[
    {
        "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": 212011,
        "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-1989",
        "page_number": 426,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "401\n\nconnections between the local guilds, membership on the committee and the emergence of a Chinese business elite, the importance of a Chinese alternative to the colonial government which the Tung Wah essentially represented, and the links between traditional Chinese political culture and the symbols and trappings of authority with which committee members sought to enhance their status. It would be interesting to see how these patterns of social control changed after the colonial government introduced more controls over the hospital in 1896. But that is another story. Dr. Sinn's book will stand as the definitive study of the early history of the hospital and it is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Hong Kong society and politics in the nineteenth century.\n\nIAN SCOTT, University of Hong Kong\n\nPaul A. Cohen and Merle Goldman, eds., Ideas Across Cultures: Essays On Chinese Thought In Honor of Benjamin I. Schwartz. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. xi + 400 pp. Index.\n\nThis Festschrift for the recently retired Harvard professor of Chinese history and political science, after nearly four decades of teaching and writing, is a genuine tribute to the iconoclastic Schwartzian tradition. All ten articles, written by former students of the last three decades, address questions in Chinese studies which engage broad ranges of comparison with other Asian and Western expressions, in search of Schwartz's 'possibility of a universal human discourse', (p. 314). In every case, the thematic questions take Schwartz's previous work as a starting point from which to embellish, extrapolate or challenge academic evaluations of China. Raising issues from such diverse fields as Shang oracular bones, Mo-ist and Confucian utilitarianism, medieval metaphysics, folk-opera in the 1920s, non-Eurocentric Marxist theory and recent democratic overtures in the People's Republic, the authors create a literary monument to the probing and sensitive studies of their teacher. Precisely because of these varying degrees of reference to the Schwartzian corpus and the unusual breadth of themes, the lack of an exhaustive bibliography related to the honored scholar and the absence of a Chinese glossary are regrettable.\n\nThe first and ninth articles, by Hao Chang and Thomas Metzger, pinpoint their correctives to Schwartz's claims. Chang repeats a claim already made in 1985 that the ‘axial age' (qua Karl Jaspers) of Chinese",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    }
]