Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions 1500-1700

<p>In this illuminating study of a vital but long overlooked aspect of Chinese religious life Jimmy Yu reveals that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries self-inflicted violence was an essential and sanctioned part of Chinese culture. He examines a wide range of practices including blood writing filial body-slicing chastity mutilations and suicides ritual exposure and self-immolation arguing that each practice was public scripted and a signal of cultural expectations. Individuals engaged in acts of self-inflicted violence to exercise power and to affect society by articulating moral values reinstituting order forging new social relations and protecting against the threat of moral ambiguity. Self-inflicted violence was intelligible both to the person doing the act and to those who viewed and interpreted it regardless of the various religions of the period: Buddhism Daoism Confucianism and other religions. This book is a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on bodily practices in late imperial China challenging preconceived ideas about analytic categories of religion culture and ritual in the study of Chinese religions.</p>