Ancestors and Anxiety: Daoism and the Birth of Rebirth in China / Edition 1

by Stephen R. Bokenkamp

Overview

This innovative work on Chinese concepts of the afterlife is the result of Stephen Bokenkamp's groundbreaking study of Chinese scripture and the incorporation of Indic concepts into the Chinese worldview. Here, he explores how Chinese authors, including Daoists and non-Buddhists, received and deployed ideas about rebirth from the third to the sixth centuries C.E. In tracing the antecedents of these scriptures, Bokenkamp uncovers a stunning array of non-Buddhist accounts that provide detail on the realms of the dead, their denizens, and human interactions with them. Bokenkamp demonstrates that the motive for the Daoist acceptance of Buddhist notions of rebirth lay not so much in the power of these ideas as in the work they could be made to do.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520259881
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	02/04/2009
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	707,517
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Stephen R. Bokenkamp is Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University. He is the author of Early Daoist Scriptures (UC Press).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Note on Translation
Introduction: The Problem of Rebirth

1. Envisioning the Dead
2. The Unquiet Dead and Their Families, Political and Agnate
3. Questionable Shapes: How the Living Interrogated Their Dead
4. Doomed for a Certain Term: The Intimate Dead
5. Rebirth Reborn

Postscript
List of Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index