[
    {
        "id": 205010,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1965",
        "page_number": 118,
        "title": "RAS-1965",
        "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n109\n\nof Buddhist Tantrism\" with a discussion of the mystic's approach to what is 'experience.' When he treats the concepts of 'reality' and 'spirituality' his reference to S. Freud's 'super-ego' for the Tibetan yid i.e. 'mind,' lacks persuasiveness, but admittedly this is not part of the main argument. Comparisons with Hegel and Kant as well as the Sanskrit sources and their interpretation could not be checked for this review. Apart from referring, among others, to Bertrand Russell and Karl Jaspers, the author seems to agree repeatedly with William S. Haas's The Destiny of the Mind. Taken as a whole, this broadly conceived study is valuable food for thought to the informed philosopher.\n\n\"Three Impressions of Bamian\" by Alastair Lamb is an exciting introduction to the sculptures, caves and wall paintings of this Buddhist monastic cave complex in Afghanistan. The views and pictures of three visitors to Bamian are compared: Charles Masson in 1832, Vincent Eyre in 1842 and Lamb himself in 1958. The picture section comprises altogether thirty-two plates, mostly photographs. The main features of Bamian are the Buddha colossi of 120 and 175 feet in height respectively, the \"giants of Gandhara sculpture.\" Bamian is taken as “a gigantic demonstration of the great extent of contacts between China, India, Iran and the Mediterranean which flourished from the foundation of the Roman Empire to the period of the T'ang Dynasty.\" The various early domes in Bamian cave architecture are treated in some detail and described as \"convincing proof of the strong Western influence in the Buddhist architecture of Afghanistan.\"\n\nThaung Blackmore presents a comprehensive view of the \"Founding of the City of Mandalay by King Mindon\" in 1857. Though some ancient Burmese customs such as myosade, i.e. human sacrifices at the foundation of a city, were given up, the construction of Mandalay was still mainly influenced by traditional concepts, in particular by astrology.\n\nWalter Hochstadter is a very outspoken fighter for the \"Real Shen Chou,\" as he sees him. Under the heading of \"Popular Conceptions of Shen Chou's Style\" he particularly criticizes Professor Osvald Sirén. Hochstadter lists seven points which are useful to establish a major painter's work, the main one being brushwork. He arrives at the conclusion that only two works",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1965.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 216509,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-2003",
        "page_number": 268,
        "title": "RAS-2003",
        "content_text": "220\n\nBuddha. After all, the Greeks had settled here even earlier, in the third century BCE. Other examples, before being blown up in 2001, were the huge images of Buddha carved out of the cliff in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, with their moulded mud and stucco draperies. Alexander's forays and settlements to lands well to the east of his Macedonian homeland remind us that several of the cities that Tucker describes were far more ancient than the Silk Road. Babylon, which fell to Alexander in 331 BCE, had already by then been the Middle East's most magnificent city for over fifteen hundred years. The earliest city to occupy the site of Chang'an was in existence before 1000 BCE.\n\nTucker manages to convey a huge sweep of history and geography. You will need time to read this book as, if you merely dip into it, you will lose the interconnecting threads, which are the crux of his thesis, i.e. that, throughout fifteen hundred years, numerous cultures met along the Silk Road and nourished each other's creative spirits. You will need to read it at a table because it is too heavy to read on your knees. And you will need an atlas alongside it that has maps showing some realms not often shown on a single spread. Your maps will need to show the geographical proximity of the towering mountain ranges of the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush with the drainage basins of the Aral Sea to their west and north and with the upper tributaries of the Indus to their east and south. The passes connecting these regions beckoned both Alexander and, nearly two thousand years later, Tamerlane, both intent on conquering and settling the north of the Indian subcontinent. You will need a single map to show the vast latitudinal spread of the great grasslands, deserts and semi-deserts from Turkey to northern China over which the nomads galloped. It was along these northernmost routes of the Silk Road that the Mongols charged on their terrifying way to Vienna, besieging it in 1241 and only withdrawing because they had to travel back, unexpectedly but unavoidably, all the way to Karakorum to appoint a new Grand Khan. The Silk Road saw many such events that were turning points in history, such as when in 1218 the governor of a city in what is now Kazakhstan killed an envoy of Ghengis Khan, suspecting that he was a spy, an action that precipitated the wrath of the Khan, and \"was to propel the world into an abyss, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to the deaths of millions of people from the Danube to the Sea of Japan' (p.221) - because Ghengis Khan's horsemen set out to avenge this insult, inflicting terrible retribution on all in their path.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390",
        "rank": 0
    }
]