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Chén Tuán 陳摶 of the Western Marchmount
Author:
Traces of a Daoist Immortal is a Daoist-infused tour de force on the Daoist mountain hermit Chén Tuán 陳摶 (Xīyí 希夷 [Infinitesimal Subtlety]; d. 989) and his fellow “hidden immortals.”
Breaking various academic taboos, including hyper-historicism, social constructivism, and conformist mentalities, here Komjathy, in an aspirational gesture towards unbridled inquiry, offers annotated translations and scholarly introductions to ten major works associated with the Daoist immortal.
The book also contains a cutting-edge, mythopoetic introduction that addresses the life and legend of Chén Tuán, his connection to the Western Marchmount of Huàshān 華山 (Mount Hua; Huàyīn, Shǎnxī), Daoist views about sleeping, dreaming, waking, as well as Daoist time-being.
Volume Editors: and
This volume of the Annual Review for the Sociology of Religion adresses the challenges of the diversity and complexity of sociological approaches to Asian forms and dynamics of Asian or Asian-inpired aescetic ideas and practices. Eleven papers, written by scholars conducting researches in different geographic and cultural contexts, all contribute to enrich discussion on the relevance of sociological studies of Yoga, meditation and other aescetic techniques and traditions.

Contributors are: Zuzana Bártová, Loïc Bawidamann, Jørn Borup, Sally SJ Brown, Ugo Dessì, Marianne Qvortrup Fibiger, Marc Lebranchu, Patrick S.D. McCartney, Lionel Obadia, Matteo Di Placido, Alexandros Sakellariou, João Paulo P. Silveira, and Rafael Walthert.
Modern South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas
This collection brings together case studies that cover a wide spectrum: from Hindu, Buddhist, Jaina traditions through reformist ventures such as the Brahmos, to issues in modern Islam and Judaism.
The first part of the book explores idioms of self-fashioning in global platforms and religious congresses. The second part explicates the nature of movements of such ideas. Cumulatively, they offer fresh and invaluable insights into their histories in modern South Asia against the backdrop of, and in relation to, wider transcultural global flows.
Contributors: Soumen Mukherjee, Toshio Akai, Jeffery D. Long, Arpita Mitra, Philip Goldberg, Ankur Barua, Oyndrila Sarkar, Madhuparna Roychowdhury, Navras J. Aafreedi, and Faridah Zaman.
Author:
In this book, Barbara Wall challenges many typical assumptions about popular literary classics via analysis of sixty Korean variations of The Journey to the West, including novels and poems, but also films, comics, paintings, and dance performances. In contrast to the typical assumption that literary classics like The Journey to the West are stable texts with a single original, she approaches The Journey to the West as a dynamic text comprised of all its variations. From Korean scholars in the 14th century to boy bands like Seventeen in the 21st century, she argues that all the creators of such variations participate in the ongoing story world known as The Journey.

Wall employs literary and quantitative analysis, ample graphic visualizations, and in-depth descriptions of classroom games to find new ways to understand the dynamics of transmedia storytelling and popular engagement with story worlds. Her approach opens new frontiers of intertextual analysis to literary scholars and teachers of literature who seek contemporary methods of introducing the epics of world literature to new generations of students.
Ge bcags (Gebchak) dgon pa, founded in 1892 in Nang chen, Khams (Qinghai Province, PRC), is still active today with around 250 nuns practising intensive Vajrayāna rituals, yogas and meditation.
The nuns’ knowledge goal is embodied, nonconceptual awareness, yet they spend many hours daily reading texts as part of their training. By investigating the whole context of the nuns’ lifeworld and ways of learning, this ethnography questions the role of reading in Ge bcags’ tacit knowledge tradition. At a time when Tibetan learning practices are quickly modernising, this book demonstrates a Buddhist tradition whose textual knowledge is not exactly literal, but cultivated through continuous, whole person learning.
Rethinking Networks of Exchange and Material Culture
Silk Road studies has often treated material artifacts and manuscripts separately. This interdisciplinary volume expands the scope of transcultural transmission, questions what constituted a “book,” and explores networks of circulation shared by material artifacts and manuscripts. Featuring new research in English by international scholars in Buddhist studies, art history, and literary studies, the essays in Beyond the Silk and Book Roads chart new and exciting directions in Silk Road studies.
Contributors are: Ge Jiyong, George A. Keyworth, Ding Li, Ryan Richard Overbey, Hao Chunwen, Wu Shaowei, Liu Yi, Lan Wu, Sha Wutian, Michelle C. Wang, and Stephen Roddy.