A Pilgrim In Chinese Culture

This engaging book on Chinese religion and culture by Judith Berling has been welcomed by longtime scholars of the same as a vital and fresh perspective. 'A Pilgrim in Chinese Culture' is a story of faith meeting faith that will enrich wisdom-seekers as well as provide a tool to introduce students to cross-cultural and interfaith issues. Berling tells how she became immersed in the issues of religious diversity, of her experiences living with religious neighbors, and of discovering how different from her own Midwestern Protestant milieu is the world of Chinese religion and culture. In China, one can be Buddhist, Confucianist, Taoist, and animist at a single moment. Exploring how this inclusivity can be achieved infuses 'A Pilgrim in Chinese Culture'. The multiplicity of deities, the notion of Truth as having many embodiments, even patterns of hospitality - Berling examines how these key aspects of Chinese culture shape and inform religion in China. Through the tales it tells, 'A Pilgrim in Chinese Culture' offers readers insights that no textbook can match, bringing home what religious diversity means in surprising and illuminating ways.

First Published in 2009. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Until now, China has been scarcely represented in the burgeoning comparative literature on pilgrimage. This volume remedies that omission, discussing the interaction between pilgrims and sacred sites from the tenth century to the present. From the perspectives of literature, art, history, religion, politics, and anthropology, the essays focus on China's most famous pilgrimage mountains as well as lesser known sites.

This book examines the pilgrimages to China from Taiwan in the late 1980s and early 1990s and offers a wide-ranging account of urban planning statements, arguments about ritual propriety, and the material culture of pilgrimage. Taiwanese Pilgrimage to China argues that as Taiwanese pilgrims and their Chinese hosts translated values produced in ritual contexts into the terms of economic and political reform, they became complicit in a shared project of composing historical truth. With its attention to pilgrimages at a possible center of geopolitical conflict, Taiwanese Pilgrimage to China provides an account of how shared frameworks for action grow and advances anthropological understandings of conflict resolution.

Illuminating one thousand years of history, The Pilgrim Art explores the remarkable cultural influence of Chinese porcelain around the globe. Cobalt ore was shipped from Persia to China in the fourteenth century, where it was used to decorate porcelain for Muslims in Southeast Asia, India, Persia, and Iraq. Spanish galleons delivered porcelain to Peru and Mexico while aristocrats in Europe ordered tableware from Canton. The book tells the fascinating story of how porcelain became a vehicle for the transmission and assimilation of artistic symbols, themes, and designs across vast distances—from Japan and Java to Egypt and England. It not only illustrates how porcelain influenced local artistic traditions but also shows how it became deeply intertwined with religion, economics, politics, and social identity. Bringing together many strands of history in an engaging narrative studded with fascinating vignettes, this is a history of cross-cultural exchange focused on an exceptional commodity that illuminates the emergence of what is arguably the first genuinely global culture.

Until now, China has been scarcely represented in the burgeoning comparative literature on pilgrimage. This volume remedies that omission, discussing the interaction between pilgrims and sacred sites from the tenth century to the present. From the perspectives of literature, art, history, religion, politics, and anthropology, the essays focus on China's most famous pilgrimage mountains as well as lesser known sites.