China Books

This is a stupendously good book for those with any interest in the 3 phases of Buddhist development--the early period of the Buddha and his disciples and the so-called "Old Wisdom" phase of Buddhism, the Mahayana phase, and, especially, the rise of Vajrayana/Tantrayana/Mantrayana. This last phase is what Snellgrove specializes in and he has done an impressive job of presenting his vast erudition to the reader.

Many people will come to Snellgrove's Indo-Tibetan Buddhism specifically due to their interest in and perhaps practice of Vajrayana Buddhism of the Tibetan variety and will be most drawn to the book's Part V on Buddhism's introduction to Tibet and its flourishing in that land.

But many of us, interested in the precise details and mysterious enigmas of the formative period of Tantric (Vajrayana) Buddhism as it arose in India, will find Snellgrove's very long Part III on the rise and complex development of Vajrayana to be SUPERLATIVE--probably the best overall treatment of this multi-faceted topic in the English language. (Note: Part III is pp. 117-303 in the Shambhala 2002 revised, single-volume edition, and so, at over 180 pages, not including many other references to tantra elsewhere, and maps, footnotes [so much easier to read than endnotes!], etc., represents a book-length treatise on just this one topic.)

Snellgrove knows **many** of the few dozen most important of the early, middle, and late Buddhist tantras in their original languages, and offers lengthy quotes from the most relevant passages in each of these tantras to illustrate or back up a point he is making in his text. He is, truly, one of the world's experts on Buddhist tantra, and explores interesting themes and discrepancies I've not seen with any other writers on the topic, even the prodigious Alex Wayman (not to mention younger writers like Thurman, Hopkins, et al.).

Moreover, he brings a candor to the topics at hand, showing how the Buddhist tantras diverge on important topics, such as the specific Deities in the 3- and 5- and 6-Buddha families, and on the controversies over whether sexual yoga and the offering of "foul" sacramental ingredients are to be literally enacted or performed only symbolically. He also demolishes the later Tibetan idea that any of these tantras can really be hierarchically ordered according the the well-known (but dubiously based) "four classes" (Action Class, Performance Class, Yoga Class, and Highest Yoga Class tantras).

I could go on and on about this wonderful Part III, which is so filled with delightful surprises and riveting insights. If one has ANY interest in Buddhist tantra and likes a writer who doesn't "dumb down" his subject matter but goes into the rich details on a wide array of topics connected with tantra, then just this Part III alone is worth the price of the book.

But then one also gets with this book all its other parts, such as Part IV's information-rich treatment of Buddhism as it developed in Central Asia and Nepal, and Part V on the schools of Buddhism in Tibet.

Get the book and learn something from an expert (and non-apologist) about the crucial set of developments in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.

I recommand this book for one who want a good reference book on Tibetan Buddhism. This book is imformative and has a reasonably comprehensive coverage on all the most important areas in Tibetan Buddhism. This book is certainly a good bargain and has a good "useful information per dollar" ratio, especially when compared to many other books in the market.
This book has also been referred to and cited by many other scholars and is a respected authority in this area.

This is a hard to find book. If you can get your hands on a copy, you won't regret it! I LOVE THIS BOOK. Full of color illustrations, easy to follow text. Explains rituals and beliefs about Tibetan Buddhism. A must have, even for long time practioners. If not for anything, then for the wonderful photos. I would give more stars if I could.

