Groups across the country have received letters notifying them that their grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities have been canceled, raising alarms about serious harm to museums, historical sites, and a wide range of community projects.
The American Oriental Society, the oldest learned society in the nation, is changing its outdated name to the American Society for Premodern Asia. Excellent work by the renaming committee, congrats! #sinology
BDK America's YT channel has launched! We'll b posting videos from the "Mutually Sustaining Life" & "The Buddhist Way of Life" TV series.
Plz sub, share, & like to help spread the dharma!
The videos r older so the resolution is crunchy, but the content is still great for class or self-study.
Cover of Building the Buddhist Revival: Reconstructing Monasteries in Modern China
It's World Book Day! I wrote a book. It came out right at the start of the pandemic which wasn't great timing, but I'm still proud of it. global.oup.com/academic/pro...
請不要將食物帶入圖書館 食物殘渣會引來老鼠 老鼠會在圖書館學習知識 考上大學 接著取代你
Lol this sign
"Do not bring food into the library
Food residue will attract mice
Mice will acquire knowledge in the library
Get into university
Then replace you"
😂
Friends, please join @adeanamcn.bsky.social and myself as we host Prof. Indrani Chatterjee (UVA) for the first lecture and discussion of our Spring 2025 #Buddhism and #Caste Initiative Lecture Series.
February 28, 2025
10am EST / 8:30pm IST (on zoom)
Register here: tinyurl.com/22rvht8f
Several students in the UCLA Library Special Collections Classroom standing around tall white tables and observing/take notes on handscrolls. Their faces are covered with emoji for privacy.
Two students in the UCLA Library Special Collections Classroom standing around tall white tables and observing/take notes on printed Chinese and Japanese books. There is one in the foreground that is bound in accordion style with folded pages. The students' faces are covered with emoji for privacy.
About a half dozen students gathered around a table with book history expert Devin Fitzgerald as they explain Chinese book imports using UCLA Library's special collections holdings. Two students in the UCLA Library Special Collections Classroom standing around tall white tables and observing/take notes on printed Chinese and Japanese books. There is one in the foreground that is bound in accordion style with folded pages. The students' faces are covered with emoji for privacy.
A half dozen students gather around a long white table observing and taking notes on two long handscrolls as Devin Fitzgerald explains the unrolling process to them. One scroll is a facsimile of the medieval Japanese hell scrolls and another is a scroll of a woman's decomposing corpse in sequence. Two students in the UCLA Library Special Collections Classroom standing around tall white tables and observing/take notes on printed Chinese and Japanese books. There is one in the foreground that is bound in accordion style with folded pages. The students' faces are covered with emoji for privacy.
Many thanks to @devinfitz.bsky.social for guiding my medieval Japan students through some of our historical goodies at UCLA Libraries yesterday! They were blown away by getting to interact with centuries-old Japanese and Chinese texts the people they're studying interacted with or made!
Scroll with Japanese text on left and image of red deity sending down lightning at black robed aristocrats on the right.
Japanese narrative picture scroll depicting a government official who, after wrongly being fired from his job, returns to wreak havoc on those in the capital who wronged him. #medievalsky
www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...
Sometimes your prayers break.
Currently looking at an Armenian prayer scroll that has been unopened for centuries - and getting ready to ID. Maybe an Ottoman or Isfahan imprint.
Just discovered this wonderful, relatively new resource: a glossary of Shōsōin terms with explanations and English translations of terms related to the treasures, materials, craft techniques, and more.
shosointen-glossary.narahaku.go.jp
CALL FOR PAPERS for NEW #AAR SEMINAR, "Buddhism and Caste" (PLEASE SHARE WIDELY)
DUE MARCH 3 via #AAR PAPERS system
@adeanamcn.bsky.social and I are pleased to announce the first paper call for our new 5-year seminar at the American Academy of Religion. Details here: papers.aarweb.org/group/15085
Everyone knows Naitō Konan's 内藤湖南 (1866–1934) famous periodisation of Chinese history into ancient, medieval, and modern, but did you know that, in 1939, Sugimoto Naoji 杉本直治 already counted nearly 100 Jap. textbooks with different tripartite, quadripartite, etc. schemes?
“#Epictetus used to say, ‘you’re a tiny soul lugging around a corpse’.”
Ψυχάριον εἶ βαστάζον νεκρόν, ὡς Ἐπίκτητος ἔλεγεν.
Steve Bokenkamp once began a review, “This book will not stand the test of time. I refer, of course, to the binding.”
Without downloading any new pics, what’s your energy going into 2025?
