Encounters with Asia is an interdisciplinary series dedicated to the exploration of all the major regions and cultures of this vast continent. Its timeframe extends from the prehistoric to the contemporary; its geographic scope ranges from the Urals and the Caucasus to the Pacific. A particular focus of the series is the Silk Road in all of its ramifications: religion, art, music, medicine, science, trade, and so forth. Among the disciplines represented in this series are history, archeology, anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. The series aims particularly to clarify the complex interrelationships among various peoples within Asia and also with societies beyond Asia. The series is closed to new submissions.
Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy, and the Rise of the Gelukpa
Brenton Sullivan
Price: $65.00
ISBN: 9780812252675
Pub Date: December 2020
Format: Hardcover
304 Pages
Building a Religious Empire presents an account of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism during its expansion and consolidation of power from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, examining the extraordinary effort Geluk lamas put into establishing institutional frameworks to standardize monastic life.
In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, Mårten Söderblom Saarela shows how—through observation, inference, and reference to ideas on language and writing—intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Chosŏn Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and the uses to which it was put: recording sounds and arranging words.
The Buddha's Footprint demonstrates how the spread of Buddhist teachings, the extension of Buddhist trading networks, and the increase of Buddhist state power were intimately connected to agricultural expansion, resource extraction, deforestation, urbanization, and the radical transformation and exploitation of Asia's environment.
In Thomas T. Allsen's analysis, pearls illuminate Mongolian exceptionalism in steppe history, the interconnections between overland and seaborne trade, recurrent patterns in the employment of luxury goods in the political cultures of empires, and the consequences of such goods for local and regional economies.
Modern Orientalism was born in the eighteenth century after a very long gestation period defined less by economic or political motives than by religious ideology. The Birth of Orientalism presents a completely new picture of the Western encounter with Asia, its underlying dynamics, and the discovery of Buddhism and Hinduism.
This groundbreaking work challenges contemporary stereotypes by revealing how both Buddhist and Muslim religious traditions were shaped by a millennium of cross-cultural exchange along the Silk Road from Iran to China.
Gu Hongming's Eccentric Chinese Odyssey is the first comprehensive study in English of Gu Hongming, both the private individual and the public cultural figure. An "imitation Western man" who became "a Chinaman again," Hongming was a reactionary to his contemporaries and an Eastern prophet to foreign intellectuals after the carnage of WWI.
This interdisciplinary study examines the reception of Āyurvedic knowledge and other Indian medical teachings in medieval China through analysis of Buddhist texts, including translations from Indian languages as well as Chinese compositions between the second and ninth centuries.
Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages exposes a number of long-hidden "foreign" elements in Chinese culture that represent the legacy of the Tuoba, a former nomadic group originally from central Asia.
Edited by Nola Cooke, Tana Li and James A. Anderson
Price: $80.00
ISBN: 9780812243369
Pub Date: June 2011
Format: Hardcover
240 Pages
This two-thousand-year history of the Tongking Gulf draws on fresh archaeological and historical insights to bridge a significant gap in studies on Southeast Asia and China.
