{"title":"Front Matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1086/725246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725246","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135096266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
One of the most well-regarded poems of Sunthorn Phu (1786–1855), a long-serving but unwilling Buddhist monk who is considered the “Shakespeare of Thailand,” is his nirat poetic journey to the Golden Mountain Temple of Ayutthaya in 1828. This article argues that a travel poem such as Sunthorn’s can show us how an account of the local landscape itself, inflected by Buddhist temporality and morality, could be used rhetorically as well as providing a framework for understanding how literature more broadly could be used to understand the affective power of place. The article begins with a brief introduction to the nirat genre using the early example of Klong Haripunchai from early sixteenth-century Lanna. This classical nirat does not merely describe the landscape but works to imply that the object of the poet’s pilgrimage is like the perfect kingdoms described in Pāli texts. Sunthorn’s nineteenth-century nirat presents us with something more layered. Read with insights from landscape theory, Sunthorn’s poem offers us not a mere description of the landscape but can allow us to understand how he and his contemporaries landscaped the Buddhist kingdom of early Bangkok.
{"title":"Temples and the Ruins of Time in Sunthorn Phu’s Nirat to Golden Mountain Temple","authors":"Paul Lewis McBain","doi":"10.1086/723302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723302","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most well-regarded poems of Sunthorn Phu (1786–1855), a long-serving but unwilling Buddhist monk who is considered the “Shakespeare of Thailand,” is his nirat poetic journey to the Golden Mountain Temple of Ayutthaya in 1828. This article argues that a travel poem such as Sunthorn’s can show us how an account of the local landscape itself, inflected by Buddhist temporality and morality, could be used rhetorically as well as providing a framework for understanding how literature more broadly could be used to understand the affective power of place. The article begins with a brief introduction to the nirat genre using the early example of Klong Haripunchai from early sixteenth-century Lanna. This classical nirat does not merely describe the landscape but works to imply that the object of the poet’s pilgrimage is like the perfect kingdoms described in Pāli texts. Sunthorn’s nineteenth-century nirat presents us with something more layered. Read with insights from landscape theory, Sunthorn’s poem offers us not a mere description of the landscape but can allow us to understand how he and his contemporaries landscaped the Buddhist kingdom of early Bangkok.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80870443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Leading scholars attribute extraordinary achievements to Roberto de Nobili, an Italian Jesuit who worked in a Catholic mission in South India in the seventeenth century. De Nobili is not only said to have enabled the “accommodation” of Indian and, by implication, Hindu social and cultural traditions in the community of converted Christians by distinguishing “religious” from “civil” practices and meanings in the lives of the so-called Gentiles. Through his engagement in the translation and hermeneutic mediation between European and Indian languages and religions, the missionary scholar is also celebrated today for having prepared the ground for the formation of a modern, that is, universalist and pluralistic, concept of religion. The article presents an in-depth reading of original writings of de Nobili and critically discusses modern historical and philological scholarship about his work. It questions the thesis that de Nobili was the harbinger of a groundbreaking new concept of religion. Critical propositions are the following: (1) de Nobili’s distinction between “religion” and “civility” was part of a strategic focus on the conversion of Brahmans in South India, not the theoretical vision of a new concept of religion. (2) Even if communicating between diverse cultures, the missionary translations embraced political contexts and scholarly paradigms that willfully invoked hostile tensions between their linguistic and cultural referents. (3) De Nobili’s redefinition of “idolatry” reveals an aggressive “semiotic ideology” that seriously undermines the argument of a friendly mediation between Christians and Gentiles.
