Matching Items (23)
Description
This dissertation examines the development of a singular ritual tradition—the “rites of summoning for interrogation” (kaozhao fa考召法)—from its earliest traces during the Han (2nd century CE) to its full-flowering as a ritual specialty by the end of the Tang (618–907) by drawing upon both esoteric Daoist texts as well as anecdotal materials from the period. Practitioners of this tradition, termed “Ritual Masters of Summoning for Interrogation” (kaozhao fashi), identified as constituents of a larger celestial surveillatory bureaucracy and drew upon its authority to cure disease, exorcize spirits, mend rifts in the community, and even determine marriage compatibility. They did so by utilizing a range of ritualistic practices drawn from the earlier Celestial Master (Zhengyi 正一) and Upper Purity (Shangqing 上清) traditions, such as visualizations, incantations, ritualized pacing, and the talismanic arts. Such practices became widespread in the Song dynasty (960–1279) and were broadly adapted by Daoist movements of the period such as the Orthodox Methods of the Celestial Heart (Tianxin zhengfa 天心正法. In Chapter 1, I trace the origins of kaozhao back to the Han, where they—along with similar exorcistic traditions—drew inspiration from the bureaucratic argot and juridical stylings of officialdom. In Chapter 2, I posit a timeline for the development of kaozhao through the examination of ritual registers and situate the practice in context of the ritual landscape of 8th century China. Chapter 3 details the construction of the kaozhao practitioner’s identity, lineage, and history in the pages of a Tang-era ritual manual, the Jinsuo liuzhu yin 金鎖流珠引. This text provides the earliest categorization of kaozhao—dividing it into a binary of “civil” (wen 文) and “martial” (wu 武) practices—the combination of which were required to attain a new form of communal transcendence called “raising the residence” (bazhai 拔宅). Finally, I demonstrate how the kaozhao rite of “patrolling” (xunyou 巡遊), located therein, recast practitioners as celestial equivalents of the itinerant surveillance commissioners of the Tang, broadening their mandate as ritual polymaths.
ContributorsWolf, Lucas A (Author) / Bokenkamp, Stephen R (Thesis advisor) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Chen, Huaiyu (Committee member) / West, Stephen H (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
This thesis gives a phonological representation of the Mandarin Chinese Neutral tone (T0) within disyllabic sequences using Optimality Theory, morphology, and semantic structure. This thesis states that T0 in Mandarin is caused by a phenomenon called Loss of Coda Licensing, which states that codas of non-head syllables that have a low semantic influence on the disyllabic sequence lose their ability to associate with a tone, causing the syllable to become a T0 syllable. To experience Loss of Coda Licensing, non-head syllables are evaluated for their semantic influence and subsequently placed into two categories: high influence and low influence. Low-influence syllables are then placed into one of five categories, with each category containing a phonological constraint that affects the syllable's coda to license a tone. This thesis utilizes Optimality Theory to posit a phonological representation that shows, like Mandarin's four lexical tones, that T0 is also a tone, even if it is shorter in length than the lexical tones. This thesis's phonological representation shows that a T0's Tone differs from that of a lexical tone because T0's Tone depends on the preceding lexical syllable's coda tone. The implications of this thesis are that tonal realization within disyllabic sequences depends on semantic contributions, that T0 syllables contain a coda that cannot license a tone, and that non-head syllables can be categorized within Chinese.
ContributorsMackie, Justin (Author) / Oh, Young (Thesis advisor) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Pruitt, Kathryn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
This dissertation challenges the conventional understanding that Song dynasty China (960–1279) was a period when Confucianism was placed at the center of governance. Bringing heretofore inadequately studied Buddhist and Daoist texts into discussion, it offers three case studies on interrelationships between Song emperors and the Three Teachings of Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. As shown in all three cases, although a religious campaign directed by the emperor and his institutional apparatus could set out under the influence of a certain teaching/religion, the campaign’s outcome at the state level would often be a fusion of various religious and cultural components. My research suggests that Song emperors employed an eclectic strategy in selecting and utilizing elements from the Three Teachings and attempted to build an imperial religion centered around themselves. As such, Song imperial power emerged as a centripetal force that compelled the Three Teachings to tailor themselves to the imperial religion. Therefore, I term the Song imperial court as a “regulated syncretic field” where segments from different religious traditions became amalgamated into religious/ritualistic entities that served imperial visions of the time. Although proponents of the Three Teachings by and large continued their efforts to gain imperial acceptance of their teachings, they often turned to local society to ensure their authority when their efforts at the court failed. Further, I argue that such phenomena were rooted in the mechanism of patriarchal governance in which the emperor considered themselves and was considered by leaders of the Three Teachings to be the patriarch of his household/empire, who was responsible for balancing the power structure among the Three Teachings.
