomical study on Conchoderma. Recognising that M. coronata might be a new member of the Ephelotidæ (Collin, 1912), Professor Cannon, with great kindness, transferred the whole of the available material to me for further study. This has shown that the material consists of a single new species, generically distinct from Ephelota and Podocyathus, the two previously known genera of the Ephelotidæ.


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