The Flood Myths Of Early China
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| Author | : Mark Edward Lewis |
| Publisher | : State University of New York Press |
| Total Pages | : 258 |
| Release | : 2012-02-01 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 0791482227 |
Early Chinese ideas about the construction of an ordered human space received narrative form in a set of stories dealing with the rescue of the world and its inhabitants from a universal flood. This book demonstrates how early Chinese stories of the re-creation of the world from a watery chaos provided principles underlying such fundamental units as the state, lineage, the married couple, and even the human body. These myths also supplied a charter for the major political and social institutions of Warring States (481–221 BC) and early imperial (220 BC–AD 220) China. In some versions of the tales, the flood was triggered by rebellion, while other versions linked the taming of the flood with the creation of the institution of a lineage, and still others linked the taming to the process in which the divided principles of the masculine and the feminine were joined in the married couple to produce an ordered household. While availing themselves of earlier stories and of central religious rituals of the period, these myths transformed earlier divinities or animal spirits into rulers or ministers and provided both etiologies and legitimation for the emerging political and social institutions that culminated in the creation of a unitary empire.
| Author | : Mark Edward Lewis |
| Publisher | : SUNY Press |
| Total Pages | : 264 |
| Release | : 2006-06-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9780791466643 |
Explores how the flood myths of early China provided a template for that society's major social and political institutions.
| Author | : Mark Edward Lewis |
| Publisher | : SUNY Press |
| Total Pages | : 256 |
| Release | : 2006-02-02 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 9780791466636 |
Explores how the flood myths of early China provided a template for that society’s major social and political institutions.
| Author | : Mark Edward Lewis |
| Publisher | : SUNY Press |
| Total Pages | : 392 |
| Release | : 1990-01-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9780791400760 |
This book provides new insight into the creation of the Chinese empire by examining the changing forms of permitted violence--warfare, hunting, sacrifice, punishments, and vengeance. It analyzes the interlinked evolution of these violent practices to reveal changes in the nature of political authority, in the basic units of social organization, and in the fundamental commitments of the ruling elite. The work offers a new interpretation of the changes that underlay the transformation of the Chinese polity from a league of city states dominated by aristocratic lineages to a unified, territorial state controlled by a supreme autocrat and his agents. In addition, it shows how a new pattern of violence was rationalized and how the Chinese of the period incorporated their ideas about violence into the myths and proto-scientific theories that provided historical and natural prototypes for the imperial state.
| Author | : Deborah Lynn Porter |
| Publisher | : State University of New York Press |
| Total Pages | : 306 |
| Release | : 1996-07-03 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 1438416342 |
Starting with a reevaluation of the critical scholarship done on the Chinese text, the Mu T'ien-tzu chuan, the author challenges the view of the text as a product of historical composition. Porter then argues that the discursive structures of flood myths, elements of which appear in the Mu T'ien-tzu chuan, have their origins in an attempt to mediate linguistically the frightening consequences of the falsification of cosmological truths. The heuristic potential of the psychoanalytical theory of the symbol is used to explain the specific cosmogonic intentions underlying the genesis of myth, as well as broader manifestations of historical, social, and cultural behavior, most particularly literary works like the Mu T'ien-tzu chuan. The author explains how mythic symbols invested with cosmogonic and regenerative significance are appropriated in the literary resolution of a socio-political trauma analogous to those mediated by flood myths. Finally, she argues that not simply the Mu T'ien-tzu chuan but Chinese fictional discourse in general is most appropriately understood as a wholly symbolic form.
| Author | : Alan Dundes |
| Publisher | : Univ of California Press |
| Total Pages | : 468 |
| Release | : 1988 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 9780520063532 |
| Author | : Mark Edward Lewis |
| Publisher | : State University of New York Press |
| Total Pages | : 514 |
| Release | : 2012-02-01 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 0791482499 |
This book examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. The central theme of the book is the way all these forms of ordered space were reshaped by the project of unification and how, at the same time, that unification was constrained and limited by the necessary survival of the units on which it was based. Consequently, as Mark Edward Lewis shows, each level of spatial organization could achieve order and meaning only within an encompassing, superior whole: the body within the household, the household within the lineage and state, the city within the region, and the region within the world empire, while each level still contained within itself the smaller units from which it was formed. The unity that was the empire's highest goal avoided collapse back into the original chaos of nondistinction only by preserving within itself the very divisions on the basis of family or region that it claimed to transcend.
| Author | : David R. Montgomery |
| Publisher | : W. W. Norton & Company |
| Total Pages | : 305 |
| Release | : 2012-08-27 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 0393083969 |
How the mystery of the Bible's greatest story shaped geology: a MacArthur Fellow presents a surprising perspective on Noah's Flood. In Tibet, geologist David R. Montgomery heard a local story about a great flood that bore a striking similarity to Noah’s Flood. Intrigued, Montgomery began investigating the world’s flood stories and—drawing from historic works by theologians, natural philosophers, and scientists—discovered the counterintuitive role Noah’s Flood played in the development of both geology and creationism. Steno, the grandfather of geology, even invoked the Flood in laying geology’s founding principles based on his observations of northern Italian landscapes. Centuries later, the founders of modern creationism based their irrational view of a global flood on a perceptive critique of geology. With an explorer’s eye and a refreshing approach to both faith and science, Montgomery takes readers on a journey across landscapes and cultures. In the process we discover the illusive nature of truth, whether viewed through the lens of science or religion, and how it changed through history and continues changing, even today.
| Author | : Shujiang Li |
| Publisher | : State University of New York Press |
| Total Pages | : 476 |
| Release | : 1994-07-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1438410816 |
| Author | : Lihui Yang |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 309 |
| Release | : 2008 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0195332636 |
Compiled from ancient and scattered texts and based on groundbreaking new research, Handbook of Chinese Mythology is the most comprehensive English-language work on the subject ever written from an exclusively Chinese perspective. This work focuses on the Han Chinese people but ranges across the full spectrum of ancient and modern China, showing how key myths endured and evolved over time. A quick reference section covers all major deities, spirits, and demigods, as well as important places, mythical animals and plants, and related items.
