Chuko Mondo and Jushi Mondo in Ninth Century Shingon Buddhism

This paper analyzes the historical conditions of Yemen’s Sufi movement from the beginning of Islam up to the rise of the Rasulid dynasty in the thirteenth century. This is a very difficult task, given the lack of adequate sources and sufficient academic attention in both the East and theWest. Certainly, a few sentences about the subject can be found scattered in Sufi literature at large, but a respectable study of the period’s mysticism can hardly be found.1 Thus, I will focus on the major authorities who first contributed to the ascetic movement’s development, discuss why a major decline of intellectual activities occurred in many metropolises, and if the existing ascetic conditions were transformed into mystical tendencies during the ninth century due to the alleged impact ofDhu’n-Nun al-Misri (d. 860). This is followed by a brief discussion ofwhat contributed to the revival of the country’s intellectual and economic activities. After that, I will attempt to portray the status of the major ascetics and prominent mystics credited with spreading and diffusing the so-called Islamic saintly miracles (karamat). The trademark of both ascetics and mystics across the centuries, this feature became more prevalent fromthe beginning of the twelfth century onward. I will conclude with a brief note on the most three celebrated figures of Yemen’s religious and cultural history: Abu al-Ghayth ibn Jamil (d. 1253) and his rival Ahmad ibn `Alwan (d. 1266) from the mountainous area, andMuhammad ibn `Ali al-`Alawi, known as al-Faqih al-Muqaddam (d. 1256), from Hadramawt.

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Fiona J. Griffiths, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women’s Monastic Life. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, pp. 360, 29 illus.

Mediaevistik ◽

10.3726/med.2019.01.30 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 286-288

Author(s):

Therese Martin

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Paradigm Shift ◽

Eleventh Century ◽

Family Members ◽

Ninth Century ◽

Religious Communities ◽

University Of Pennsylvania ◽

Medieval Studies ◽

Monastic Life ◽

Multiple Levels

The year 2018 saw the publication of two important monographs, each with groundbreaking scholarship on complementary aspects of monasticism; together they offer a clear path forward for Medieval Studies as a whole. While Fiona Griffiths’s Nuns’ Priests’ Tales and Steven Vanderputten’s Dark Age Nunneries approach the essentially interrelated natures of men’s and women’s medieval monasticism from different perspectives, it is by reading them in concert that one becomes aware of the paradigm shift they signal. In a welcome change from a traditional consideration of so-called “double” monasteries as neither fish nor fowl, Griffiths and Vanderputten offer a feast of evidence for the multiple levels of interactions between the genders—including priests and nuns, students and teachers, patrons, family members, and rulers, as well as the conventionally understood mixed religious communities of monks and nuns—at majority female monasteries in Western Christendom from the early through central Middle Ages. Vanderputten starts at the beginning of the ninth century and carries his investigation forward to the mid-eleventh, at which point Griffiths launches her study, moving the matter on from the late eleventh century into the early thirteenth.

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Ritualized Writing

10.21313/hawaii/9780824859404.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Bryan D. Lowe

Keyword(s):

Ninth Century ◽

State Control ◽

Social Organizations ◽

The Social ◽

Institutional Structures ◽

Devotional Practices ◽

Ritual Practices

Transcribing scripture (sutras) represents one of the most central devotional practices in the Buddhist world. Sutra copying functioned as a form of ritualized writing, a practice strategically set apart from more mundane forms through a set of practices and beliefs. This book highlights sutra transcription throughout Asia, but focuses primarily on seventh- through ninth-century Japan, where the practice is particularly well-documented. It shows how scribes engaged in ritual practices related to purification and how patrons held elaborate dedication ceremonies upon the completion of a project. It traces the social organizations and institutional structures through which sutra copying took place. It highlights the function of the practice in the lives of diverse individuals from scribes to rulers. As a whole, the book offers a radical reassessment of Buddhism in ancient Japan that moves beyond scholarly tendencies to focus on state control and exploitation, and proposes a new way to treat scriptures as ritualized texts that interact dynamically with the individuals and communities who produce them.

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Anchoress and Abbess in Ninth-Century Saxony

10.2307/j.ctt28517j ◽

2012 ◽

Keyword(s):

Ninth Century

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Āṇṭāḷ

10.1093/oso/9780195170825.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Vijaya Nagarajan

Keyword(s):

Tamil Nadu ◽

Personal Narrative ◽

Ninth Century ◽

Fragmented Landscape ◽

Folk Wisdom ◽

Waking Up

Combining personal narrative, analytic insight, and poetics, in this chapter the author explores the parallels between the popular ninth century Tamil saint Āṇṭāḷ and the ritual of the kōlam in Tamil Nadu. The links between Āṇṭāḷ, her devotion to Vishnu, and the kōlam present a fragmented landscape of oral and written narrative, folk wisdom, and ideology. The author finds four similar themes between the story of Āṇṭāḷ and the ritual of making the kōlam: sacred time, waking up, forgiveness, and generosity. Āṇṭāḷ maintains a lively presence in the kōlam ritual even today. The author traces the possible origins of the kōlam in medieval Tamil texts.

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The prefield after the Old High German period

10.1093/oso/9780198813545.003.0005 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Augustin Speyer ◽

Helmut Weiß

Keyword(s):

Ninth Century ◽

Structural Constraints ◽

Old High German ◽

Syntactic Change ◽

The One ◽

Split Cp

The filling of the prefield in Modern German is determined by information-structural constraints such as scene-setting, contrastiveness, and topichood. While OHG does not yet show competition between these constraints, competition arises from MHG onward. This has to do with the generalization of the V2 constraint (i.e. the one-constituent property of the prefield) for declarative clauses, in which context the information-structural constraints are loosened. The syntactic change whose result eventually was the loss of multiple XP fronting comprised a change of the feature endowment of C because the fronting of expletive thô (roughly in the OHG of the ninth century) led to the reanalysis of XP fronting as a semantically vacuous movement whose only function is to check the EPP feature of C. Data from doubly filled prefields in ENHG and post-initial connectives indicate that an articulated split CP-structure, as proposed within the cartographic approach, is also at play in German.

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Conclusion

10.1093/oso/9780198815013.003.0011 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Ildar Garipzanov

Keyword(s):

Cultural History ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Late Antiquity ◽

Western Europe ◽

Dominant Role ◽

Ninth Century ◽

Sources Of Authority ◽

History Of ◽

Historical Periods

The concluding chapter highlights how the cultural history of graphic signs of authority in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages encapsulated the profound transformation of political culture in the Mediterranean and Europe from approximately the fourth to ninth centuries. It also reflects on the transcendent sources of authority in these historical periods, and the role of graphic signs in highlighting this connection. Finally, it warns that, despite the apparent dominant role of the sign of the cross and cruciform graphic devices in providing access to transcendent protection and support in ninth-century Western Europe, some people could still employ alternative graphic signs deriving from older occult traditions in their recourse to transcendent powers.

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