Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism

by Youru Wang

Author	: Youru Wang
Publisher	: Routledge
Total Pages	: 302
Release	: 2003-12-08
Genre	: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN	: 1134429762

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As the first systematic attempt to probe the linguistic strategies of Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism, this book investigates three areas: deconstructive strategy, liminology of language, and indirect communication. It bases these investigations on the critical examination of original texts, placing them strictly within soteriological contexts. Whilst focusing on language use, the study also reveals some important truths about these two traditions and challenges many conventional understandings of them. Responding to recent critiques of Daoist and Chan Buddhist thought, it brings these two traditions into a constructive dialogue with contemporary philosophical reflection. It discovers Zhuangzian and Chan perspectives and sheds light on issues such as the relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy, de-reification of words, relativising the limit of language, structure of indirect communication, and use of paradox, tautology and poetic language.

Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion

by Timothy D. Knepper

Author	: Timothy D. Knepper
Publisher	: Springer
Total Pages	: 295
Release	: 2017-11-24
Genre	: Philosophy
ISBN	: 3319641654

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This collection of essays is an exercise in comparative philosophy of religion that explores the different ways in which humans express the inexpressible. It brings together scholars of over a dozen religious, literary, and artistic traditions, as part of The Comparison Project's 2013-15 lecture and dialogue series on "religion beyond words." Specialist scholars first detailed the grammars of ineffability in nine different religious traditions as well as the adjacent fields of literature, poetry, music, and art. The Comparison Project's directors then compared this diverse set of phenomena, offering explanations for their patterning, and raising philosophical questions of truth and value about religious ineffability in comparative perspective. This book is the inaugural publication of The Comparison Project, an innovative new approach to the philosophy of religion housed at Drake University (Des Moines, Iowa, USA). The Comparison Project organizes a biennial series of scholar lectures, practitioner dialogues, and comparative panels about core, cross-cultural topics in the philosophy of religion. Specialist scholars of religion first explore this topic in their religions of expertise; comparativist philosophers of religion then raise questions of meaning, truth, and value about this topic in comparative perspective. The Comparison Project stands apart from traditional approaches to the philosophy of religion in its commitment to religious inclusivity. It is the future of the philosophy of religion in a diverse, global world.

Canadian-Daoist Poetics, Ethics, and Aesthetics

by John Z. Ming Chen

Author	: John Z. Ming Chen
Publisher	: Springer
Total Pages	: 225
Release	: 2015-10-09
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 3662479591

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This monograph takes an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to 20th and 21st -century Canadian Daoist poetry, fiction and criticism in comparative, innovative and engaging ways. Of particular interest are the authors’ refreshing insights into such holistic and topical issues as the globalization of concepts of the Dao, the Yin/Yang, the Heaven-Earth-Humanity triad, the Four Greats, Five Phases, Non-action and so on, as expressed in Canadian literature and criticism – which produces Canadian-constructed Daoist poetics, ethics and aesthetics. Readers will come to understand and appreciate the social and ecological significance of, formal innovations, moral sensitivity, aesthetic principles and ideological complexity in Canadian-Daoist works.

Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life

by Vera da Silva Sinha

Author	: Vera da Silva Sinha
Publisher	: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages	: 329
Release	: 2020-04-30
Genre	: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN	: 9027261245

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The dynamics of language, culture and identity are a major focus for many linguists and cognitive and cultural researchers. This book explores the inextricable connection that language has with cultural identity and cultural practices, with a particular emphasis on how they contribute to shaping personal identity. The volume brings together selected peer-reviewed papers from the 7th International Conference on Language, Culture and Mind with other specially commissioned chapters. Like the conference, this book aims to enhance mutual understanding among researchers from diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, offering a wealth of insights to a wide range of readers on recent culturally oriented cognitive studies of language.

Dao Companion to Chinese Buddhist Philosophy

by Youru Wang

Author	: Youru Wang
Publisher	: Springer
Total Pages	: 436
Release	: 2019-01-31
Genre	: Philosophy
ISBN	: 9048129397

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Too often Buddhism has been subjected to the Procrustean box of western thought, whereby it is stretched to fit fixed categories or had essential aspects lopped off to accommodate vastly different cultural norms and aims. After several generations of scholarly discussion in English-speaking communities, it is time to move to the next hermeneutical stage. Buddhist philosophy must be liberated from the confines of a quasi-religious stereotype and judged on its own merits. Hence this work will approach Chinese Buddhism as a philosophical tradition in its own right, not as an historical after-thought nor as an occasion for comparative discussions that assume the west alone sets the standards for or is the origin of philosophy and its methodologies. Viewed within their own context, Chinese Buddhist philosophers have much to contribute to a wide range of philosophical concerns, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion, even though Western divisions of philosophy may not exhaust the rich contents of Chinese Buddhist philosophy. .

