Mark Csikszentmihalyi – författare

Leading scholars examine religious and philosophical dimensions of the Chinese classic known as the Daodejing or Laozi.Renowned international scholars examine crucial issues surrounding the Laozi, the third century B.C.E. Chinese classic also known as the Daodejing in this indispensable volume. The work offers diverse interpretations, a wide range of scholarly traditions, and a variety of ways to engage, ponder, and evaluate the Laozi.Contributors include Robert Henricks, Zhang Longxi, Tateno Masami, Isabelle Robinet, Harold D. Roth, Bryan W. Van Norden, and Liu Xiaogan.

The first concerted attempt to analyze how the histories Shiji and Hanshu described the technical arts as they were applied in vital areas of the administration of pre-Han and Han China.While cultural literacy in early China was grounded in learning the Classics, basic competence in official life was generally predicated on acquiring several forms of technical knowledge. Recent archaeological finds have brought renewed attention to the use of technical manuals and mantic techniques within a huge range of discrete contexts, pushing historians to move beyond the generalities offered by past scholarship. To explore these uses, Technical Arts in the Han Histories delves deeply into the rarely studied "Treatises" and "Tables" compiled for the first two standard histories, the Shiji (Historical Records) and Hanshu (History of Han), important supplements to the better-known biographical chapters, and models for the inclusion of technical subjects in the twenty-three later "Standard Histories" of imperial China. Indeed, for a great many aspects of life in early imperial society, they constitute our best primary sources for understanding complex realities and perceptions. The essays in this volume seek to explain how different social groups thought of, disseminated, and withheld technical knowledge relating to the body, body politic, and cosmos, in the process of detailing the preoccupations of successive courts from Qin through Eastern Han in administering the localities, the frontier zones, and their numerous subjects (at the time, roughly one-quarter of the world's population).

The first concerted attempt to analyze how the histories Shiji and Hanshu described the technical arts as they were applied in vital areas of the administration of pre-Han and Han China.While cultural literacy in early China was grounded in learning the Classics, basic competence in official life was generally predicated on acquiring several forms of technical knowledge. Recent archaeological finds have brought renewed attention to the use of technical manuals and mantic techniques within a huge range of discrete contexts, pushing historians to move beyond the generalities offered by past scholarship. To explore these uses, Technical Arts in the Han Histories delves deeply into the rarely studied "Treatises" and "Tables" compiled for the first two standard histories, the Shiji (Historical Records) and Hanshu (History of Han), important supplements to the better-known biographical chapters, and models for the inclusion of technical subjects in the twenty-three later "Standard Histories" of imperial China. Indeed, for a great many aspects of life in early imperial society, they constitute our best primary sources for understanding complex realities and perceptions. The essays in this volume seek to explain how different social groups thought of, disseminated, and withheld technical knowledge relating to the body, body politic, and cosmos, in the process of detailing the preoccupations of successive courts from Qin through Eastern Han in administering the localities, the frontier zones, and their numerous subjects (at the time, roughly one-quarter of the world's population).

People have written biographies of Confucius for over 2,000 years, but a recent discovery of a Chinese tomb containing the oldest written account of his life provides an opportunity to revisit the philosopher afresh. In this book, Mark Csikszentmihalyi tells the story of the life and wisdom of the Chinese thinker by exploring Confucius as a ritual prodigy, moral educator, scholar and political draftsman. He also considers how Confucius has been used as a symbol for traditional Chinese culture in modern times – both by those who want to radically reform or destroy it and by those who seek to preserve or revive it. Confucius: A New Tradition provides an insightful, accessible and concise account of a key figure in East Asian thought.

This book reconstructs a neglected episode in the development of Confucianism, one that considerably influenced later Chinese religious thought.Material Virtue examines a set of four through first century B.C.E. Chinese texts that argue virtue has a physical correlate in the body. Based on both transmitted (e.g., the Mengzi or Mencius) and recently excavated (e.g., the Wuxing or Five Kinds of Action) texts, Material Virtue describes how the argument addresses challenges to early Chinese religious ethics in part by relying on emerging notions such as the balance of qi (pneumas) also found in natural philosophy.