Check you have completed your end of week 7 assignments by the start of class on Tue.!
IMPORTANT: PASSWORD ACCESS TO PDFs: Username and password can be found on the Canvas Homepage
Use the Pad for all your anonymous questions and concerns.
Thu March 12: Buddhist hell- Mulian Rescues His Mother
- Configuring your preferred ways to engage in remote learning.
- Updates on the final project and how to do this while not on campus.
- Class content: How did the view of the afterlife change after Buddhism became widespread in China from the third century onwards? The idea of the bureaucracy was married easily to the notion of the Ten Kings of Hell. Read the primary and secondary source, and take notes, using the Questions for Focus, to prepare for class.
- Secondary source:
- Ledderose, Lothar von. “The Bureaucracy of Hell”. In Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Print. The A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts, 1998. (PDF) [note: unfortunately I could not turn this into a searchable PDF at this moment]
- Primary source:
- “The Quest of Mulian, or The Great Maudgalyāyana Rescues his Mother from Hell”. In An Anthology of Translations: Classical Chinese Literature. Vol. 1: From Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty, edited by John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau, 1088-1110. New York: Hong Kong: Columbia University Press; The Chinese University Press, 2000. (PDF)
- Questions for focus: What did Buddhist hell look like? How could you end up there? How could you avoid going to hell? What does bureaucracy add to the terrors of hell? How was the view of the afterlife different from pre-Buddhist China? How do you think did that affect the behavior of the survivors?
- Optional extra: Podcast “The Great Maudgalyayana”. Chinese Literature Podcast. https://chinachannel.org/2018/02/07/great-maudgalyayana/ with additional background information.
- Slides (Google drive)
If you need to read up more on the basics of Buddhism, the library has several useful introductions available, for instance:
- Keown, Damien. Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions, 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. (ebook Trexler)
- various articles via Credo Reference (as always, be discerning)
To be used in a future class:
Thu. March 12: Emperor Taizong of Tang in Buddhist Hell
The story of how emperor Tang Taizong (r. 626-649) was called to hell in 636, but returned and lived to tell the tale. The oldest known version of the story dates from the 9th century, the most elaborate version (optional extra for this session) is from the late 16th century. Read the story, and explore the scrolls, and take notes to prepare for class.
- “The Emperor Taizong in Hell.” In An Anthology of Translations: Classical Chinese Literature. Vol. 1: From Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty. Edited by John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau, 1080-1088. New York: Hong Kong: Columbia University Press; The Chinese University Press, 2000. (PDF)
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- This story is from a ninth- or tenth-century manuscript found in northwestern China (Mogao Caves, near Dunhuang)
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- “Taizong’s Hell: A Study Collection of Chinese Hell Scrolls”, by Kenneth Brashier. URL: http://people.reed.edu/~brashiek/scrolls.html
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- Explore the focal set of ten scrolls. You can zoom in on the main picture, and click through on the small fragments on the right, for the ten different courts.
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- Optional extra: Chapter 10 and 11. In The Monkey and the Monk: A Revised Abridgement of The Journey to the West, translated and edited by Anthony C. Yu, 143-177. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006.(PDF)
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- This is the same story as it is found in the late sixteenth-century version of Journey to the West (Xiyouji or Hsi-yu-chi). That larger book opens with the story of Monkey (see topic: Monkey)
- List of questions to help you see the key issues, similarities and differences between these two versions: (Link to file on Gdrive)
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