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Dice and Gods on the Silk Road

2021-07-19 Body, Mind & Spirit
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Release : 2021-07-19
Genre : Body, Mind & Spirit
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 379/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Dice and Gods on the Silk Road by : Brandon Dotson

Download or read book Dice and Gods on the Silk Road written by Brandon Dotson. This book was released on 2021-07-19. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do dice and gods have in common? What is the relationship between dice divination and dice gambling? This interdisciplinary collaboration situates the tenth-century Chinese Buddhist “Divination of Maheśvara” within a deep Chinese backstory of divination with dice and numbers going back to at least the 4th century BCE. Simultaneously, the authors track this specific method of dice divination across the Silk Road and into ancient India through a detailed study of the material culture, poetics, and ritual processes of dice divination in Chinese, Tibetan, and Indian contexts. The result is an extended meditation on the unpredictable movements of gods, dice, divination books, and divination users across the various languages, cultures, and religions of the Silk Road.

Handbook of Divination and Prognostication in China

2022-05-20 Body, Mind & Spirit
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Release : 2022-05-20
Genre : Body, Mind & Spirit
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 260/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Handbook of Divination and Prognostication in China by : Michael Lackner

Download or read book Handbook of Divination and Prognostication in China written by Michael Lackner. This book was released on 2022-05-20. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book that systematically explores the manifold aspects of divination and prognostication in traditional and modern China.

Playing with Reality

2024-06-18 Science
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Release : 2024-06-18
Genre : Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 20X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Playing with Reality by : Kelly Clancy

Download or read book Playing with Reality written by Kelly Clancy. This book was released on 2024-06-18. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging intellectual history that reveals how important games have been to human progress, and what’s at stake when we forget what games we’re really playing. We play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to make predictions about the future. Games are an essential aspect of humanity and a powerful tool for modeling reality. They’re also a lot of fun. But games can be dangerous, especially when we mistake the model worlds of games for reality itself and let gamification co-opt human decision making. Playing with Reality explores the riveting history of games since the Enlightenment, weaving an unexpected path through military theory, political science, evolutionary biology, the development of computers and AI, cutting-edge neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. Neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy shows how intertwined games have been with the arc of history. War games shaped the outcomes of real wars in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. Game theory warped our understanding of human behavior and brought us to the brink of annihilation—yet still underlies basic assumptions in economics, politics, and technology design. We used games to teach computers how to learn for themselves, and now we are designing games that will determine the shape of society and future of democracy. In this revelatory new work, Clancy makes the bold argument that the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature and our actions.

Tibetan Magic

2024-03-07 Social Science
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Release : 2024-03-07
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 961/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Tibetan Magic by : Cameron Bailey

Download or read book Tibetan Magic written by Cameron Bailey. This book was released on 2024-03-07. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the theme of magic in Tibetan contexts, encompassing both pre-modern and modern text-cultures as well as contemporary practices. It offers a new understanding of the identity and role of magical specialists in both historical and contemporary contexts. Combining the theoretical approaches of anthropology, ethnography, religious and textual studies, the book aims to shed light on experiences, practices and practitioners that have been frequently marginalized by the normative mainstream monastic Buddhist traditions and Western Buddhist scholarship, which focuses primarily on meditation and philosophy. The book explores the intersection between magic/folk practices and Tantra, a complex, socio-religious phenomenon associated not only with the religious and political elites who sponsored it, but also with 'marginal' ethnic groups and social milieus, as well as with lay communities at large, who resorted to ritual agents to fulfil their worldly needs.

Living Folk Religions

2023-05-30 Religion
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Release : 2023-05-30
Genre : Religion
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 627/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Living Folk Religions by : Sravana Borkataky-Varma

Download or read book Living Folk Religions written by Sravana Borkataky-Varma. This book was released on 2023-05-30. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living Folk Religions presents cutting-edge contributions from a range of disciplines to examine religious folkways across cultures. This collection embraces the non-elite and non-sanctioned, the oral, fluid, accessible, evolving religions of people (volk) on the ground. Split into five sections, this book covers: What Is Folk Religion? Spirit Beings and Deities Performance and Ritual Praxis Possession and Exorcism Health, Healing, and Lifestyle Topics include demons and ambivalent gods, tree and nature spirits, revolutionary renunciates, oral lore, possession and exorcism, divination, midwestern American spiritualism, festivals, queer sexuality among ritual specialists, the dead returned, vernacular religions, diaspora adaptations, esoteric influences underlying public cultures, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), music and sound experiences, death rituals, and body and wellness cultures. Living Folk Religions is a must-read for those studying Comparative Religions, World Religions, and Religious Studies, and it will also interest specialists and general readers, particularly enthusiastic readers of Anthropology, Folklore and Folk Studies, Global Studies, and Sociology.

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