Should I Be Worried? Worry in Dunhuang Divination
The emotional aspect of divination has rarely been systematically addressed in the history of Chinese divination. Focusing on divination manuals from Dunhuang 敦煌, this article examines the interaction between emotions, especially worry, and divination in medieval China. It explores, on the one hand,...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2024
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| In: |
International journal of divination and prognostication
Year: 2024, Volume: 5, Issue: 2, Pages: 209-239 |
| Further subjects: | B
Dunhuang manuscripts
B worry B Chinese divination B emotional terminology B divination manuals B medieval China B certainty & auspiciousness resp. uncertainty & inauspiciousness in Chinese divinatory terminology |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | The emotional aspect of divination has rarely been systematically addressed in the history of Chinese divination. Focusing on divination manuals from Dunhuang 敦煌, this article examines the interaction between emotions, especially worry, and divination in medieval China. It explores, on the one hand, how worry in the medieval context drove individuals to seek divinatory practices. On the other hand, it examines how the divination manuals used worry and other emotive words as part of their technical language to measure uncertainty. Surveying different usages of the terms for worry in these manuals, the article argues that the language of worry was part of the terminology of Dunhuang divination, serving as a heuristic to help the inquirers sense the level of auspiciousness and uncertainty of future scenarios. The article will also show that emotional words form a unique layer of terminology that conveys to inquirers a specific sense of auspiciousness. |
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| ISSN: | 2589-9201 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: International journal of divination and prognostication
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/25899201-bja10016 |