著名学者把非凡的成就归功于罗伯托·德·诺比利(Roberto de Nobili)，他是一位意大利耶稣会士，17世纪在南印度的天主教传教会工作。据说，De Nobili不仅通过区分所谓外邦人生活中的“宗教”和“民间”习俗和意义，使皈依基督教的社区能够“迁就”印度的社会和文化传统，也就是说，迁就了印度教的社会和文化传统。通过他在欧洲和印度语言和宗教之间的翻译和解释学调解的参与，这位传教士学者今天也因为为现代宗教概念的形成奠定了基础而受到庆祝，即普遍主义和多元化的宗教概念。本文对德诺比利的原创作品进行了深入的阅读，并批判性地讨论了关于他的工作的现代历史和语言学奖学金。它质疑了诺比利是一个开创性的新宗教概念的先驱的论点。关键命题如下:(1)de Nobili对“宗教”和“文明”的区分是南印度婆罗门皈依的战略重点的一部分，而不是对新宗教概念的理论愿景。(2)即使在不同文化之间进行交流，传教士的翻译也包含了政治背景和学术范式，故意在其语言和文化指称之间引发敌对的紧张关系。(3) De Nobili对“偶像崇拜”的重新定义揭示了一种激进的“符号学意识形态”，严重破坏了基督徒和外邦人之间友好调解的论点。
{"title":"Roberto de Nobili and the Myth of the Modern Conceptualization of Religion in Seventeenth-Century India","authors":"Alexander Henn","doi":"10.1086/722178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722178","url":null,"abstract":"Leading scholars attribute extraordinary achievements to Roberto de Nobili, an Italian Jesuit who worked in a Catholic mission in South India in the seventeenth century. De Nobili is not only said to have enabled the “accommodation” of Indian and, by implication, Hindu social and cultural traditions in the community of converted Christians by distinguishing “religious” from “civil” practices and meanings in the lives of the so-called Gentiles. Through his engagement in the translation and hermeneutic mediation between European and Indian languages and religions, the missionary scholar is also celebrated today for having prepared the ground for the formation of a modern, that is, universalist and pluralistic, concept of religion. The article presents an in-depth reading of original writings of de Nobili and critically discusses modern historical and philological scholarship about his work. It questions the thesis that de Nobili was the harbinger of a groundbreaking new concept of religion. Critical propositions are the following: (1) de Nobili’s distinction between “religion” and “civility” was part of a strategic focus on the conversion of Brahmans in South India, not the theoretical vision of a new concept of religion. (2) Even if communicating between diverse cultures, the missionary translations embraced political contexts and scholarly paradigms that willfully invoked hostile tensions between their linguistic and cultural referents. (3) De Nobili’s redefinition of “idolatry” reveals an aggressive “semiotic ideology” that seriously undermines the argument of a friendly mediation between Christians and Gentiles.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88134365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":The Paradox of Being: Truth, Identity, and Image in Daoism","authors":"Tobias Benedikt Zürn","doi":"10.1086/722221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722221","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76408841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores one of the great paradoxes of imperial China: the rise of religions that required qijia (family abandonment) in a society that privileged a patriarchal family system. Grounded in the case of Quanzhen Daoism, the article examines representations of qijia in poetry, hagiographies, inscriptions, and plays to explain the distinctive ways in which this nonscriptural tradition of renunciation configured its relationship with families. It demonstrates that there existed ambivalent, even contradictory, attitudes toward the issue of family, particularly that of parents, in different genres of Quanzhen texts. This ambivalence speaks to irreconcilable family-monastery tensions as the Quanzhen order transformed from a local movement with a few ascetic elites to a nationwide monastic order in the early thirteenth century. In thirteenth-century qijia narratives, Quanzhen apologists deployed flexible renderings of filial piety to validate personal and universal salvation—instead of familial salvation—as the principal goal of a Quanzhen monastic career. Neither the Quanzhen ideology nor its monastic institution truly addressed the interests of natural families. As such, the Quanzhen tradition contrasts sharply with the medieval Buddhism and Daoism, whose apologists conceptualized the family-monastery relations to harness the family interests to the needs of the churches. Despite posing a direct challenge to the patriarchal family system, Quanzhen Daoism developed into one of the two major Daoist schools after the thirteenth century. Its success resulted from the Quanzhen order’s salvationist contribution to the crumbling northern Chinese society under Mongol conquest, as well as its initiatives producing texts to promote pro-Quanzhen narratives.
