Belief in Song Religion: "Writings from Longshu on the Pure Land" (Longshu jingtu wen 龍舒淨土文)

Presented by Harvard University's Faribank Center for Chinese Studies, Robert Hymes of Colombia University will discuss the cultural, religious, and historical value of Belief in Song Religion: "Writings from Longshu on the Pure Land"

Belief in Song Religion: "Writings from Longshu on the Pure Land" (Longshu jingtu wen  龍舒淨土文)

Robert Hymes, H. Walpole Carpentier Professor of Chinese History (EALAC) at Columbia University, received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on the social and cultural history of middle-period and early-modern China, drawing questions and sometimes data from cultural anthropology as well as history, and using the methods of the local historian to study elite culture, family and kinship, medicine, religion, gender, and (currently) the changing role and form of Chinese social networks from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. His publications include Statemen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (1987), and Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modern China (2002). Both books won the Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies for the best book on pre-1900 China. Professor Hymes also co-edited Ordering the World: Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China (1993).