Narratives and Rituals: The Inheritance Context of Dai Epics (original) (raw)

Narratives as Ritual Histories: The Case of the Northern-Thai Buddhist Chronicles

Even if the corpus of Northern Thai “chronicles” or tamnan has not yet been fully documented or catalogued, it is safe to state that most tamnan tell and retell, reformulate, reframe and recycle Buddhist narratives with different degrees of fact and fiction. Traditional chronicles, as a relatively “free” or open genre, have actively exploited ancient formulas, templates and recipes from mainstream and regional Buddhist literature, together with Thai/Tai folklore, to bring new and multiple meanings into evolving historical situations. This is especially true for what are called the tham tamnan and puttha tamnan, but it also holds true for, at least in some aspects, the phuen or tamnan mueang. [...]

Anecdotes and/as Social Memory: Understanding the Nature of Buddhist Miracle Tales in Early Medieval China

Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 2023

Where did the many anecdotes filling the pages of Chinese Buddhist "miracle tales" come from? What sort of literature do these narratives constitute? And what difference do the answers to these questions make? This paper adduces evidence that these narratives were compiled as reports of events alleged to have actually occurred and that they reached their eventual compilers through networks of written and oral exchange among people who shared an interest in sponsoring, promulgating, and preserving them. To see them as didactic fictions fabricated by individual authors to help inculcate Buddhist values is to fundamentally misunderstand these texts. In fact, the very notion of author proves misleading. Understanding the genre correctly as a textual concretization of social memory has important implications for grasping the ways in which these texts are important and useful for historians both of Buddhism and of narrative literature in China.

Cultural Circles and Epic Transmission: The Dai (Tai) People in China

ORAL TRADITION, 2013

The Dai ethnic group in China and the Thai people in Southeast Asia can all be broadly divided into two cultural groups: a Buddhist cultural circle and another circle centered around indigenous religion. Within the Buddhist circle, the Dai people practice Theravada Buddhism, celebrating the Songkran Festival and using a writing system created by their ancestors long ago with the result that poems were often recorded as written texts or books very early in their history. Within the indigenous circle, the Dai communities in China are generally referred to as “Hua-Yao Dai” (“Colorful-Waistband Dai,” in connection with their vivid clothing), and they adhere to folk belief or animism. These communities have little or no literacy education; consequently, their poetry has been handed down orally from generation to generation. Interestingly, in both of these Dai cultural circles, the poetry employs a key technique that can be termed “waist-feet rhyme” wherein the last syllable of one line rhymes with an internal syllable in the succeeding line. This feature—which is discussed in detail below—is embedded in both the oral and written traditions and is an important enabling device within the poetry of the Dai people.

Approaching the Sacred in Chinese past Contexts Summary

2018

Recent scholarship on sacred sites and pilgrimage convincingly demonstrates that the conceptual separation of belief and knowledge as well as the dichotomization of the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’ both in the case of the Chinese historical and present-day contexts are most inappropriate as a methodological framework. With a strong focus on practice and embodiment and by breaking away from a single discipline approach, my paper is concerned with the question why and how people narrated their own encounters with the Sacred. In the center of my discussion are the mountains as the paragons of Chinese history. They display multiple identities as part of imperial ritual, of mysticism, nature and history, of life, fertility and death and as part of Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist sites of worship and for performing self-cultivation which were used by literati to project something of themselves into the future.

Oral Traditions in Contemporary China

Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation, 2022

In Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation, Juwen Zhang provides a systematic survey of such oral traditions as folk and fairy tales, proverbs, ballads, and folksongs that are vibrantly practiced today. Zhang establishes a theoretical framework for understanding how Chinese culture has continued for thousands of years with vitality and validity, core and arbitrary identity markers, and folkloric identity. This framework, which describes a cultural self-healing mechanism, is equally applicable to the exploration of other traditions and cultures in the world. Through topics from Chinese Cinderella to the Grimms of China, from proverbs like “older ginger is spicier” to the life-views held by the Chinese, and from mountain songs and ballads to the musical instruments like the clay-vessel-flute, the author weaves these oral traditions across time and space into a mesmerizing intellectual journey. Focusing on contemporary practice, this book serves as a bridge between Chinese and international folklore scholarship and other related disciplines as well. Those interested in Chinese culture in general and Chinese folklore, literature, and oral tradition in particular will certainly delight in perusing this book. ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1793645132 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1793645135

Identity of the Vietnamese narrative culture: archetypal journeys from folk narratives to fantasy short stories

humanities and social sciences communications, 2021

The journey to another world is an archetype that exists in the forms of marvelous motifs and is also a typical narrative formula with the purpose of creating diverse versions of Vietnamese folk narratives. The archetypal journey was later reborn and expanded in medieval literature as Vietnamese culture, which has become more complex over time. With the aim of discovering the cultural identity of Vietnamese narratives using sociohistorical approaches and discussing the archetype grounded in specific contexts, this research focuses on journey motifs to the upper and lower world in folk narratives in early collections written in Han characters and in related historical and cultural bibliographies. At the same time, by analyzing the fantasy short stories in Excursive Notes on Weird Stories (Truyen ky man luc) by Nguyen Du, this study aims to discover the process of acculturation and creation of materials and motifs from folk narratives, and it discusses how these motifs have been adapted. This research reveals specific messages about the history, culture, era, voice and true identity of the medieval Vietnamese Confucian. Importantly, this study emphasizes the unification of spiritual power between folklore and Taoism and the powerful and influential competition between Taoism and Confucianism in medieval Vietnamese literature. The analysis shows that by recreating the motifs of the folk narratives, writers have built other world journeys to describe the hidden political discourses and religious conflicts in the thoughts of the human mind in the most ideal form.