2025 is on the horizone
The horizon:
“You’ll be visited by three spirits”
The three spirits:
I don’t think you can get real good at sinology until you read lots of books for many years. You might have a good memory or a skill for seeing and describing things anew that sets you up for success but really you just need to read Chinese and about China all the time.
Carved stone base of a statue: basically a rectangular block with reliefs showing a fancy incense burner in the center flanked by two lions without manes, who really look more like rats or possibly squirrels. Anyway, distinctly rodenty.
Another blocky base with an even fancier incense burner at the center. These lions have magnificently curly manes and have clearly just been for a wash and set.
Third blocky base with incense burner. These lions have wildly bouffant manes and each is holding up a forepaw like Vanna White, indicating the censer.
Final base, incense burner not very fancy (but gilded!). These lions are squat and short-faced, with barely any manes, and look like nothing so much as a couple of French bulldogs.
Medieval Buddhists of the Day, collective award: all those sixth-century stonecarvers who had no idea what a lion looks like but weren’t going to let that stop them 😁 #MBOTD 🀄️📚
(Details of bases from statues found at the 北吴庄 site near the old city of Ye 邺城 in southern Hebei)
An illustration on how to identify a fine horse
Chinese Woodblock Print Advent Calendar 2024 - 17 December - Broad Records from a Forest of Facts 事林廣記, 1492 - A fascinating encyclopedia of knowledge of all types, such as how to identify a fine horse 🀄📚 #AdventCalendar2024 #WoodblockAdvent @thianun.bsky.social
A print that depicts oranges and apples, peeled and unpeeled, with the loose peels spelling out the Chinese words 深愛 (“deep love”)
Awfully dusty in here all of a sudden.
(“深愛,” a little print made for me by a student who wrote a lovely note on the back and handed it to me on the way out of the final exam)
The sequel has arrived! More Swindles from The Late Ming by Zhang Yingyu (2024) from @columbiaup.bsky.social as supplied by Aunty Lesley's House of Festive Fun 🎄🤶 @bridgebooksdromore.bsky.social where the only swindle is the tea! 🫢 #histbookchat #sinology #history #law #crime
Photo of a hand holding a bottle of Etsu Japanese gin. The label is blue and white with a kind of orientalist depiction of a courtesan emerging out of a gold lotus blossom.
Staff appreciation at the dept holiday party means a new Hokkaido gin I’ve never tried! 😍
I know it's hard for Western countries to look to the rest of the world as role models for anything, but damn, Western politicians could really learn a thing or two from South Koreans about going all in to defend democracy
(specifically thinking of Germany & the US rn, but I'm sure there's more)
Cover of the current issue of Journal of Chinese Religions
Journal of Chinese Religions 52.2 (December 2024) just dropped muse.jhu.edu/issue/53935
Some heroic fellows looking at a map or a painting on a table
Chinese Woodblock Print Advent Calendar 2024 - 4 December - Combined Edition of Records of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin 精鐫合刻三國水滸全傳, late Ming - two books plus a dramatis personae, illustrations, and commentary from famous folk 🀄📚 #AdventCalendar2024 #WoodblockAdvent @thianun.bsky.social
Woodblocks, hot off the 3D printer! Will try inking them up later, but for now I’m having fun just making rubbings with crayon….
The talk I’ve been anticipating all semester: a lecture on race and ethnicity in 7th-9th c. Japan by Nadia Kanagawa, one of the most exciting historians working on premodern Japan. Tomorrow (12/4) at Princeton.
eap.princeton.edu/events/stran...
Medieval Buddhist of the Day 🀄📚: Bhiksu Fasheng 比丘法生, who made a lavish niche in the Guyang cave in honor of Emperor Xiaowen, the Prince of Beihai (then a powerful court official), and his mother, Lady Gao (a previous #MBOTD). Who was he and what did he think he was doing with this gift?
Four books of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms lianhuanhua series
Page scan of the Three Kingdoms lianhuanhua, featuring Cao Cao about to execute Chen Gong, with Liu Bei and Guan Yu next to Cao Cao on the left.
Design lineage of Ma Chao, featuring the original character design of Ma Chao in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms lianhuanhua that directly inspired the Three Kingdoms manga by Mitsuteru Yokoyama and later anime and video games.
A page of the Three Kingdoms lianhuanhua featuring Zhang Fei, Liu Bei and Guan Yu, compared to a screenshot of the Toei's Sangokushi anime movie from 1992, also known as "The Great Conquest" in english.
The 1957-1960s Romance of the Three Kingdoms "lianhuanhua" (连环画), or palm-sized picture books and comics, published by Shanghai Fine Arts Publishing is one of the most important modern adaptations of RoTK.
Despite being unknown in the west, it still influences all other adaptations to this day.