Even before the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, Westerners have looked upon Tibetan Buddhism as a source of timeless wisdom and inspiration. Unfortunately, many of us who participate in the practice of the religion find themselves as lost as a deer that stares with confusion into the headlights of an oncoming car. Robert Thurman has been through that already. In 1964, he became the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk, by the Dalai Lama no less! Four years later, he left that life to pursue an academic career; he now chairs the department of Religion at Columbia University. Having lived in both cultures, (not to mention the fact that he is literally a genius) qualifies him as our guide for this magical mystery tour. If you read this book, you will then recognize at least some of what is going on in any Tibetan Buddhist ritual or celebration which you will ever witness. As an added bonus, reading this book will give you gobs of insightful trivia for interesting dinner-table conversation. The pretty pictures make this a suitable coffee-table book for illiterates; this book has something for everyone

China surpassed Japan in 2003 to become America's 3rd largest trade partner, after Canada and Mexico. Indeed, it won't be long - a couple of years at most - before China overtakes Mexico's position. In addition, China is already the world's 4th largest merchandise trader after the US, EU and Japan, and one of the top leading overall (merchandise plus services) trading nations of the world. By the end of this decade, perhaps before then, China will take over Japan's place as the world's 3rd largest overall trader in both merchandise and services - an astonishing performance for a country which practically did zero trade with the rest of the world only 25 years ago.

Policy-makers and businesspeople everywhere, and in America especially, need to sit up and listen to the sound, balanced, non-partisan, and cool-headed analysis by one of the world's leading experts on China and its role in the global trading system. And his name is Nicholas Lardy of the Brookings Institution.

Globalization is the hot topic and major concerns for every government and enterprises in 2002.

How China can integrate into the Global ecomony ?
And How Hong Kong can still alive when facing the competition with China in 2003?

Mr. Zhu Rongji (Prime Minister of China) has spoken to all elite people and officials when trip to Hong Kong in November, 2002.

Hong Kong is facing the highest un-empolyment percentage in 2002 and it is over 8% of the total population now.

How to make Hong Kong can be rapid changing in the next decade? There are no industrial development as before due the higher costs than other provinces in China. So China will give them more pressure when getting the orders from Oversea's markets.

Reckon you can see the speeches of " Zhu Rongji " in his last trip to Hong Kong.

China and Hong Kong are the Business Partners since 1983.
But now they are the competitor in every business development.
So how Hong Kong can stay alive when facing the Global economy?

Hong Kong can only run their own way and don't let China copy their old ways.

Although it is not easy to go the new way, it is their own choice.
Don't think too late and must run from this minute.

E-commerce and E-business development is the only way to go and reckon it can work more faster than China's doer.

Hong Kong should be forgotten your doer's way and think to re-enginnering in your business structures and models.

Hard work is the old fashion for Hong Kong now.
New Fashion is the new ideas and new models when stepping into the E-business.

Hope Hong Kong's government can bring up all the elite people to come across the crisis of economy and deflation in the next decade.

This is one of my most used, most favorite cookbooks and believe me, I have a lot of cookbooks. I love this book b/c every recipe tastes great! I love the pictures, the text, everything! Do yourself a favor and buy this book. Just the soup recipes alone are worth the price but really, every recipe I have ever tried is great!

this book has lots of super delicious recipes, and their easy to follow too. 1 of my fave recipe books 2 thumbs up! :O)

As a person that has studied East Asian cultural history academically for years, and a person who will be teaching China just four months from now, I found this book to be perfect. It was not written by a scholar, and I think in reality that is what makes it great. It is simply a man with a love for Asian culture, who came to be exposed to the reality of modern China. Still, even with all the hardships, his love remained. It is a testament to Americans that can see beyond the perceptions built by our own society, and also to the Chinese culture that was able to shine even under the political turmoil. Mark Salzman would not only write a wonderful book from his experience, but he also carried the beauty of wushu back to the United States, which is an accomplishment in and of itself. This book has incredible insight into Chinese culture, of course from an American perspective. There are too many good points about this book, and the movie that was produced as a result, to begin to list them here. I suggest you simply buy it and be prepared for a very enjoyable read, and maybe possibly a change in your perceptions.

This book, even though not written by a professional writer, tells the true life story of a martial artist and his search for a teacher. The story combines a description of China and its traditions , and the teachings of a true martial artist. It is focused on philosophy and changes the traditional view of martial arts as a violent art. It's a novel with a message.

