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September 28th, Numos
Pho Bang is having it's 5 year anniversary!!!!
So exciting!
Dancing, drag queens and bands!
Horray!
Pho Bang is having it's 5 year anniversary!!!!
So exciting!
Dancing, drag queens and bands!
Horray!
Thanks to the late PBS re-runs here, I finally got to see the last episode of Eastenders with Ethel.
Watching the last scenes with her and Dot made me cry. 4 years late but better than never!
And then they showed Prince Harry in his Nazi uniform on the news afterwards. I had to laugh, how stupid can the boy be?
Dear god the royals should not be let out without staff!!!
Watching the last scenes with her and Dot made me cry. 4 years late but better than never!
And then they showed Prince Harry in his Nazi uniform on the news afterwards. I had to laugh, how stupid can the boy be?
Dear god the royals should not be let out without staff!!!
The Ghost Festival in China by Stephen F. Teiser was exactly what I was hoping for. It was a little older than I realized, the paperback was from 1996 but the original copyright was 1988. As a result many of the sources he used were early 80's and earlier. He quoted DeGroot a lot, which doesn't happen much anymore, as well as a lot of older sources. Despite it's age though it was a very interesting read. I'd definitely recommend it.
The subject matter was the Chinese Ghost festival, held on the 5th of the 7th month, in Tang times. It was Buddhist festival, though there were also Daoist celebrations jointly, and the Emperor worshiped his (or her as Empress Wu also participated) during the festival. The festival basically involved giving presents to monks that would end up benefiting your ancestors so they would not spend so much time in hell.
The book traced the Buddhist origins of the festival, looking at the history of Mu-Lien, a Buddhist monk, who traveled to hell to free his mother with the help of the Buddha. The book contained many different versions of the myth. And pointed out how different audiences looked for different things in the myths. The popular audience being the most concerned with the journey through hell and the tortures inflicted there.
Teiser included many excellent direct translations of sutras and texts.
Teiser looked in depth at the cosmology involved in the texts, the development of hell, the merging of Chinese and Indian Buddhist ideas. The texts laid down what was to become the tradition of the ten kings of judgment and the ideas of hell and purgatory of later Song times and beyond. He also looked at the hungry ghosts. There were great descriptions of them with their necks that were too thin to eat any food. It also made clear to me that the hungry ghosts had been reincarnated as hungry ghosts and not just become ghosts after death, which I hadn't realized before.
The book looked at why the festival was so popular, and Mu-Lien's role as shaman as well as Buddhist monk. How his powers resembled those of the popular shamans, with his ability to travel between realms and visit the dead and know their conditions. I find the shaman tradition of China very interesting, and so this chapter was particularly interesting. Especially as it was written before much of the controversy surrounding shamanism in China had surfaced.
But the chapter that surprised me the most and I found to be the most interesting, was about Buddhism and the family. It was a very good analysis of how Buddhism entered the role of the family, and conquered the prejudice against it on that front. The story of Mu-lien had it so that the offerings a man made to his ancestors were not able to be received, rather he needed the aid of a monk whose increased piety would be able to have the offerings actually help his ancestors. This necessity of mediation was a new idea and one that worked to fully integrate Buddhism into the family cults. The way he presented the integration of Buddhism and ancestor worship made a great deal of sense, and showed a great deal of synthesis and wisdom on the part of the Buddhists.
He also had a very nice summary of why it's important to study religion in the Tang, which if it were not so long part of me would want to steal for my letter.
The subject matter was the Chinese Ghost festival, held on the 5th of the 7th month, in Tang times. It was Buddhist festival, though there were also Daoist celebrations jointly, and the Emperor worshiped his (or her as Empress Wu also participated) during the festival. The festival basically involved giving presents to monks that would end up benefiting your ancestors so they would not spend so much time in hell.
The book traced the Buddhist origins of the festival, looking at the history of Mu-Lien, a Buddhist monk, who traveled to hell to free his mother with the help of the Buddha. The book contained many different versions of the myth. And pointed out how different audiences looked for different things in the myths. The popular audience being the most concerned with the journey through hell and the tortures inflicted there.
Teiser included many excellent direct translations of sutras and texts.
Teiser looked in depth at the cosmology involved in the texts, the development of hell, the merging of Chinese and Indian Buddhist ideas. The texts laid down what was to become the tradition of the ten kings of judgment and the ideas of hell and purgatory of later Song times and beyond. He also looked at the hungry ghosts. There were great descriptions of them with their necks that were too thin to eat any food. It also made clear to me that the hungry ghosts had been reincarnated as hungry ghosts and not just become ghosts after death, which I hadn't realized before.
The book looked at why the festival was so popular, and Mu-Lien's role as shaman as well as Buddhist monk. How his powers resembled those of the popular shamans, with his ability to travel between realms and visit the dead and know their conditions. I find the shaman tradition of China very interesting, and so this chapter was particularly interesting. Especially as it was written before much of the controversy surrounding shamanism in China had surfaced.
But the chapter that surprised me the most and I found to be the most interesting, was about Buddhism and the family. It was a very good analysis of how Buddhism entered the role of the family, and conquered the prejudice against it on that front. The story of Mu-lien had it so that the offerings a man made to his ancestors were not able to be received, rather he needed the aid of a monk whose increased piety would be able to have the offerings actually help his ancestors. This necessity of mediation was a new idea and one that worked to fully integrate Buddhism into the family cults. The way he presented the integration of Buddhism and ancestor worship made a great deal of sense, and showed a great deal of synthesis and wisdom on the part of the Buddhists.
He also had a very nice summary of why it's important to study religion in the Tang, which if it were not so long part of me would want to steal for my letter.
The pantheons, philosophies, legends and rituals "imported" into China at the start of the medieval period became in the T'ang more fully accepted into the traditional patterns of Chinese religion, which were themselves transformed in the process. Many of the basic forms of later folk religion had surfaced by the late Tang; A Buddho-Taoist pantheon staffed by bureaucratic divinities a systematized picture of the afterlife in heavens and hells; the involvement of Buddhist and Taoist monks as ritual specialists at critical junctures of the life of the individual and the community; and a comprehensive worldview in terms of which fate and retribution could be figured and the divinatory arts could be practiced
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