ContributorsLi, Jiangnan (Author) / Tillman, Hoyt (Thesis advisor) / Bokenkamp, Stephen (Thesis advisor) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Hartman, Charles (Committee member) / Chen, Huaiyu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This dissertation contextualizes Lü Fu’s (1671-1742) Diagram of the Three Realms Unified and Popular Exposition of Twenty-One Histories in the book culture of the Qing (1644-1911). Through close examinations of Lü Fu’s works, I illustrate that his mapmaking and writing are driven by the central theme of placing and directing the self in the temporal and spatial world. His map is not just an illustration of the spatial construction of the physical world but also a text that “maps out” historical knowledge and Confucian ethics to help readers navigate the moral universe. His mapmaking sheds light on the interpretation of premodern Chinese maps and contributes to contemporary discussions of maps by opening up new possibilities for understanding them. Lü Fu’s popular exposition on the history of previous dynasties mirrors his map in intriguing ways, suggesting a deliberate interplay between the two. The all-encompassing nature of his works also suggests that he self-consciously explores the potential of both map and yanyi. He makes the popular exposition accessible to the general public by offering them the essential knowledge they should possess through various methods, especially self-publishing. His invention of an innovative printing technique, clay block printing, provides a window into the complexity of eighteenth-century printing culture.
ContributorsLiang, Shuo (Author) / Oh, Young Kyun (Thesis advisor) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / West, Stephen H (Committee member) / Hedberg, William C (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
This dissertation focuses on the corpus of Zang Maoxun’s literary creations in The Collection from the Fubao Hall and investigates his involvement in the cultural activities of the Jinling Poetry Society. Unearthing how Zang and this Society, as self and community, played an instrumental role in creating and sustaining a network of dramatists and drama critics in the Jiangnan region, a careful review of his poems and prose shows the extent to which text preparation, commentary, and printing were at the center of his communications with his social circle. Moreover, this dissertation unpacks Zang’s contribution to the promotion of dramatic texts through a thorough examination of his ardent editorial work in revising Tang Xianzu’s The Four Dream Plays from the Jade Tea Hall, the epitome of the southern musical drama. By using Zang’s 1618 Diaochong guan edition of his adaptations as a focal point, this dissertation compares it with three late Ming editions of Tang’s plays printed in the dual colors of red-and-black ink. In light of their innovative editorial designs, and the varying evaluations formed in their pages about Zang’s editorial work, this dissertation reveals the importance of Zang’s adaptations in the history of The Four Dream Plays’ textual transmission, as well as the interplay between the tradition of drama criticism and the new technology of multicolor printing and consequent innovation in editorial principles.
ContributorsZhang, Rachel Junlei (Author) / West, Stephen (Thesis advisor) / Oh, Young (Committee member) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Li He (790-816), an outstanding poet full of literary talent in
classical Chinese poem history, his poignant words, incredible literary construction, nether artistic conception and nuanced peculiar poem style owned him the reputation of “ghostly, demonic genius” 鬼才. Scholars demonstrated that his ghostly and demonic style has much to do with the special imagery and allusion in his poetry. However, this kind of ghostly appeal of literature exactly have much to do with the large quantity of sensory vocabulary that the poet is expert in using in his poems, which evokes resonance from the readers/audiences. Li He fuses visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile sensation in his poems, building up his special writing style, evoking and creating a sensorial space for readers. The thesis concentrates on analyzing the sensory vocabulary in Li He’s poetry, sonic depiction in particular, which are rarely discussed before, based on which making further conclusion about the artistic conception and the special style of Li He’s poetry.
classical Chinese poem history, his poignant words, incredible literary construction, nether artistic conception and nuanced peculiar poem style owned him the reputation of “ghostly, demonic genius” 鬼才. Scholars demonstrated that his ghostly and demonic style has much to do with the special imagery and allusion in his poetry. However, this kind of ghostly appeal of literature exactly have much to do with the large quantity of sensory vocabulary that the poet is expert in using in his poems, which evokes resonance from the readers/audiences. Li He fuses visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile sensation in his poems, building up his special writing style, evoking and creating a sensorial space for readers. The thesis concentrates on analyzing the sensory vocabulary in Li He’s poetry, sonic depiction in particular, which are rarely discussed before, based on which making further conclusion about the artistic conception and the special style of Li He’s poetry.