{"title":"Cultivation, Salvation, and Obligation: Quanzhen Daoist Thoughts on Family Abandonment","authors":"Jinping Wang","doi":"10.1086/722161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722161","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores one of the great paradoxes of imperial China: the rise of religions that required qijia (family abandonment) in a society that privileged a patriarchal family system. Grounded in the case of Quanzhen Daoism, the article examines representations of qijia in poetry, hagiographies, inscriptions, and plays to explain the distinctive ways in which this nonscriptural tradition of renunciation configured its relationship with families. It demonstrates that there existed ambivalent, even contradictory, attitudes toward the issue of family, particularly that of parents, in different genres of Quanzhen texts. This ambivalence speaks to irreconcilable family-monastery tensions as the Quanzhen order transformed from a local movement with a few ascetic elites to a nationwide monastic order in the early thirteenth century. In thirteenth-century qijia narratives, Quanzhen apologists deployed flexible renderings of filial piety to validate personal and universal salvation—instead of familial salvation—as the principal goal of a Quanzhen monastic career. Neither the Quanzhen ideology nor its monastic institution truly addressed the interests of natural families. As such, the Quanzhen tradition contrasts sharply with the medieval Buddhism and Daoism, whose apologists conceptualized the family-monastery relations to harness the family interests to the needs of the churches. Despite posing a direct challenge to the patriarchal family system, Quanzhen Daoism developed into one of the two major Daoist schools after the thirteenth century. Its success resulted from the Quanzhen order’s salvationist contribution to the crumbling northern Chinese society under Mongol conquest, as well as its initiatives producing texts to promote pro-Quanzhen narratives.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85603930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism","authors":"Sonia Hazard","doi":"10.1086/722220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722220","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84218289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Contrary to modern scholarly claims that Confucians rarely spoke about gods and spirits, official histories contain detailed records of court discussions on proper sacrifice to the gods of an extensive imperial pantheon. During China’s “premodern” era, ritual officers of the court formulated the liturgies devoted to gods on the basis of canonical precedent—privileging the voice of Confucius—and conducted regular cult feastings to the gods at imperial altar terraces and temples. I read the historical records of these rites as discursive constructions of the cosmos and the gods that circulated through it. Ritual officers of the imperial court cited classical passages as the locus classicus of Suburban Sacrifice to the highest deity of the official pantheon called Vast Heaven High God. In doing so, they articulated a multivalent conception of Vast Heaven High God as both a cosmogonic force and an ancestral deity that posed logistical challenges to building the proper ritual spaces to feast this god. My analysis of the rites conducted at Suburban Sacrifice divulges a conception of the relation between built ritual space and the celestial realm of the cosmos where High God circulates that is indexical rather than metaphorical. Ritual officers of the court construed Round Terrace as a microcosm of Vast Heaven where the most powerful celestial agents, including High God, were arranged in a proper hierarchy in order to facilitate their access to cult feastings.
