Volume 75, Issue 4

This paper explores the relationship between the Shiji ’s authors and their sources by examining how they constructed the historical narrative of the fall of the Qin Empire. While Sima Qian and his father Sima Tan have been traditionally credited as the authors of the Shiji , their authorial voice was recently challenged by scholars. In response to the revisionist view, this paper discerns that the Shiji maintains a consistent narrative of the Qin collapse, which is generated through rigorous source redactions whereby Sima Qian and/or Sima Tan were able to incorporate their ideological agenda and personal opinions in subtle ways that are almost invisible to the reader. With such anonymity, the historiographers succeeded in establishing the authority of their historical narratives. Rather than simply juxtaposing the narratives of their sources, the Simas indeed authored their “patterned past” of the Qin collapse. However, the past constructed in the Shiji comprises various independent narratives whose plausibility is contingent upon the respective epistemic quality of their evidence rather than a harmonious discourse.

This paper is a first presentation of a Chinese Map of the World or Kunyutu 坤輿圖 discovered in a Federal library in Berne in 2017. It focusses on the rendering of the 7000 characters contained within the map. The translation of the complete 112 text blocks on the map will be provided in a second paper, whilst Indices I and II of this paper render the 1025 toponyms. The text blocks contain information on the customs and products of a given place, as well as describing other curiosities associated with it. These texts are compared with other maps and texts, in particular with The Complete World Map ( Kunyu quantu 坤輿全圖) and The Explanations to the World Map ( Kunyutu shuo 坤輿圖說) of 1674 by Verbiest. The re-translation of the text blocks helps to identify certain anachronisms and inaccuracies although the map purports to reflect the political situation in the years 1700–1729. This reveals the extent to which the text blocks draw on previous sources. Moreover, the rendering of the toponyms detects some inconsistencies in orthography and these interferences offer valuable pointers to the source and target languages. These various pieces of evidence suggest that the map was made much later by a copyist and is not only a cartographic composite of earlier maps, but also a fusion of Northern and Southern Mandarin. The translations presumably from French, Portuguese and Spanish sources in Southern Mandarin – the language of the officials ( guanhua 官話) of the late Ming – as well as a variety of Southern Chinese dialects point to the underlying influence of a Jesuit tradition.

One of the main reasons why words (i.e., ‘images’) in the Yìjīng and Guīcáng might appear so enigmatic is because they have become detached from the ‘pictures’ ( guàhuà 卦畫) or ‘bodies’ ( guàtǐ 卦體), as divination results, in which diviners first recognized them. This paper has two objectives. The first, as part of a larger database project, uses early Chinese excavated materials to reconstruct and reimage the many configurations and appearances of trigram Kūn’s ‘body’ (Kūn tǐ 坤體). Seeing and thinking about the pure even-numbered, yīn trigram in its original configurations leads us toward a deeper appreciation and understanding of the complexity of this early system of divination, and doing so is integral to investigating, as a thought experiment, complex relationships between divination results (i.e., trigrams and hexagrams) and numbers, numbers and images, and images and predictions. Users of the Changes should no longer visualize Kūn’s ‘body’ as one-dimensional ☷ and . The second, examines images of trigram Kūn in the Yìjīng , with a starting point being the images in the canonical commentaries, and the Shuō guà commentary in particular, by using hermeneutic principles in the ‘numbers and images’ tradition. The Shuō guà presents images either found in or to be extrapolated from the base text within a structured and highly interpretive system that creates ‘image programs’ for each of the eight trigrams. I argue the Shuō guà ’s image programs have a defined architecture, and its images are not random lists of words collected without an agenda and devoid of relationships and mutual interaction with others.

