Raji C. Steineck – författare

Between 1885 and 1891 the Swiss pastor Wilfried Spinner sojourned in Japan on behalf of the East Asian mission. He founded the first Christian parishes in Tokyo and Yokohama and began to intensively teach there. However, his interest was also directed at local beliefs, which informed the everyday lives of the population. He brought back to Europe around eighty religious scrolls, comprising some painted hanging scrolls and numerous black-and-white prints (ofuda). Ofuda are paper amulets featuring representations of important deities, Buddhas and bodhisattvas, which were printed in and distributed from temples. Some of them additionally feature calligraphy, which was written by the monks in the presence of the pilgrims. They are evidence to their pilgrimage and accompany them onwards as protection and good luck charms. The recently discovered collection of Wilfried Spinner in the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich covers a broad spectrum both figuratively and in content.Text in English, German, and Japanese.

Origins and Futures: Time Inflected and Reflected provokes an interdisciplinary dialogue about culture, politics, and science’s strategies to divert the relentless trajectory of time. Literature, socio-political policy, physics, among other subjects, demonstrate the human refusal to enlist in temporal determinism. Articles ranging from how detective fiction and international terrorism manipulate the narration of events, to the unlocking of political trauma through forgiveness, to the genetic archaeology of the Human Genome project and the lacunar amnesia of nuclear energy corporations, all argue that wherever human minds meet they wrestle to undo the irrevocable, the irreversible, the fixed. Although such efforts look to the future, they rarely look straight ahead. Whatever their enterprise, writers, philosophers, and scientists believe that origins are alacritous keys to future hopes and aspirations.Contributors include: Marcus Bullock, Michael Crawford, Patricia Engle, Carol Fischer, J. T. Fraser, Sabine Gross, Paul Harris, Rosemary Huisman, Karmen MacKendrick, Steven Ostovich, Walter Schweidler, Friedel Weinert, and Masae Yuasa.

Did East Asian literatures, ranging from bronze inscriptions to zazen treatises, lack a concept of authorship before their integration into classical modernity? The answer depends on how one defines the term author. Starting out with a critical review of recent theories of authorship, this edited volume distinguishes various author functions, which can be distributed among several individuals and need not be integrated into a single source of textual meaning. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean literary traditions cover the whole spectrum from 'weak' composite to 'strong' individual forms and concepts of authorship. Divisions on this scale can be equated with gradual differences in the range of self-articulation. Contributors are Roland Altenburger, Alexander Beecroft, Marion Eggert, Simone Müller, Christian Schwermann, and Raji Steineck.

The contributions to Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic World reflect upon the problems implied in the received notions of philosophy in the respective scholarly literatures. They ask whether, and for what reasons, a text should be categorized as a philosophical text (or excluded from the canon of philosophy), and what this means for the concept of philosophy. The focus on texts and textual corpora is central because it makes authors expose their claims and arguments in direct relation to specific sources, and discourages generalized reflections on the characteristics of, for example, Japanese culture or the Indian mind. The volume demonstrates that close and historically informed readings are the sine qua non in discussing what philosophy is in Asia and the Islamic world, just as much as with regard to Western literatureContributors are Yoko Arisaka, Wolfgang Behr, Thomas Fröhlich, Lisa Indraccolo, Paulus Kaufmann, Iso Kern, Ralf Müller, Gregor Paul, Lisa Raphals, Fabian Schäfer, Ori Sela, Rafael Suter, Christian Uhl, Viatcheslav Vetrov, Yvonne Schulz Zinda, and Nicholas Zufferey.

Offers a groundbreaking approach to a key text in Zen Buddhism.In Zen Time, Raji C. Steineck provides a robust contextualization of Dōgen's Uji, the most renowned text on time in Zen Buddhism. Situating the text within the historical context of the medieval Zen master's writing, Steineck illustrates how Dōgen shaped the rhythm of life in the Zen monastery to actualize his idea that time in itself is salvific. Dōgen was meticulous in his observation of the particulars of each temporal moment, regarding them as an opportunity to bring together interrelated tenets of Buddhist doctrine and practice. In contrast to readings that equate the Zen approach to time with "living the moment" and that pit qualitative understandings of time against quantitative understandings, Steineck shows how Dōgen was able to connect time's qualitative and quantitative aspects in a way that, despite its mystical elements, remains instructive in relation to contemporary secular and philosophical discussions. The book includes a translation of Uji in an appendix.An open access version of this book was published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Offers a groundbreaking approach to a key text in Zen Buddhism.In Zen Time, Raji C. Steineck provides a robust contextualization of Dōgen's Uji, the most renowned text on time in Zen Buddhism. Situating the text within the historical context of the medieval Zen master's writing, Steineck illustrates how Dōgen shaped the rhythm of life in the Zen monastery to actualize his idea that time in itself is salvific. Dōgen was meticulous in his observation of the particulars of each temporal moment, regarding them as an opportunity to bring together interrelated tenets of Buddhist doctrine and practice. In contrast to readings that equate the Zen approach to time with "living the moment" and that pit qualitative understandings of time against quantitative understandings, Steineck shows how Dōgen was able to connect time's qualitative and quantitative aspects in a way that, despite its mystical elements, remains instructive in relation to contemporary secular and philosophical discussions. The book includes a translation of Uji in an appendix.An open access version of this book was published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.