Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textile Images (Perspectives on the Global Past)

In __Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textiles,__ Mariachiara Gasparini investigates the origin and effects of a textile-mediated visual culture that developed at the heart of the Silk Road between the seventh and fourteenth centuries. Through the analysis of the Turfan Textile Collection in the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin and more than a thousand textiles held in collections worldwide, Gasparini discloses and reconstructs the rich cultural entanglements along the Silk Road, between the coming of Islam and the rise of the Mongol Empire, from the Tarim to Mediterranean Basin. Exploring in detail the iconographic transfer between different agents and different media from Central Asian caves to South Italian churches, the author depicts and describes the movement and exchange of portable objects such as sculpture, wall painting, and silk fragments across the Asian continent and across the ages. Gasparini’s history offers critical perspectives that extend far beyond an outmoded notion of “Silk Road studies.” Her cross-media work shows readers how certain material cultures are connected not only by the physical routes they take but also because of the meanings and interpretations these objects engage in various places. __Transcending Patterns__ is at once art history, material and visual cultural history, Asian studies, conservatory studies, and linguistics.

Ogyû Sorai (1666-1728) was one of the greatest philosophers of early modern Japan, often compared to Western thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. This volume, a monumental work of scholarship, offers for the first time in any Western language unabridged and fully annotated translations of Sorai's masterpieces. The Bendô (Distinguishing the Way) and Benmei (Distinguishing Names) are works of political philosophy that define the theoretical foundation for a leadership exercising total power, the best remedy, in Sorai's view, for a regime in crisis. The translations are based on the 1740 (Genbun 5) woodblock edition, the first major edition of these seminal texts published during the Tokugawa period.

John Tucker situates the Bendô and Benmei in relation to Neo-Confucianism via what is known as "philosophical lexicography." This genre is traced to the early-thirteenth-century Song dynasty text the Xingli ziyi (The Meanings of Neo-Confucian Terms) by Chen Beixi (1159-1223). Although Sorai was an unrelenting critic of the Neo-Confucian formulations of the great Song synthesizer Zhu Xi (1130-1200), his thinking remained, due to its genre, methodology, and conceptual repertory, essentially a radical revision of Neo-Confucian discourse. Tucker's introduction also examines the reception of Sorai's two Ben during the remainder of the Tokugawa, calling attention to radical tendencies in later developments of Sorai's thought as well as to the increasingly scathing critiques of his "Chinese" approach to philosophy, language, and politics. Finally, it traces the vicissitudes of the two Ben in modern Japanese intellectual history and their role in the formation of the ideas of Meiji intellectuals such as Nishi Amane (1829-1897) and Katô Hiroyuki (1836-1916).

As before, however, Sorai came under attack this time for his supposed irreverence toward the throne, the Japanese people, and the imperial nation-state. Though an unpopular philosophy in early twentieth-century Japan, in the postwar years Sorai's thought was interpreted (by Maruyama Masao and others) as an important modernizing force. While it critiques such ideologically grounded attempts to cast Sorai's Bendô and Benmei as theoretical contributions to political modernization, Tucker's study nevertheless acknowledges that Sorai's masterworks, in their concern for language analysis as the way to solve philosophical problems, share significant common ground with the analytic approach to philosophy pioneered by various twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophers.

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Notes on Terms, Transliterations, and Translations Introduction: A Medieval Matrix CHAPTER 1. The Development of Central Asian Textile Imagery CHAPTER 2. The Sino-Sogdian Matrix and Its Preservation CHAPTER 3. The Adaptation of Ancient Central Asian Patterns CHAPTER 4. A Kinship of Images CONCLUSION. A Step Away from the Renaissance Glossary Notes Bibliography Index