Michael J Puett – författare

Ritual is usually understood as pointing to some essence beyond the ritual act itself. This ambitious interdisciplinary study offers a convincing challenge to this understanding. The authors begin by seeking to explain how the conventional idea arose in the first place. They locate its origin in a post-Protestant and post-Enlightenment vision of ritual action that emphasizes rituals as merely external signs of interior states. This approach, say the authors, is part of a far larger way of relating to the self and to the world, which they label "sincerity." But ritual, they say, is the very opposite of sincerity because it consists of stylized, repetitive interactions that construct an "as if" world, a world of role, propriety, play, and even fantasy, rather than pointing to the world as it actually is. In fact, that is ritual's great contribution. Ritual modes of behavior make a shared social world possible by helping to navigate between diverse people and groups, rather than attempting to transcend and efface boundaries. After setting forth this argument, the authors go on to build on it by showing how sincerity and ritual are stand-ins for two very different ways of being in the world. Although both modes are always present to some degree, modernity has deeply privileged sincerity and authenticity. And, they say, we are now paying a heavy price for this extreme and often totalizing projection of personality in contemporary political life.

Evidence from Shang oracle bones to memorials submitted to Western Han emperors attests to a long-lasting debate in early China over the proper relationship between humans and gods. One pole of the debate saw the human and divine realms as separate and agonistic and encouraged divination to determine the will of the gods and sacrifices to appease and influence them. The opposite pole saw the two realms as related and claimed that humans could achieve divinity and thus control the cosmos. This wide-ranging book reconstructs this debate and places within their contemporary contexts the rival claims concerning the nature of the cosmos and the spirits, the proper demarcation between the human and the divine realms, and the types of power that humans and spirits can exercise.It is often claimed that the worldview of early China was unproblematically monistic and that hence China had avoided the tensions between gods and humans found in the West. By treating the issues of cosmology, sacrifice, and self-divinization in a historical and comparative framework that attends to the contemporary significance of specific arguments, Michael J. Puett shows that the basic cosmological assumptions of ancient China were the subject of far more debate than is generally thought.

A master class from four renowned Harvard professors—an anthropologist, a physician, a theologian, and a historian—on discovering wisdom in challenging times.In moments of uncertainty, to whom do we turn for solace and insight? How can we endure and overcome our own suffering? Harvard University professors Davíd Carrasco, Arthur Kleinman, Stephanie Paulsell, and Michael Puett turn to great thinkers, artists, and religious traditions not for definitive answers, but for lessons we can bring to our own quests for wisdom. Wisdom, they find, is not an abstract ideal but a way of living formed by caring for others and through everyday practices of solitude, ritual, and art. Based on their celebrated Harvard course, The Practice of Wisdom helps us brave loneliness, grief, and crises and bring beauty, healing, and spiritual significance into our lives.Wisdom, they teach, is an ongoing quest—a practice to be lived and deliberately cultivated. Through five interwoven chapters, we travel from Chinese temples and Hindu ashrams to Emily Dickinson’s Homestead and US-Mexico borderlands. We encounter philosopher William James on the power of the subconscious after trauma; theologian Howard Thurman on solitude as a source of dignity; Toni Morrison on the interplay between mercy and goodness; John Phillip Santos on generational wisdom; physician Paul Farmer on medical compassion; and Confucius on ritual as a way of breaking the patterns that entrap us. We hear from Wendy Doniger, the eminent scholar of Hinduism, whose reflections present wisdom as a lifelong, unfinished art of seeking meaning, balance, and purpose.Threaded throughout this short but powerful book is the image of the labyrinth: life as a series of turns that carry us through adversity and loss to hard-won clarity and grace. Led by teachers who have walked these paths, lost their way, and carried on, we learn the art—and practice—of living wisely.