[
    {
        "id": 214243,
        "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-1998",
        "page_number": 101,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "64\n\nMaritchi [or Marici Deva], [a Sanskrit term for the Indian mythological form of Parbati, the wife of Siva]; and Ma-yeh, the mother of Sakyamuni, The Buddha, the whole being confused by devotees who tend to describe them all as Chun-t'i, with the legends of Maritchi and Cundi producing an inextricably involved and perplexing picture.\n\nImages of Marici are present in both the Ta Pei Ssu and the Pi-yun Ssu and in both temples he, rather than she, is portrayed as a standing Buddhist deity with eight arms and with three faces. The face facing forward is of a benign human with hooded eyes commonly seen on Tibetan images. He has a third eye in the centre of his forehead. The other two are faces of a pig and of a human. He is dressed in colourful robes and a five-leaf Buddhist crown, and is barefoot.\n\nThe association between Chun-t'i and Kuan Yin goes back to the original relationship in Buddhism of Chun-t’i with the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara who promised to save mankind and bring them to deliverance before they, the two bodhisattvas, Chun-t'i and Avalokitesvara themselves entered Nirvana. Marici has the face and eight arms of Chun-t'i, and is one of the six manifestations of Avalokitesvara who is concerned especially with humans, rather than the deities and demons. Chun-t'i in the form of Avalokitesvara is a male deity, though Tantric sects, giving her an entirely different role left her feminine.\n\nLegends about Chun-t'i usually include stories of her valour in battle. According to the Ming novel The Deification of the Gods [Feng-shen Yen-i], from which many of the beliefs of folk religion devotees have evolved, Chun-t’i was summoned to Heaven during the legendary period of Chinese history when the heroes and Immortals were emerged, in order to acquire the necessary skills to take on K'ung Hsüan, one of the contestants for the dynastic throne. This was because she had attained the required degree of perfection on Earth. She found herself whisked aloft in a rainbow, and having acquired the skills necessary she reappeared in a cloud of fire with twenty-four heads and eighteen arms and, throwing a silken cord around her adversary's throat, she turned K'ung Hsüan into a one-eyed peacock on which she rode off to the Western Heavens.\n\nImages of Chun-t'i show her with four or nine pairs of arms, each",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214244,
        "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-1998",
        "page_number": 102,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "65\n\nhand holding a precious object including a rosary, cudgel, jar, spear, pagoda, golden arrow, halberd, or bell, etc. and it is therefore not surprising that the images of Chun-t'i on the altars of both Buddhist and folk religion temples portray her with eight or eighteen arms and hands, the main two hands being held palms pressed together before the chest in prayer. The uppermost hands hold discs of the Sun and Moon respectively and the remainder, individually, hold various attributes including a seal of office, a sword, shield and fly switch. She is variously represented with three heads though predominantly she is depicted with one head with three faces one of which is that of a sow. Chun-t'i again often has a third eye in the centre of her forehead, usually a Taoist form but attributed to her Indian origin as a metamorphosed caste mark. She is generally portrayed sitting on a lotus throne in the same posture adopted by the Buddha and, in one of her poses, also by Kuan Yin P’u-sa. According to Werner the legend explaining the third face being that of a sow and the creatures supporting the lotus also being pigs relates how one of the abbesses of the Semding monastery in Tibet in whom the goddess Chun-t'i was believed to be successively incarnated, had an excrescence resembling a sow's ear at the back of her head.\n\nIn northern and central China in Tantric Buddhist temples, the Lamaist goddess Maritci, portrayed in a chariot drawn by seven pigs is identified as Chun-t'i; in the south however, where Tantric Buddhism hardly penetrated, images identified as Chun-t'i are said by priests, should devotees enquire, to be the Brahmanic cult of Maritci. However, in Tibetan and Mongol [Tantric] Buddhism Tou-mu is a common deity with her three eyes and many arms; she is considered to be an incarnation of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva known throughout China as Kuan Yin and this doubtless explains the confusion with Kuan Yin in central and southern China. She has been identified as Tou-mu Yuan-chün, the main deity in the T'ai Sui Hall in the Jade Emperor temple in Tainan, where she is flanked by two Tantric aides, Ch'ieh-ch'ih and Yao Ya.\n\nIn her Taoist form she is portrayed seated on a lotus, again of Indian origin, which in a number of temples rests on the back of a tortoise which in turn rests on three or seven pigs. Most likely this is no more than a reflection of the tale in the Feng-shen Yen-i in which one of the disciples of Tou-mu, Shui-huo Tung-tzu, who changed into a tortoise, bore off Tou-mu to the Western Heavens.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214265,