The book is well researched & documented. It's awsome.
If later excacations by archaeologists and proved beyond reasonable doubt it was a Chinese settlement, the history of the western world should be rewritten.

When I first picked up this book and started to read it, it glued itself to my hands and did not want to let go. Anyway, that's how it felt as I read page after exciting page of this excellent work. This rendition of the author's historical/archaeological research and discovery is of the highest and most exciting caliber. The author's quest was to find who built certain structures on Cape Dauphin on Cape Breton Island. In his effort to find out, in the first half of the book, the author discusses the European discovery and early colonization of North Eastern North America, more specifically, Cape Breton Island and its surroundings. The second half is more concerned with the local Mi'kmaq Indians, including parallels between their culture and that of the Chinese. Chinese history is also briefly covered in this half, as it pertains to the main theme of this book. Included throughout are snippets of the author's personal life as he conducts his painstaking research. When I first read the book's subtitle, I was very skeptical: how could the Chinese have made their way to Eastern North America before the Europeans? After having read the author's arguments and his well-constructed analysis, I am now willing to entertain the possibility that he may indeed be on the right track. The author's writing style is very chatty, friendly and engaging, so much so that, as stated earlier, I could not put the book down. This book would be of great interest to history buffs as well as anyone who loves a good who-done-it story.

This is a collection of poetry salvaged from the walls of the barracks on Angel Island, where Chinese immigrants were detained between 1910 and 1940. Poems are in both English and Chinese. In addition to the poems, the editors provide an introduction to early Chinese immigration, and there are several pages of quotes from various immigrants, on various subjects such as the voyage to America and their impressions of Westerners. The poetry speaks for itself -- poems of desperation, despair, homesickness, and anger. This is a wonderful collection.

No immigrant population has ever been treated as shabbily and violently as the Chinese, who began arriving in large numbers during the California Gold Rush and who were recruited in even larger numbers to build transcontinental railroads, build levees in California, and to supplant African-American cotton pickers in Mississippi. The Chinese were brutalized, excluded, mocked, and TAXED! In 1852, a Foreign Miner's Tax, which accounted for more than half of the tax revenue collected in California between 1850 and 1870, was imposed on Chinese miners. Parallel fears fueled the antagonism against the Chinese: first, that they were unassimilable; second, that they would pollute the bloodlines of the Great Race, the Anglo-Saxon stock, which would seem to imply a measure of assimilation, or else outbreed "us". Laws were passed to exclude Chinese women, and then, in 1882, to exclude all immigration from China. Laws continued to severely curtail Chinese immigration until the 1960s, but exclusion was never 100% effective. The principal loohole was the acknowledged human right of Chinese-Americans to bring their wives and children to "Gold Mountain." The officials charged with overseeing this trickle of migration were invariably convinced that most of it was fraudulent; they were fierce and self-righteous in ferreting out the "paper sons," those illegal immigrants of yesteryear.

From 1910 to 1940, all immigrants arriving in California from China - including many who were en route to Mexico or Cuba - were quarantined in wooden barracks on the hidden side of Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, north of Alcatraz. About 175,000 Chinese, men, women and children, spent from three days to three years in detention on Angel Island, and quite a few of them ended up being shipped home. This book tells the story of that immigration in thirty pages of general history and through interviews with thirty-nine elderly survivors of the Island experience. Pictures of the detention station and its operations are also included, and suggest the bleak, crowded, disrespectful conditions that prevailed.

In 1940, the barracks on Angel Island were closed and abandoned. The buildings remained in disrepair until 1970, by which time Angel Island was a state park. Then the buildings were slated for demolition, but during an inspection, a park ranger, Alexander Weiss, noticed that the walls of the wooden buildings were covered with Chinese characters, carved or inscribed. He notified scholars at San Francisco State University, the inscriptions were photographed and translated, it was confirmed that they were chiefly poems composed in inmates during detention, and the Asian American community of San Francisco bagan to lobby for preservation of the historical site, equivalent to Ellis Island in the memory of European American immigrant descendents.

