How did Buddhism; so prominent in Japanese life for over a thousand years; become the target of severe persecution in the social and political turmoil of the early Meiji era? How did it survive attacks against it and reconstitute itself as an increasingly articulate and coherent belief system and a bastion of the Japanese national heritage? Here James Ketelaar elucidates not only the development of Buddhism in the late nineteenth century but also the strategies of the Meiji state.
#917755 in Books Princeton University Press 1993-11-15Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 9.00 x .36 x 6.00l; .52 #File Name: 0691000921148 pages
Review
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Five StarsBy CustomerGood historic text.0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. The most accessible decent translation; more about the Renaissance influence of Horapollo than the ancient backgroundBy DAJIf you have read anything about the decipherment of hieroglyphs in the early 19th century; you will know that Horapollo's book Hieroglyphica misled Europeans into thinking hieroglyphs were an entirely ideographic script. In 1950; George Boas made the most recent English translation of this infamous book. I'm not entirely satisfied with his edition; but if you want to read the text and don't know another language; your only other option is Alexander Turner Cory's 1840 translation. It's easy to find and read online; but it has even less commentary than Boas and; like many 19th-century texts; it switches into Latin whenever the original text discusses sex; even though Horapollo is hardly explicit about such things.Boas' main interest was the way Horapollo's book influenced Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries; so he based his translation largely on the published Latin version; which is closer to what those people would have read than the earliest extant Greek copies are. His version would be helpful for anyone studying the use in hieroglyphs in early modern times and would probably make a useful companion to The Myth of Egypt and Its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition. Boas' commentary also points out where Horapollo's ideas are similar to those of other ancient authors; from Herodotus to Ammianus Marcellinus. Yet the commentary is not very detailed and gives only a limited impression of the context the book came from. Grafton's 1993 foreword helps in fleshing that context out and in providing references to some more recent sources that touch on it.Granted; that context is very murky. The book is traditionally attributed to one of two thoroughly Hellenized Egyptians named Horapollo in the fifth century AD; a grandfather and his grandson. Yet the history of the text before the 15th century seems to be entirely unknown. All we can say for sure is that some of the meanings that the author gave to hieroglyphic symbols were correct; but most were not. Therefore; the text does seem to come from a time when some fragmentary knowledge about the script was still extant. Every accurate passage of the Hieroglyphica comes from Book One; which is one of the reasons why Boas says Book Two was probably written by a different author. On top of that; some pieces of the text seem to have been lost; others may have been tacked on to earlier passages; and some passages contradict one another.For a long time; the only extensive commentary on the Hieroglyphica and its origins was a French-language one by Baudouin van de Walle and Jozef Vergote in Chronique d'Égypte in 1943. The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo Nilous; by Mark Wildish; seems poised to replace that commentary once it is published next month; but Boas' book will remain the cheaper and more accessible option for a long time.
