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The Legends of Mountains & Seas: A Non-Bestiary Interpretation of Divination, Sorcery, Demigods, Gods, Religion, Immortality, Metamorphosis, Cosmology, Mythogeography and Folklore of Ancient China Kindle Edition
Anne Birrell, author of The Classic of Mountains and Seas, pointed out that the book was taken to be of different genre in history, such as geomancy, geography and cosmology, etc., with the Westerners and Japanese going astray in different directions as well, including the claims of cosmography per M. Nazin (1839), geography per Léon de Risny (1890s), tribal peoples per Gustav Schlegel (1892), deities per Edward T. C. Werner (1923), materia medica per Bernard E. Read (1928–39), religious and medical per Ito Seiji (1969), ethnographic per Rémi Mathieu, folk medicine per John William Schiffeler (1977, 1980), and gendered motif per Riccardo Francasso (1988), etc. Richard Strassberg treated the book as bestiary (2018). Today, in the context of China’s assertion of the grandiose imperial past, the book was wrongly treated by the Chinese to be about ancient geological exploration records, a theme also seen in Henriette Mertz’s Pale Ink (1958).
The Legends of Mountains and Seas, which would be expounded in this book to be about two different kinds of fortune-telling, sorcery and divination, should not be taken as a Han-dynasty equivalent philosophical ‘jing’ [canons or classic, i.e., longitude/28 lodges’ asterism] learning edited by Confucius and his disciples, nor the nature of the derivative sets of interpretation and commentary books that were known as the Han dynasty ‘wei’ [‘latitude’ or “five planets’ divination”] series, nor the ‘chen-wei’ (ch'an wei) prophecy and argot books (i.e., implicit prophecy or cryptology that Jacques Gernet called by esoteric commentaries). While the mountain part of the book could be termed ‘guideways’ as proposed by Yuan Ke and Richard Strassberg, the ‘jing’-suffixed seas’ components could not be qualified with this tag. The mountains' part was actually the ancient Shi-fa stalk divination.
The Legends of Mountains and Seas was compiled by Liu Xin (53 BC - 23 AD). The book, totaling 18 chapters nowadays, apparently developed the different contents throughout the Zhou, Qin, Han and Jinn dynasties. It was deduced that Liu Xin combined the five chapters of the book on the “mountains” (Wu Zang San Jing) with the chapters on the “[over-]seas” contents to become a consolidated mountains and seas' book. The seas or overseas’ components could be further separated into two groups, i.e., the “inner seas” and the “outer seas” sections that were compiled by Liu Xin and the “within-seas” and the “overseas wilderness” sections that were possibly collected by Guo Pu (A.D. 276-324), with the former two sections possibly synchronizing with the Han empire’s military expansion, and the latter two sharing similar contents as Lian-shan Yi (divination on concatenated [undulating] mountain ranges), Gui-cang Yi (returning-to-earth hoarding divination), A.D. 279 Ji-zhong tomb divination texts, and the 1993 Wangjiatai excavated divination texts.
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Reading age4 - 18 years
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LanguageEnglish
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Publication dateJanuary 14, 2020
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Product details
- ASIN : B083WFXWGL
- Publication date : January 14, 2020
- Language : English
- File size : 1050 KB
- Simultaneous device usage : Unlimited
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 131 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,479,132 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #731 in Children's Folk Tales & Myth Collections
- #998 in Mysticism (Kindle Store)
- #1,138 in Folklore (Kindle Store)
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About the author
Hong Yuan is author of the duology books The Sinitic Civilization: A Factual History Through the Lens of Archaeology, Bronzeware, Astronomy, Divination, Calendar and the Annals, and From the Khitans to the Jurchens & Mongols: A History of Barbarians in Triangle Wars & Quartet Conflicts
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