The station is now a major tourist attraction of the Bay Area, and easily one of the most interesting, to which thousands of visitors travel by ferry. The calligraphic inscriptions are visible, and translations are readily available. Unlike the stereoptype of "coolie" immigrants, the Chinese who cut these characters in the walls were literate representatives of a great civilization, however penniless and friendless they may have been when they arrived in the Land of the Free, only to be imprisoned.

The bulk of this touching book is composed of selected poems, in Chinese and in English translation, from the walls of the Island. Some express desolation:

"Living on Island, away from home elicits a hundred feelings.
My chest is filled with a sadness I cannot bear to explain.
Night and day, I sit passively and listlessly.
Fortunately, I have a novel as my companion."

Some are angry:

"Sadly, I listen to insects and angry surf.
The laws pile layer upon layer; how can I dissipate my hatred?
Drifting in as a traveler, I met with thsi calamity.
It's more miserable than owning only a flute
in the marketplace of Wu."

A few are vengeful:

"I have 10,000 hopes that the revolutionary armies
will complete their victory,
And help make the mining enterprises successful
in the ancestral land.
They will build many battleships and come
to the U.S. territory,
Vowing never to stop till the white men
are completely annihilated."

Of course the battleships never came. Instead there were waves of industrious and civil immigrants, and then further waves of industrial wares which we in America have come to depend on. Have the Chinese terrorized America? Stolen American jobs? Degraded American racial purity? Here in San Francisco, it seems obvious that the Chinese have been among the most valuable and assimilable immigrant populations ever. Their crime rate and public assistance rate are extremely low, and their employment rate is unmatched by any European American group. They've excelled in our public schools, raising the standards of performance for "white" students by their example of seriousness. They exceed the averages of European Americans in education, income, and marital stability. Their consumption of illegal drugs is far lower than that of white suburbanites. They are a major component of the thriving multi-culturalism that makes San Francisco the most desirable place to live in all the United States, as proven by housing prices.

America was built by immigrants, and then rebuilt again and again by later waves of immigrants, each time a richer and stronger culture. Those who blame problems on recent immigrants are wrong; they themselves are the problem.

I expected good artwork from this author as I've seen other work of his, but it has so much more than that! After receiving a copy as a gift, I sat down to read a little bit and read it from cover to cover. I found it engrossing and very amusing. I plan on going through it again now to look at the artwork in more detail, as I often find hidden things in Ben Wu's work. I recommend this book!

This book is fantastic, if not only for the storyline, which could only be described as bedtime stories for Wednesday Addams, but also for the fantasticly detailed artwork. The author is also the artist, and I am sure someday will be a major name, both in literature and art.

A magnificent insight of pre-World War II Japan and China by the hands of the most represantive of Greek soul of all writers.

The book proved invaluable in researching my new novel set in China as a sequel to THE SHANGHAI MURDERS. It was glorious to hear Kazantzakis's words on places that I have seen and his insights, as is true in his great fiction, are devistating in their accuracy. A book that all travel writers should read. A great treat.

The book, "The Jews of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture and Religion," by Xin Xu is a wonderful work which describes in great detail the culture, religious rites and history of the community of Jews that settled in Kaifeng back when it was the capital city.
He talks about relations with their neighbors, their clothing styles, religion, customs, language, diet and more.
Xin conducts a thorough and intricate study regarding this unique and astounding group of Jews who were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world for centuries.
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The Jews Of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture, And Religion by Ux Xin (Nanjing University) examines the indigenous Jewish community that lived in the city of Kaifeng in northeastern China. Far removed from the rest of the world, the Kaifeng Jews gradually adopted Chinese customs into their traditional way of life, and intermarried with the non-Jewish populace, so that eventually their descendants were almost completely assimilated. A truly fascinating and extensively researched historical study, The Jews Of Kaifeng is a unique and very welcome contribution to Judaic Studies reference shelves and supplemental reading lists.