Daoism and Environmental Philosophy

by Eric S. Nelson

Author	: Eric S. Nelson
Publisher	: Routledge
Total Pages	: 262
Release	: 2020-10-01
Genre	: Architecture
ISBN	: 0429678223

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Daoism and Environmental Philosophy explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their potential significance in our contemporary environmental crisis. This book traces early Daoist depictions of practices of embodied emptying and forgetting and communicative strategies of undoing the fixations of words, things, and the embodied self. These are aspects of an ethics of embracing plainness and simplicity, nourishing the asymmetrically differentiated yet shared elemental body of life of the myriad things, and being responsively attuned in encountering and responding to things. These critical and transformative dimensions of early Daoism provide exemplary models and insights for cultivating a more expansive ecological ethos, environmental culture of nature, and progressive political ecology. This work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in philosophy, environmental ethics and philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history.

Xu Bing and Contemporary Chinese Art

by Hsingyuan Tsao

Author	: Hsingyuan Tsao
Publisher	: State University of New York Press
Total Pages	: 264
Release	: 2011-09-01
Genre	: Philosophy
ISBN	: 1438437927

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How Chinese is contemporary Chinese art? Treasured by collectors, critics, and art world cognoscenti, this art developed within an avant-garde that looked West to find a language to strike out against government control. Traditionally, Chinese artistic expression has been related to the structure and function of the Chinese language and the assumptions of Chinese natural cosmology. Is contemporary Chinese art rooted in these traditions or is it an example of cultural self-colonization? Contributors to this volume address this question, going beyond the more obvious political and social commentaries on contemporary Chinese art to find resonances between contemporary artistic ideas and the indigenous sources of Chinese cultural self-understanding. Focusing in particular on the acclaimed artist Xu Bing, this book looks at how he and his peers have navigated between two different cultural sites to establish a third place, a place from which to appropriate Western ideas and use them to address centuries-old Chinese cultural issues within a Chinese cultural discourse.

Chuang-tzu

by

Author	:
Publisher	: Turner Publishing Company
Total Pages	: 210
Release	: 2011-02-01
Genre	: Religion
ISBN	: 1594733287

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The timeless wisdom of this classic Taoist text can become a companion on your own spiritual journey. The Chuang-tzu is the second major text of the Taoist tradition. It was compiled in the third century BCE and follows the lead of the best-known and oldest of all Taoist texts, the Tao-te-ching (Book of the Tao and Its Potency). Representing the philosophy of its main author, Chuang Chou, along with several other early Taoist strands, the text has inspired spiritual seekers for over two thousand years. Using parable, anecdote, allegory and paradox, the Chuang-tzu presents the central message of what was to become the Taoist school: a reverence for the Tao—the "Way" of the natural world—and the belief that you are not truly virtuous until you are free from the burden of circumstance, personal attachments, tradition and the desire to reform the world. In this special SkyLight Illuminations edition, leading Taoist scholar Livia Kohn, PhD, provides a fresh, modern translation of key selections from this timeless text to open up classic Taoist beliefs and practices. She provides insightful, accessible commentary that highlights the Chuang-tzu's call to reject artificially imposed boundaries and distinctions, and illustrates how you can live a more balanced, authentic and joyful life—at ease in perfect happiness—by following Taoist principles.

The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative Thinking

by Steven Burik

Author	: Steven Burik
Publisher	: State University of New York Press
Total Pages	: 241
Release	: 2010-07-02
Genre	: Philosophy
ISBN	: 1438427425

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How do differences in language influence comparative philosophy? Although the Orientalism famously described by Edward Said is rare today, Steven Burik maintains that comparative philosophy often subtly privileges one tradition over another since certain conceptual schemes are so embedded in Western languages that it is difficult not to revert to them. Arguing for a new approach that acknowledges how theory and practice cannot be separated in comparative philosophical endeavors, Burik provides nonmetaphysical, deconstructionist readings of Heidegger and Derrida and uses these to give a new reading of classical Daoism. The ideas of language advanced therein can aid the project of comparative philosophy specifically, and philosophies generally, in trying to overcome ways of thinking that have dominated Western philosophy for twenty-five hundred years and still frustrate intercultural encounters.