Primary Sources and Asian Pasts最新文献

{"title":"Landscapes, Linkages, and Luminescence: First-Millennium CE Environmental and Social Change in Mainland Southeast Asia","authors":"Miriam T. Stark","doi":"10.1515/9783110674088-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110674088-008","url":null,"abstract":"Profound social transformations took place across South and Southeast Asia during the early first millennium CE, incorporating new religious and philosophical ideologies across the Old World. Conventional Southeast Asian scholarship uses documentary sources and art history to explain the origins of first-millennium CE developments, when temple-based Brahmanic and Buddhist religions, international trade networks, and the region’s earliest cities emerged. Archaeological research documents Southeast Asians’ materialization of indigenous and South Asian ideas in their construction of politico-ritual places and goods that linked these landscapes into broader interactional landscapes from the midto late third to the early seventh centuries CE: the Gupta period in South Asia. Researchers have delved into contemporary developments west and northwest of the Gupta epicenter to understand pan-regional developments during the first millennium CE. Expanding our vision eastward to Southeast Asia, whose concurrent developments have conventionally been attributed to “Hindicization” or “Indianization,” also contextualizes the Gupta Age and offers insights on panregional developments during the first millennium CE. Brahmanic structures that housed Indic gods offer chronological anchors and define geographic limits of new ideologies; urban scale and settling along trade routes yield demographic insights, and artifact provenances define interactional space. Such information is essential to interrogating environmental history and material matters. Understanding how Southeast Asians used a South Asian idiom to establish a regional identity through religious ideologies and ritual practice is the goal of this chapter. Archaeological techniques document the development of new economic,","PeriodicalId":306709,"journal":{"name":"Primary Sources and Asian Pasts","volume":"231 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132156759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sri Ksetra, 3rd Century BCE to 6th Century CE: Indianization, Synergies, Creation","authors":"J. Stargardt","doi":"10.1515/9783110674088-009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110674088-009","url":null,"abstract":"George Cœdès, the celebrated epigrapher of Sanskrit and Old Khmer, developed a theory of the Indianization of Southeast Asia in a colonial context in the 1930s, as a parallel to contemporary research on the Romanization of Europe. Qualified in the Asian case as a cultural, not a military, colonization, Cœdès wrote: “In the majority of cases [in Southeast Asia], one passes without transition from a late Neolithic to the first traces of Hinduism [my translation and emphasis].” He proposed processes of intensifying cultural colonization in the 2nd and 3rd centuries with enduring results by the 4th century. This view permeated the work of many scholars, e.g. K. N. Chaudhuri, up to 1990. It is an undeniable fact that, at different times in the 1st millennium CE, societies throughout most of Southeast Asia that previously lacked systems of writing – and had therefore been widely assumed by scholars of Indianization to lack organized social structures, religions, art, and architecture – adopted Indian scripts and bodies of Indian sacred texts and adapted Indian religious thought, architecture, and art. The exact nature of this much-invoked Indianization of Southeast Asia, its human agencies, its driving forces, and its timing, all demand constant reinterrogation through research. This chapter is such an attempt, justified by the fact that the valuable archaeological publications since c. 1990 to have addressed this problem include little up-to-date research on the Pyu sites of Myanmar, which covered the most extensive geographical area of any culture in mainland","PeriodicalId":306709,"journal":{"name":"Primary Sources and Asian Pasts","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128597977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Index","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110674088-014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110674088-014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":306709,"journal":{"name":"Primary Sources and Asian Pasts","volume":"161 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128655845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Four Syllables for Slaying and Repelling: A Tibetan Vajrabhairava Practice from Recently Recovered Manuscripts of the “Lost” Book of Rwa (Rwa pod)","authors":"B. J. Cuevas","doi":"10.1515/9783110674088-011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110674088-011","url":null,"abstract":"In 2001, the late Elliot Sperling published a brief but incisive article entitled “‘Orientalism’ and Aspects of Violence in the Tibetan Tradition,” marking one of the first steps in the dismantling of a persistent romance, a fanciful stereotype of Tibetan Buddhism as the quintessential religion of peace and nonviolence and the Dalai Lamas, past and present, as paragons of Gandhian pacifism. In Sperling’s effort in that essay to