Table of Contents
- NEW BOOK>
"Buddhist Learning in South Asia: Education, Religion, and Culture at
the Ancient Śrī Nālandā Mahāvihāra"
- NEW BOOK>
The Foresight of Dark Knowing: Chŏng Kam nok and Insurrectionary
Prognostication in Pre-Modern Korea, Translated by John Jorgensen
NEW
BOOK> "Buddhist Learning in South Asia: Education, Religion, and
Culture at the Ancient Śrī Nālandā Mahāvihāra"
by Pintu Kumar
Dear Colleagues,Please allow me to share the publication of my book, Buddhist Learning in South Asia: Education, Religion, and Culture at the Ancient Śrī Nālandā Mahāvihāra. This interdisciplinary study is the first book to study ancient Indian Buddhism from an educational perspective. The book attempts to present Buddhism not only as a religion but also as a source of the diffusion of knowledge. It provides a complete survey of the Śrī Nālandā Mahāvihāra from the perspective of its educational curricula as well as its religious influence. It provides detailed descriptions of the origin, growth, management, and academic and cultural life of Nālandā, with particular attention to its pedagogy, curriculum, teachers, and students. It also presents an alternative interpretation of nationalist and popular notions about Śrī Nālandā as an international university and proves that it was, at its core, a Buddhist monastery and an institution of Buddhist learning focused on the study and promotion of Buddhism.
Some of you may be interested in this book, which is detailed are below with links followed by its table of contents:
Pintu Kumar: Buddhist Learning in South Asia: Education, Religion, and Culture at the Ancient Śrī Nālandā Mahāvihāra, Lexington Books, 324 pages, 978-1-4985-5492-3
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498554930/Buddhist-Learning-in-South-Asia-Education-Religion-and-Culture-at-the-Ancient-Sri-Nalanda-Mahavihara
https://www.amazon.in/Buddhist-Learning-South-Asia-Mahavihara-ebook/dp/B07D63G51N
Table of contents:
Acknowledgments ix
1 Origin, Growth, and Decay of Śrī Nālandā Māhavihāra 1
2 Śrī Nālandā Mahāvihāra in Travelogues and Archaeology 59
3 Pre-Nālandā/Brāhmaṇical Education: Gurukulas 101
4 Śrī Nālandā Mahāvihāra: An Institution of Religious Learning 125
5 Śrī Nālandā and Buddhist Learning 159
6 Śrī Nālandā’s Monastic Organization and Religion 193
7 Life, Ritual, and Influences 237
Conclusion 271
Bibliography 293
Index 313
Thank you so much.
Pintu Kumar, Assistant Professor of History, MLNCE, Delhi University
Fulbright Nehru Visiting Scholar 2015-17, University of Virginia, USA
NEW
BOOK> The Foresight of Dark Knowing: Chŏng Kam nok and Insurrectionary
Prognostication in Pre-Modern Korea, Translated by John Jorgensen
by A. Charles Muller
The Foresight of Dark Knowing: Chŏng Kam nok and Insurrectionary
Prognostication in Pre-Modern Korea, Translated by John JorgensenUniversity of Hawai'i Press
520pp. June 2018
ISBN: 9780824875381
Detailed book information: http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9961-9780824875381.aspx
Description
Korea has long had an underground insurrectionary literature. The best-known example of the genre is the Chŏng Kam nok, a collection of premodern texts predicting the overthrow of the Yi Dynasty (1392–1910) that in recent times has been invoked by a wide range of groups to support various causes and agendas: from leaders of Korea’s new religious movements formed during and after the Japanese occupation to spin doctors in the South Korean elections of the 1990s to proponents of an aborted attempt to move the capital from Seoul in the early 2000s.
Written to inspire uprisings and foment dissatisfaction, the Chŏng Kam nok texts are anonymous and undated. (Most were probably written between the seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries.) In his expansive introduction to this first English translation, John Jorgensen notes that the work employs forms or codes of political prediction (Ch. tuch’en; Kor. toch’am) allied with Chinese geomancy (fengshui) but in a combination unique to Korea. The two types of codes appear to deal with different subjects—the potency of geographical locations and political predictions derived from numerological cycles, omens, and symbols—but both emerge from a similar intellectual sphere of prognostication arts that includes divination, the Yijing (Book of Changes), physiognomy, and astrology in early China, and both share theoretical components, such as the fluctuation of ki (Ch. qi). In addition to ambiguous and obscure passages, allusion and indirection abound; many predictions are attributed to famous people in the distant past or made after the fact to lend the final outcome an air of authority. Jorgensen’s invaluable introduction contains a wealth of background on the history and techniques of political prediction, augury, and geomancy from the first-century Han dynasty in China to the end of the nineteenth century in Korea, providing readers with a thorough account of East Asian geomancy based on original sources.
This volume will be welcomed by students and scholars of premodern Korean history and beliefs and those with an interest in early, arcane sources of political disinformation that remain relevant in South Korea to this day.
