Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500-1700 - Hardcover

YU

9780199844883: Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500-1700

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199844887 ISBN 13: 9780199844883

Publisher: Academic, 2017

In this illuminating study of a vital but long overlooked aspect of Chinese religious life, Jimmy Yu reveals that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, self-inflicted violence was an essential and sanctioned part of Chinese culture. He examines a wide range of practices, including blood writing, filial body-slicing, chastity mutilations and suicides, ritual exposure, and self-immolation, arguing that each practice was public, scripted, and a signal of certain cultural expectations.

Yu shows how individuals engaged in acts of self-inflicted violence to exercise power and to affect society, by articulating moral values, reinstituting order, forging new social relations, and protecting against the threat of moral ambiguity. Self-inflicted violence was intelligible both to the person doing the act and to those who viewed and interpreted it, regardless of the various religions of the period: Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and other religions.

Self-inflicted violence as a category reveals scholarly biases that tend to marginalize or exaggerate certain phenomena in Chinese culture. Yu offers a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on bodily practices in late imperial China, challenging preconceived ideas about analytic categories of religion, culture, and ritual in the study of Chinese religions.

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Review:

this is an important and original study that should be widely read by students of Chinese culture and society. (Wilt L. Idema, Comptes Rendus)

About the Author:

Sheng Yen Assistant Professor of Chinese Buddhist Studies at Florida State University

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