ContributorsWen, Yu (Author) / West, Stephen H. (Thesis advisor) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Oh, Young Kyun (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Stories concerning Minamoto no Yoshitsune, one of Japan's best known and most tragic heroes, are numerous and varied. From his birth to his death, nearly every episode of Yoshitsune's life has been retold in war tales, histories, and plays. One of the major and most influential retellings of the Yoshitsune legend is found in Gikeiki, a text from the fifteenth century. This study looks at the early period of the legend and specifically focuses on the Kibune episode, when Yoshitsune lived and trained at Kurama Temple. It provides a new translation of the episode as told in Gikeiki and discusses the different portrayals of Yoshitsune within the Gikeiki textual lineage and in previous and subsequent works of literature. The thesis also takes a brief look at the development of Gikeiki texts; it shows the malleability of the Yoshitsune legend and the Gikeiki text and discusses the implications that this malleability has on our understanding of the place of Gikeiki and the legend of Yoshitsune within the medieval Japanese cultural consciousness.
ContributorsMerrill, Edward (Author) / Creamer, John (Thesis advisor) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Zuo, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This dissertation uncovers the contemporary impressions of Song cities represented in Song narratives and their accounts of the interplay between people and urban environments. It links these narratives to urban and societal changes in Hangzhou 杭州 (Lin’an 臨安) during the Song dynasty, cross-referencing both literary creations and historical accounts through a close reading of the surviving corpus of Song narratives, in order to shed light on the cultural landscape and social milieu of Hangzhou. By identifying, reconstructing, and interpreting urban changes throughout the “pre-modernization” transition as well as their embodiments in the narratives, the dissertation links changes to the physical world with the development of Song narratives. In revealing the emerging connection between historical and literary spaces, the dissertation concludes that the transitions of Song cities and urban culture drove these narrative writings during the Song dynasty. Meanwhile, the ideologies and urban culture reflected in these accounts could only have emerged alongside the appearance of a consumption society in Hangzhou. Aiming to expand our understanding of the literary value of Song narratives, the dissertation therefore also considers historical references and concurrent writings in other genres. By elucidating the social, spatial, and historical meanings embedded in a variety of Song narrative accounts, this study details how the Song literary narrative corpus interprets the urban landscapes of the period’s capital city through the private experiences of Song authors. Using a transdisciplinary methodology, it situates the texts within the cultural milieu of Song society and further reveals the connections of these narratives to the transformative process of urbanization in Song society.
ContributorsHan, Ye (Author) / West, Stephen H. (Committee member) / Bokenkamp, Stephen R (Committee member) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
My dissertation primarily investigates the vast literary corpus of “Qiantang meng”
錢塘夢 (A dream by Qiantang River, 1499, QTM hereafter), the earliest preserved
specimen of the Chinese vernacular story of the “courtesan” 煙粉 category, which
appears first in the mid-Hongzhi 弘治period (1488-1505). The story treats a Song
scholar Sima You 司馬槱 (?) who traveled in Qiantang and dreamed of a legendary Su
Xiaoxiao 蘇小小, a well-educated and talented courtesan who supposedly lived during
the Southern Qi 南齊 (479-520). Fundamentally, I am concerned with how and why an
early medieval five-character Chinese poem, questionably attributed to Su Xiaoxiao
herself, developed across the later period of pre-modern Chinese literary history into an
extensive repertoire that retold the romantic stories in a variety of distinctive literary
genres: poems, lyric songs, essays, dramas, ballads, vernacular stories, miscellaneous
notes, biographical sketches, etc. The thematic interest of my research is to evaluate how
travel and dream experiences interactively form a mode whose characteristics could help
develop a clearer understanding of biji 筆記 (miscellaneous notes) as a genre which is
representational and presentational, exhibiting a metadramatic textual pastiche that
collects both fact and fiction. The timeless popularity of QTM storylines reflect and
express the trope of the “travel and dream” experience. This is something of a “living”
complex of elements through which a textual community in later generations can
reconstruct their authorial and cultural identity by encountering, remembering and
reproducing those elements in the form of autobiographical and biographical expression
of a desiring subject. Travel and dream experiences are cross-referenced, internally
dialogical, mutually infiltrating, and even metaphorically interchangeable. They are
intertwined to create a liminal realm of pastiches in which we can better examine how the
literati in the Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties
formed their own views about a past which shapes and is shaped by both collective and
individual memory. Such retellings both construct and challenge our understanding of the
complex networks of lexical and thematic exchange in the colloquial literary landscape
during the late imperial period.