        "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-1998",
        "page_number": 123,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "86\n\npray to him for the blessing of a son. However, in Cholon [Saigon] his image, seen in several temples are known as Tzu-wei Ta-ti but identified as T'ai-sui, the god of the planet Jupiter and of Time, though in the major Jade Emperor temple in Cholon images of both T'ai Sui with his bell and Tzu-wei astride his lion stand side by side.\n\nHis standard image in Cantonese communities portrays him as a clean-shaven youth with large round protruding eyes, astride or sitting side-saddle on a reclining mythical beast, possibly a stylised lion. He is holding a seal aloft in his right hand, a talisman bearing the inscription \"The Star looks Straight On\" R. He also has a unique feature, a flag pole behind him on to which is fixed a sheathed sword. The youth holds a conch shell in his left hand and is dressed in only trousers and a cape which hangs round his neck and down his back. He is wearing shoes and has neck-length hair which is held in place by a tiara from which two objects, like insects' feelers, protrude upwards.\n\nIn yet another tale, an extraordinary and complicated legend, an emperor had eighteen robes specially embroidered for the Eighteen Lohan. These were being delivered by a trusted minister who reached their palace in the Western Heavens only to find seventeen Lohan. He sought the eighteenth and found him dead in the kitchen crawling with big fat lice. As this Lohan was the god of the star Tzu-wei and this star represented the emperor of China, the minister knew immediately that the emperor had died since his departure and the spirit of the dead Lohan had been incarnated as the new emperor. The minister was puzzled - what he should do? Finally, he placed the cape around the body of the dead Lohan and returned to Earth bearing a box from the other Lohan which would, they assured him, prove that he had accomplished his mission. When, after months of travel, he reached home, the new emperor opened the box and out flew a crane up into the sky and back to the stars. Artists customarily depict this in their portrait of Tzu-wei.\n\n39] Lei Shen The Spirit of Thunder\n\nLei Shen is portrayed and named as such in only one of the two temples, the Pi-yun Ssu. The problem is that Lei Shen, as such, has been noted on remarkably few altars. Lei Kung, the God of Thunder is",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214352,
        "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-1998",
        "page_number": 210,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "175\n\nthe Zhou dynasty and became the emperor of the new dynasty, the Zhou, and is known by his reign title of Wu Wang. The Book of History suggests that his army consisted in part or in the main of a central Asian race, the Western Yi. Zhou Xin is vilified as a moral degenerate under the spell of a wicked concubine, Dan Ji. The Shang were attacked and replaced as the dominant force in northern China by the Zhou just before the first millennium BC, having come from the west. They established their capital near present-day Xi'an.\n\n6\n\nThe victor, Wu Wang [King Wu], passed on the title of Zhou Gong [Duke Zhou] to his brother, Dan, and also conferred the imperial title on his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather who had only been dukes when still alive. Zhou Gong was the paragon of literary China for some three thousand years, and it was he rather than his imperial brother who was the author of the Constitution of Zhou. When his brother, the emperor, died leaving a young son, court officials and the vassals assumed that Duke Zhou would usurp the throne and kill his nephew. He did nothing of the sort, and instead, it was the young king who at the age of nineteen stripped his uncle of his powers and forced him to live in exile in Shandong where he died a few years later.\n\nThe deities described in traditional vernacular fiction, and in particular in the immensely popular novel the Fengshen Yanyi, are known to most Chinese, whereas the majority of those left out of the Fengshen Yanyi, apart from the major cult deities, have to all intents and purposes gone into limbo and are only known within small pockets of China or have been lost in the mists of time. Versions of the legend passed on orally often in local dialect, which frequently does not extend further than the extent of the dialect group, have numerous minor and occasionally major variations, whereas the written version was read China-wide in its 'established' state.\n\nSo many heroes and worthies make their appearance at one stage or another that it is impossible to name them all. Some appear momentarily during one of the battles, others are recorded in several chapters, occasionally with different names or titles, such as the Northern Emperor [Bei Di] who is also known by his titles, Xuantian Shang Di, The Supreme Lord of the Dark Heavens, and Zhen Wu, The True Warrior. And in temples today, in all probability, he will be known by only one of these titles, with local devotees vigorously denying that an identical...\n\nPage 210\n\nPage 211",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
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