bring much-needed context and critical sensitivity to a challenging topic – and, in turn, to humanize Tibetans, their history, and their culture – he did well to remind us of the messy realities of the human condition, of worldly existence, of those “aspects of life that breed strife and discord.” And in that messiness, he argued, Tibetan Buddhism was made “a vehicle for power in the arena of world history, first for Tangut emperors, then for Mongol, Chinese, and Manchu rulers.” Indeed, Tibetan Buddhism is rich with an abundance of methods and techniques for the attainment of power, both for religious and political ends. Inasmuch as there are Tibetan rituals, too numerous to count, for acquiring the wisdom and benevolence of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, for achieving goodwill, peace, and healing, there are also nearly an equal number (if not more) designed for coercion, suppression, and violent harm. They include the usual tantric initiations, ritual offerings, ceremonies employing wrathful deities, and so forth; but also rituals to repel and suppress aggressive forces, intoning hostile mantra and dhāraṇī spells, casting ritual “cake bombs” (gtor","PeriodicalId":306709,"journal":{"name":"Primary Sources and Asian Pasts","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130990309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Why So Many ‘Other’ Voices in the ‘Brahmin’ Mahābhārata?","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110674088-002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110674088-002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":306709,"journal":{"name":"Primary Sources and Asian Pasts","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128507367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Primary Sources and Asian Pasts: Beyond the Boundaries of the “Gupta Period”","authors":"P. Bisschop, E. Cecil","doi":"10.1515/9783110674088-001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110674088-001","url":null,"abstract":"these are just some of the primary sources for the study of premodern Asia. How might scholars chart new directions in Asian studies following these historical traces of past societies and polities? To address this question, this book unites perspectives from leading scholars and emerging voices in the fields of archaeology, art history, philology, and cultural history to revisit the primary historical sources that ground their respective studies, and to reflect upon the questions that can be asked of these sources, the light they may shed on Asian pasts, and the limits of these inquiries.","PeriodicalId":306709,"journal":{"name":"Primary Sources and Asian Pasts","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130300080","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Meaning of the Word ārya in Two Gupta-Period Inscriptions","authors":"Csaba Dezső","doi":"10.1515/9783110674088-010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110674088-010","url":null,"abstract":"The composition of good poetry – as Bhāmaha, the oldest authority on classical Indian poetics, observed – brings about both pleasure (prīti) and fame (kīrti). The latter benefit includes not just the poet’s fame, but also that of his patron. Kings, in particular, relied on poets to immortalize their glorious deeds and to transmit their fame to future generations. As Rudraṭa, a Kashmirian author on poetics, pointed out, once the temples and other foundations they have built are destroyed by time, not even the kings’ names would remain if there were no good poets to preserve them. Praśasti, Sanskrit eulogistic poetry, has as one of its principal goals the perpetuation of the memory of its patrons. It does not simply recount the battles fought and the foundations made by the king, but through praising his meritorious and valorous deeds it affirms his unique suitability for his position. As Sheldon Pollock has observed, “Fame may be the product of concrete practices, but it is not something that exists concretely, like a temple or a victory pillar. It remains amorphous until embodied in some language; it remains unintelligible unless that language can speak in the figures of speech that explain to us the otherwise inexplicable; and it remains transient if that language itself is transient.” Cosmopolitan Sanskrit, the language of the gods, was uniquely fit for preserving and transmitting fame in the form of inscriptions throughout South and Southeast Asia. These inscriptions publicly proclaim the truth of the acts they relate as well as the truth of the qualifications of the kings they praise. To illustrate the potency of poetic speech, this paper presents two uniquely important inscribed Sanskrit praise poems, praśastis, from Gupta India: the Allahabad pillar inscription, composed by Hariṣeṇa and celebrating the deeds of the Gupta king Samudragupta (r. ca. 335–376 CE), and the Bhitari inscription,","PeriodicalId":306709,"journal":{"name":"Primary Sources and Asian Pasts","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133372441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Imperial Languages and Public Writings in Tamil South India: A Bird’s-Eye View in the Very Longue Durée","authors":"E. Francis","doi":"10.1515/9783110674088-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110674088-007","url":null,"abstract":"In North India, the Gupta