Buddhism in China during the late Qing and Republican period remained a powerful cultural and religious force. Francesca Tarocco is a rising star in this field and offers an innovative high-quality piece of work that presents a new perspective on the influence of Buddhism on Chinese culture. Drawing on scarcely analyzed historical and archive sources, including photographs and musical scores, Tarocco adeptly argues that Chinese Buddhism played a more vital role in shaping Chinese culture t...

In Japanese the term Karaoke means, literally, ‘empty orchestra’. One definition disparagingly describes it as the ‘social sensation from Japan where sufficiently inebriated people embarrass themselves in public by singing along to a music track with the lyrics displayed on a TV screen’. In recent years the world has been witnessing a massive worldwide karaoke explosion.In Karaoke, Zhou Xun and Francesca Tarocco address the complexity of this social craze, exploring its em...

Renunciation is a core value in the Buddhist tradition, but Buddhism is not necessarily austere. Jewels—along with heavenly flowers, rays of rainbow light, and dazzling deities—shape the literature and the material reality of the tradition. They decorate temples, fill reliquaries, are used as metaphors, and sprout out of imagined Buddha fields. Moreover, jewels reflect a particular type of currency often used to make the Buddhist world go round: merit in exchange for wealth. Regardless of ...