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play in the interconnected worlds of religion and the arts in early modern China, the main topic of this small volume. My discussion of the Ming prison as an example of a creative environment and its elite prisoners as creative subjects will serve to introduce interdisciplinary scholarship on premodern
spaces and polychromed light. Chinese Buddhists identify four sacred mountains as the dwelling places of bodhisattvas ; Taoists five holy abodes of suprahuman immortals. Fifth, there are cosmological places that replicate or reflect the cosmic order of the world. Hindu Temples serve both cosmogonic
distinct lexeme available in any particular non-western “religion” under study: the mandarin term jiao in China (e.g., Yu 2005, 22–24; cf. Ni 2015, 152–53, 175); the Sanskrit, dharm , in South Asia (e.g., Alles 2013); the Arabic word dīn in Islam (e.g., Khatami 2010, 61); and so forth
has developed both in India and abroad, and devotees have come to expect this even as they anticipate thematic changes according to the ritual calendar. Figure 2 Detail of embroidered Chinese peacock on a deity’s skirt. Mayapur, 2012. Image by Author As an example of ISKCON style, let us consider
, etc. In the new online environment, all of these issues become contentious.” 58 However, Mori’s work reveals that the eighth-century Chinese religious practice of prayer and devotion to Kichijōten itself involved technology in the form of a wish-giving jewel just as modern technology might be used to
religion, especially as the history of religions, surfaced in the German university system and within a generation throughout Europe and the United States. Supported, especially on the popular level, by a series of events from the artistic fascination with and Christian missions into China and Japan, the
what practitioners themselves believe. As the title suggests, the focus of Bellah’s book is the earliest known forms of human civilization. Bellah spreads his attention across tribal societies, archaic societies, and the four great civilizations of the Axial Age – ancient Israel, Greece, China, and
longer spiritual foundation. Maroon culture in Suriname, sacred geometry in the Islamic world, calligraphy in China, and Aboriginal visual languages in Australia, Canada, and the United States all refuse to be understood from a binary distinction between religion and the secular. A postsecular approach
hurled at someone from the outside. Early Protestants often accused Catholics of idolatry. Later, Protestant missionaries accused people in Africa, India, China, and other places of committing idolatry because they interacted with gods, ancestors, and spirits using images. For the alleged “idolaters