錢塘夢 (A dream by Qiantang River, 1499, QTM hereafter), the earliest preserved
specimen of the Chinese vernacular story of the “courtesan” 煙粉 category, which
appears first in the mid-Hongzhi 弘治period (1488-1505). The story treats a Song
scholar Sima You 司馬槱 (?) who traveled in Qiantang and dreamed of a legendary Su
Xiaoxiao 蘇小小, a well-educated and talented courtesan who supposedly lived during
the Southern Qi 南齊 (479-520). Fundamentally, I am concerned with how and why an
early medieval five-character Chinese poem, questionably attributed to Su Xiaoxiao
herself, developed across the later period of pre-modern Chinese literary history into an
extensive repertoire that retold the romantic stories in a variety of distinctive literary
genres: poems, lyric songs, essays, dramas, ballads, vernacular stories, miscellaneous
notes, biographical sketches, etc. The thematic interest of my research is to evaluate how
travel and dream experiences interactively form a mode whose characteristics could help
develop a clearer understanding of biji 筆記 (miscellaneous notes) as a genre which is
representational and presentational, exhibiting a metadramatic textual pastiche that
collects both fact and fiction. The timeless popularity of QTM storylines reflect and
express the trope of the “travel and dream” experience. This is something of a “living”
complex of elements through which a textual community in later generations can
reconstruct their authorial and cultural identity by encountering, remembering and
reproducing those elements in the form of autobiographical and biographical expression
of a desiring subject. Travel and dream experiences are cross-referenced, internally
dialogical, mutually infiltrating, and even metaphorically interchangeable. They are
intertwined to create a liminal realm of pastiches in which we can better examine how the
literati in the Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties
formed their own views about a past which shapes and is shaped by both collective and
individual memory. Such retellings both construct and challenge our understanding of the
complex networks of lexical and thematic exchange in the colloquial literary landscape
during the late imperial period.
ContributorsWu, Siyuan (Author) / West, Stephen H. (Thesis advisor) / Cutter, Robert Joe (Committee member) / Oh, Young (Committee member) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 [Explaining depictions of reality and analyzing graphs of words] (100 AD), written by Xu Shen 許慎of Eastern Han dynasty, is known as the first comprehensive dictionary for Chinese characters. However, the earliest complete edition of the Shuowen available today is the Songkanben 宋刊本 (Woodblock printed edition from the Song dynasty). As a result, Songkanben is employed as the primary source in most studies on the Shuowen conducted by scholars after the Song dynasty. In 1982, the discovery of Tangxieben Shuowen mubu canjuan 唐寫本說文木部殘卷 (The incomplete juan under wood classifier of the Shuowen written in manuscript form in the Tang), shed light on a new angle of view in examining the Shuowen, mostly developed from Songkanben. In this paper, after an introduction on the Songkanben by Xu brothers, as well as the discovery and dating of the incomplete manuscript form of Shuowen from Tang, a comparative study between the Songkanben and Tangxieben of the Shuowen from five aspects: order of entries, the appearance of the Small Seal script of a few entries, the explanation of the meaning of some characters, the graphic analyze and the fanqie 反切 phonetic notation for some entries. The hypothesis presented in this thesis is that Tangxieben, with its antiquarian value, advantages and features, though not older for sure, may belong to an older tradition. And it suggests that there is a scholarship of the Shuowen during the Tang. And Xiao Xuben 小徐本by Xu Kai 徐鍇 (920-74), from some specific aspects in the comparison, tends to be closer to Tangxieben compared with Da Xuben 大徐本by Xu Xuan 徐鉉 (917-92). Consequently, as the original text of the Shuowen is not available today and what we have studied on the Shuowen basically is based on the editions by Xu brothers, it would be reasonable to keep this in mind, and refer to different editions of the Shuowen and critically examine them in philological studies related to it when apply and study the Shuowen nowadays.
ContributorsGao, Can (Author) / Oh, Young Kyun (Thesis advisor) / Ling, Xiaoqiao (Committee member) / West, Stephen H. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017