Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE
«Campany analyzes both well-known and little-studied materials primarily drawn from the Buddhist and Daoist canons, offers detailed explorations of important texts previously un-discussed or under-discussed in Western-language scholarship, and provides extensive translations done to a high philological standard...[this book] brings to completion one of the most compelling, productive, and likely seminal research agendas the field of medieval China has seen in recent years…The field is fortunate that a scholar as widely learned, philologically reliable, methodologically innovative, and honestly self-reflective as Campany has undertaken the work.»
Lucas Rambo Bender, Early Medieval China
Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience?
Les merPractitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience?
In Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE, Robert Ford Campany examines how dreaming was addressed in texts produced and circulated by practitioners of Daoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and other self-cultivational disciplines. Working through a wide range of scriptures, essays, treatises, biographies, commentaries, fictive dialogues, diary records, interpretive keys, and ritual instructions, Campany uncovers a set of discrete paradigms by which dreams were viewed and responded to by practitioners. He shows how these paradigms underlay texts of diverse religious and ideological persuasions that are usually treated in mutual isolation. The result is a provocative meditation on the relationship between individuals’ nocturnal experiences and one culture’s persistent attempts to discipline, interpret, and incorporate them into waking practice.
Detaljer
- Forlag
- Harvard University Press
- Innbinding
- Innbundet
- Språk
- Engelsk
- ISBN
- 9780674293724
- Utgivelsesår
- 2023
- Format
- 23 x 15 cm
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«Campany analyzes both well-known and little-studied materials primarily drawn from the Buddhist and Daoist canons, offers detailed explorations of important texts previously un-discussed or under-discussed in Western-language scholarship, and provides extensive translations done to a high philological standard...[this book] brings to completion one of the most compelling, productive, and likely seminal research agendas the field of medieval China has seen in recent years…The field is fortunate that a scholar as widely learned, philologically reliable, methodologically innovative, and honestly self-reflective as Campany has undertaken the work.»
Lucas Rambo Bender, Early Medieval China