period (ca 320‒550 CE) witnessed the spread of Sanskrit as the expressive language of political inscriptions and the final displacement of the Prakrit languages in this capacity in the framework of what Pollock has called the Sanskrit cosmopolis. This shift toward Sanskrit – for aesthetic rather than religious reasons, according to Pollock, who has also argued that Sanskrit had linguistic stability and had been secularized – also took place very early in South India, notably in Āndhra. It is from Āndhra that the oldest known copper-plate grant survives: the Prakrit Patagandigudem plates, which begin with a Sanskrit formula. Āndhra is also significant as the region in which the Pallavas rulers first find mention. The Pallavas quickly shift from the use of Prakrit charters in favor of Sanskrit charters around the middle of the fourth century CE. Later, when the dynasty is reestablished in the north of present-day Tamil Nadu (around 550 CE), we find bilingual charters composed in both Sanskrit and Tamil. The relocation of the Pallava polity to the northern portion of the Tamiḻakam (“the Tamil space”), and the linguistic dynamics that this geographic shift entailed, provide a useful introduction to the subject of this paper. I will look – in the very longue durée, from ca. 550 CE to the early nineteenth century CE – at the languages used in political expressions intended for public viewing (that is, in copper-plate and stone inscriptions) in the Tamil South, a region that experienced the coexistence and cross-fertilization of two rich literary and intellectual traditions, one expressed in Tamil, the other in Sanskrit. I will first adopt a dynastic approach (§ 2), examining language use by successive dynasties of the Tamil South in their epigraphical production. I will then focus on a particular district of present-day Tamil Nadu (§ 3) and assess its epigraphical languages over a very long period. The inscriptional records presented here are thus mainly royal inscriptions, that is, inscriptions commissioned by royal figures (which is especially the case of the copper-plate grants), but nonroyal records will also be taken account, especially when they contain eulogies of kings and royal self-depictions,","PeriodicalId":306709,"journal":{"name":"Primary Sources and Asian Pasts","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133917385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Love, Unknowing, and Female Filth: The Buddhist Discourse of Birth as a Vector of Social Change for Monastic Women in Premodern South Asia","authors":"Unknowing","doi":"10.1515/9783110674088-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110674088-012","url":null,"abstract":"Despite its ubiquity in the classical tradition, the premodern South Asian Buddhist tale of the suffering fetus in the filthy female womb is often read as medical, a pseudobiological interpolation in the “religious” canon of classical Buddhism. Leaving aside theoretical questions about how well categories like “science” and “religion” serve us in understanding premodern South Asian Buddhist cultural worlds, this essay argues that Buddhist narratives about the suffering fetus and the foul female womb have important and broad implications for the contestation of gender in South Asian Buddhist contexts. An oft-repeated trope, Buddhist descriptions of birth have been a powerful means – in language suggested by the editors of this volume – of “perennializing” a certain classical Buddhist ideology of the female reproductive body. They have also operated, as I argue here and elsewhere, as a “vector of social change” (again, using the language of the editors), albeit in ways both indirect and paradoxical. In the context of the profound suffering of birth (the central message of this ubiquitous trope), women’s fertility and sexual desirability or readiness are not to be coveted and devoutly wished for. For this reason, men and women contemplating, reproducing, and circulating the Buddhist discourse of birth may have found it easier to conceive of women living another kind of life besides motherhood and wifehood. Here, I argue that the Buddhist tale of the impure, disgusting, and violent female body and the suffering of the fetus within the womb, so seemingly negative toward women, in fact operated discursively and affectively to support premodern female Buddhist monasticism by helping to generate a moral-social imaginary in which female fertility and sexuality cannot be the highest good of womanhood. A discourse that denies the auspiciousness and sexual desirability of women as fundamental truths – as classical Buddhism does – would have posed a disruption to authoritative customs and norms regarding female nature and female virtue in premodern South Asia, customs and norms that many","PeriodicalId":306709,"journal":{"name":"Primary Sources and Asian Pasts","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114578859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Skandapurāṇa and Bāṇa’s Harṣacarita","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110674088-005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110674088-005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":306709,"journal":{"name":"Primary Sources and Asian Pasts","volume":"136 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123043002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}