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In historical surveys of witches and witchcraft, the Chinese case is surprisingly absent. This book intends to fill that gap.
Traditional China had at least two different strands of fear, directed at women and sometimes also men. The fear of witches harming people through figurines remained limited to individual social and personal conflicts, for instance between women competing for the attention of their partner or a carpenter and his customers. There was usually a clear winning party. The fear of witches using animal or demon familiars to harm members of their own community indiscriminately led to social exclusion or worse.
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The History of Thought of the Edo Period is a lively area of research. You have the choice between Shinto, Confucianism, Buddhism, National Studies, and Dutch Studies, none of which was the state ideology, and all of which were practised together in a small, interactive intellectual world. The intellectuals shared a common language (classical Chinese), and polemics was one of the ways in which they interacted.
This volume contains the new, annotated translations of two of such polemical treatises (dating from 1686 and 1687): two Buddhist monks attacking the "arch-Confucian" Hayashi Razan (1583-1657) in the name of Buddhism and Shinto.
The Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha Translated
Editor / Translator:
The Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha presents sixteen philosophical systems known to its 14th century author. The first and so far only English translation of the whole of the Sarvadarśanasaṃgraha dates from the nineteenth century, when few of the source texts used by its author were accessible.
This new translation will rectify numerous current incorrect interpretations and misunderstandings of the text.
In a fourth-century tale, two farmers get lost in a pleasure grotto and unwittingly sever their fragile ties with the mortal world. Surprisingly, this simple cautionary fantasy spawned a complex literary tradition. The narrative instability of the tale was part of its snowballing appeal. Early in the tale’s journey through literary history, the girls met by the farmers morphed into female entertainers, Daoist priestesses, and spiritual transcendents. This malleability offered a wealth of artistic possibilities. The feature of “time dilation” and its associated dangers was also to become a flexible literary instrument and a defining feature of grotto fantasy literature.
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The Buddha prophesied that his teachings would vanish a few hundred years after his passing, creating an existential dilemma for Chinese Buddhists on the brink of Buddhism’s disappearance.
This book examines the origins of this prophecy and the famie 法灭 (‘end of Buddhism’) belief in Indian and Central Asian Buddhism, and the centuries-long struggle of Chinese Buddhists to interpret and adapt this prophecy. This resulted in the unique East Asian Buddhist belief of mofa 末法 (‘the final age of Buddhism’), which profoundly influenced medieval China and Japan.
A Reception History of Texts, Beliefs, and Practices
This is the first book-length study of the reception of Christianity and the epistemic outcomes of contact between Protestant and Catholic missionaries and Indigenous Austronesians in the contact zone of seventeenth-century colonial Taiwan.

In the Age of European Expansion, Dutch Reformed and Spanish Catholic missionaries attempted to win the souls of Indigenous Austronesian people in Taiwan. Christopher Joby answers the question of how the missionaries tried to overcome the gap between their own cultures and languages and those of the Indigenous Austronesians or Formosans to communicate their versions of the Christian Gospel in the contact zone of seventeenth-century Taiwan, and he analyses the consequences of these encounters. As such, this book is a reception history of the texts, beliefs, and practices that Reformed Protestant and Catholic missionaries introduced to convert the Formosans to their mode of Christianity. Using many linguistic and non-linguistic examples, this approach allows for a ‘complementary colour perspective’ by comparing the epistemic outcomes of the Dutch Reformed and Catholic missions.