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AOC: Asian Religions, Reading List - Coggle Diagram

- - - - SEALS
        
        initially, authentication of deeds, official documents and contracts (Han dynasty)
        
        connections to tallies?
  - - - texts needing to be considered both aurally and visually (what is written and what is read [aloud])
        
        thinking about li as walking, and walking as visible (circumventing the definitional problem of 'ritual' just as music is audible --> constituting an aural/ visual pair
      - what about Zhuangzi?
- - - - see them as rituals of incorporation and renewal:
        
        difference between the sick and the well
        
        Daoist view: that your body is very dynamic and you’re constantly taking in this stale qi
        
        incorporating you back into this world of being healthy and well
        
        ideas about contagion and the sources of disease
  - - - a memorial culture assumes different rules of reading as well as the process of ethics building. one recites the Shijing and gradually shapes the psyche. Yet for the Han dynasty, this premise is only where the story begins. That is, the stele hymns not only quote form the Shijing but these same stele hymns also saw themselves as a new version of the Shijing.
        
        the Eastern Han stele demonstrates how text is ritual - in a memorial culture, texts were not silently read books that remained tidily separate from the reader; they instead existed beyond the physical brushwork or stone engraving, actually changing the psyche of those who memorized them
        the stone stele functioned as an outdoor bronze vessel; it both bore a prominent inscription to the dead and conveyed food to them in an ancestral setting
- - - - sutras & scriptures concerned with ritual procedures; rituals could be easily absorbed without any substantial modifications, into different scriptural environments. the rituals in question relied on the current liturgical technologies: talismans, incantations, effigies and icons
        
        Indic & Chinese cultures shared the idea that the compelling strength of the word permits, through appropriate ritual protocols, direct communication with spirits and deities
        
        e.g. comparing the Sutra for the Conjuration of Bewitchments, Preached by the Buddha & the Scripture for Unbinding Curses, Revealed by the Most High Lord Lao
        
        the Taoist scripture being a response to the Buddhist anti-sorcery sutra; using rites & writing in particular to exorcise the bewitched
        
        note the emphasis on sound which possesses an inherent vitality and coercive power
        
        Conclusion: that when removed from their devotional context and more or less emancipated from their canonical moorings, such Buddho-Taoist traditions became, in Dunhuang, the main constituents of pragmatic procedures, whether astromedical or mantic
        
        that the text is part of the ritual and essence of the ritual
- - - - Reveal the degree to which Buddhist and Taoist specialists eventually came to share a common ritual idiom by the fifth century
        
        from the History of the Sui Dynasty/ Sui-Shu in the seventh century
        
        case of the Taoists first printing talismans to heal the sick and the Buddhists then characteristically applying the technique to their own most pressing devotional need, the multiplication of Buddha images
        
        in the case of illness: the master visualizes, circulates breaths and then applies the seal three times
        
        comparison between the Essentials of the Practice of Perfection; Law Code of Right Unity 正一法文修真旨要 with a fifth-century Buddhist text, the Book of Consecration
        
        early use of seals attested to in the Baopuzi by Ge Hong (282-323) where seals are used as emblems of authority and implements of power in controlling subordinate godlings and demons
        
        patterns of assimilation:
        
        the swallowed talisman and the impressed spirit-seal to reinforce one another & then to even coalesce
        
        once the short step had been taken from the application of the seal on the patient's skin to the manufacture, by means of the seal, of an ingested talisman, the initial distinction between the two modalities, one internal, the other external had been bridged
        
        this fusion of procedures made possible by the common overarching matrix that informed and gave meaning to both these quasibureaucratic operations: the peculiar cause-and-effect structure of Chinese ritual, founded on the vision of cosmic Law that governed Buddhists and Taoists alike
        
        think about seals? Read Anna Seidel