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This book is a unique transdisciplinary study on animals and plants in medieval Chinese religions and science, especially in such a critical era of environmental crisis today. In recent years, environment historians have written intensively on China, yet the study of animals and plants in medieval China was less developed, not much about the role of religions, more precisely. This book aims to bridge the gaps between religious studies and environmental studies, between the history of science and religious studies, and between animal studies and plant studies. It also deals with folklores and other literary sources for examining the changing images of animals in the psychological and imaginative experience, which are often overlooked in the conventional scholarship. This book addresses big issues such as how religious agents responded to the challenges about animals and plants as material culture in the mundane world, and how the religious writers developed their different discourse about animals and plants from the state ideology, and how the spiritual world and natural world mutually enriched each other in the medieval world of China.
“In this book, Huaiyu Chen, a leading pioneer in the study of animals in Chinese history and religion, masterfully explains how medieval Chinese categorized and employed plants and used animal behavior to predict the future. He further indicates that Chinese monks explained the disposition and characteristics of animals through both native, correlative theory and Buddhist ideas” —Professor Keith Knapp, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, USA.
Acknowledgments; List of Figures; List of Charts; Introduction; Plant Science and Technology in Medieval China; Ordering Plants in the Buddhist World: A Medieval Botanical Taxonomy; Animal Divination and Climate: An Environmental Perspective on the Cult of the Pig; Zoomancy in Medieval China; The Changing Images of Zodiac Animals in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Literature; The Were-Tigers in Medieval China and Its Asian Context; The Animal Turn in Asian Studies and the Asian Turn in the Animal Studies; Bibliography; Index