This article deals with the semantic differences and similarities between the volitive modal verbs in German and modern Chinese. The research questions of the article are: How is the intentionality of volitive modal verbs located in modern Chinese? What are the differences in their location in German and in modern Chinese? The four Chinese modal verbs xiǎng 想, yào 要, kĕn 肯 and yuànyì 愿意 are contrasted with the German volitive modal verbs wollen and mögen by numerous examples from the CCL corpus (The Corpus of Center of Chinese Linguistics at the University of Peking) with a corresponding translation. In this way, it enables a deeper understanding of the volitive modal verbs in both languages. In this respect, the contribution can be helpful both for language teachers who teach Chinese as a foreign language and for researchers in the field of contrastive linguistics.

Between 1633 and 1639, the Tokugawa shogunate had published a series of edicts, expelling all Westerners except the Dutch from the country, curtailing international commerce and missionary activities, as well as forbidding the Japanese from ever leaving their homeland. The Edo government maintained its isolationist course with varying degrees of success for more than two hundred years, finally caving in under foreign pressure in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although the border control was exceptionally strict, small merchant craft and fisherman boats were still navigating between the islands of Japan. The sailors could rarely find a way back home after a shipwreck. Saved by passing whalers or washed ashore in a distant land, some of them survived their ordeal and ended up in the West where they were often employed as guides, interpreters and language teachers. Several countries sent diplomatic missions to Japan, using repatriation of castaways as a pretext to open negotiations with the shogunate. In this article, we will try to deconstruct the history of the relations between Japan and the Western powers through the eyes of these castaways and identify several methodological challenges that such a research entails.

Today, across all the places where the various Buddhist schools have established themselves, there is a broad phenomenon with heterogeneous characteristics and manifestations called engaged Buddhism or socially engaged Buddhism. What unites the advocates of this movement is the way the Buddhist notion of dukkha (i.e., ‘suffering’) is interpreted to include the economic, political, social, and even ecological dimensions of suffering in the contemporary world. Engaged Buddhists have reformulated the normative teachings of dukkha to make them relevant to current issues. In this paper, I present an example of ecologically and socially engaged Theravāda Buddhism of the Maap Euang Meditation Center for Sufficiency Economy, in Thailand near Bangkok. Members of this community have developed a form of engaged Buddhism that treats ideas of “sufficiency” economy and peasant agroecology. To understand this movement, I will argue that the discipline of Buddhist Studies needs to combine the study of ancient canonical texts with the study of their contemporary interpretations.

The following study provides an insight into Japanese policies on wounded veterans’ relief during the twentieth century. During the long war (1937–1945) with China and later with the Allied Forces (1941–1945), the Japanese government established strong physical, occupational and spiritual rehabilitation programs in addition to several laws that provided pensions or allowances for military disabilities. After the defeat in 1945, under the Occupation’s new rules of democratization and demilitarization, wounded veterans quickly lost all their benefits. Furthermore, their image was devalued in the eyes of society and their voices were marginalized. However, because of their struggles, the State established a new non-discriminatory law for all disabled people. Nevertheless, after the return of Japanese autonomy in 1952, the wounded veterans still felt that they were not treated adequately because no law addressed their specific circumstances. In order to attain their goal, they created a new association of disabled veterans to express their frustration and to lobby the Japanese government for change. Because of their stubborn mobilization, the Law for Special Aid to the Wounded and Sick Retired Soldiers was finally enacted in 1963 and provided veterans with the assistance they needed and for which they had long-since been asking.

The literary description of the movement, “New Methods of Midwifery,” during the 1950s is not only a historical record of the innovation of delivery techniques, but also a demonstration of the realization of bio-governance at the grassroots level, and of the reformation of traditional gender concepts. These works directly criticized outdated delivery methods and the traditional concept of life that traditional midwives observed and also documented the development of bio-politics in New China. The writers portrayed a series of images of traditional midwives and socialist midwives which left a traceable legacy of visions of Chinese professional women. This article aims to investigate the images of this special professional group and their cultural significance to the reformation of Chinese fertility culture, daily life and the development of bio-politics during the 1950s.