{"title":"The Ritual Construction of Confucian Gods in Imperial China: The Case of Vast Heaven High God","authors":"Thomas A. Wilson","doi":"10.1086/722177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722177","url":null,"abstract":"Contrary to modern scholarly claims that Confucians rarely spoke about gods and spirits, official histories contain detailed records of court discussions on proper sacrifice to the gods of an extensive imperial pantheon. During China’s “premodern” era, ritual officers of the court formulated the liturgies devoted to gods on the basis of canonical precedent—privileging the voice of Confucius—and conducted regular cult feastings to the gods at imperial altar terraces and temples. I read the historical records of these rites as discursive constructions of the cosmos and the gods that circulated through it. Ritual officers of the imperial court cited classical passages as the locus classicus of Suburban Sacrifice to the highest deity of the official pantheon called Vast Heaven High God. In doing so, they articulated a multivalent conception of Vast Heaven High God as both a cosmogonic force and an ancestral deity that posed logistical challenges to building the proper ritual spaces to feast this god. My analysis of the rites conducted at Suburban Sacrifice divulges a conception of the relation between built ritual space and the celestial realm of the cosmos where High God circulates that is indexical rather than metaphorical. Ritual officers of the court construed Round Terrace as a microcosm of Vast Heaven where the most powerful celestial agents, including High God, were arranged in a proper hierarchy in order to facilitate their access to cult feastings.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81221146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The purpose of the article is threefold. First, it explores whom the term “Karaites” initially denoted. The suggested answer is that as late as toward the middle of the tenth century, it designated representatives of a cross-sectoral (or trans-sectarian) phenomenon within Judaism of an antitraditionalist opposition (akin to ahl [or aṣḥāb] al-raʾy who opposed ahl [or aṣḥāb] al-ḥadīth in Islam), rather than members of any specific religious group. Second, the article revisits the question of what the early Karaites’ attitude was toward the ʻAnanites. It demonstrates that although the Karaites appreciated ʻAnan ben David as a rebellious innovator and courageous trailblazer, as well as were acquainted with and studied his Code, as late as toward the middle of the tenth century, they were still not associated with the ʻAnanites, forming two separate religious movements. Third, the article reappraises the issue of provenance of ʻAnan’s life story and its emergence among the Karaites as the founding narrative of the movement, by investigating how, why, when, and by whom the myth of ʻAnan as the father of Karaism was created, as well as when and why it became popular among the Karaites. The article focuses on the history of Karaism as preserved in rabbinic Jewish sources from the ninth through the eleventh centuries. It also scrutinizes contemporary Karaite texts and Muslim heresiographic literature that address the subject. The extensive comparisons help to trace the origins of this myth back to the Babylonian geonim and reconstruct the way in which the Karaites appropriated, developed, and transformed it.
{"title":"Reconstructing the Past and Conceptualizing the Jewish “Other”: How the Babylonian Geonim Contributed to the Creation of the Founding Myth of Karaism","authors":"Marzena Zawanowska","doi":"10.1086/720628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720628","url":null,"abstract":"The purpose of the article is threefold. First, it explores whom the term “Karaites” initially denoted. The suggested answer is that as late as toward the middle of the tenth century, it designated representatives of a cross-sectoral (or trans-sectarian) phenomenon within Judaism of an antitraditionalist opposition (akin to ahl [or aṣḥāb] al-raʾy who opposed ahl [or aṣḥāb] al-ḥadīth in Islam), rather than members of any specific religious group. Second, the article revisits the question of what the early Karaites’ attitude was toward the ʻAnanites. It demonstrates that although the Karaites appreciated ʻAnan ben David as a rebellious innovator and courageous trailblazer, as well as were acquainted with and studied his Code, as late as toward the middle of the tenth century, they were still not associated with the ʻAnanites, forming two separate religious movements. Third, the article reappraises the issue of provenance of ʻAnan’s life story and its emergence among the Karaites as the founding narrative of the movement, by investigating how, why, when, and by whom the myth of ʻAnan as the father of Karaism was created, as well as when and why it became popular among the Karaites. The article focuses on the history of Karaism as preserved in rabbinic Jewish sources from the ninth through the eleventh centuries. It also scrutinizes contemporary Karaite texts and Muslim heresiographic literature that address the subject. The extensive comparisons help to trace the origins of this myth back to the Babylonian geonim and reconstruct the way in which the Karaites appropriated, developed, and transformed it.","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79834997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others. By T. M. Luhrmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. 256. $29.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).","authors":"Sabina Magliocco","doi":"10.1086/720735","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720735","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88724729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE–800 CE. By Robert Ford Campany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2020. Pp. xvii+260. $55.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper).","authors":"Mark Halperin","doi":"10.1086/720734","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720734","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45784,"journal":{"name":"HISTORY OF RELIGIONS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76099031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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