Ancestors and anxiety
Subtitle: Daoism and the birth of rebirth in China
By: Stephen R. Bokenkamp.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 220
ISBN-13: 9780520249486
Subjects: Taoism; Reincarnation -- Buddhism
Other titles: Daoism and the birth of rebirth in China
Description: "This innovative work on Chinese concepts of the afterlife is the result of Stephen Bokenkamp's groundbreaking study of Chinese scripture and the incorporation of Indic concepts into the Chinese worldview. Here he explores how Chinese authors, including Daoists and non-Buddhists, received and deployed ideas about rebirth from the third to the sixth centuries C.E. In his final chapter, Bokenkamp closely examines a body of fifth-century Daoist scriptures that endorsed a version of the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth, along with ideas of punitive hells and the possibility of a ritual transfer of merit to rescue the dead from them. In tracing the antecedents of these scriptures, Bokenkamp uncovers a stunning array of non-Buddhist accounts that shed light on the realms of the dead, their denizens; and human interactions with them."--book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.