The transmission of Buddhism from India to China was one of the most significant cross-cultural exchanges in the premodern world. This cultural encounter involved more than the spread of religious and philosophical knowledge. It influenced many spheres of Chinese life, including the often overlooked field of medicine. Analyzing a wide variety of Chinese Buddhist texts, C. Pierce Salguero examines the reception of Indian medical ideas in medieval China. These texts include translations from Indian languages as well as Chinese compositions completed in the first millennium C.E. Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China illuminates and analyzes the ways Chinese Buddhist writers understood and adapted Indian medical knowledge and healing practices and explained them to local audiences. The book moves beyond considerations of accuracy in translation by exploring the resonances and social logics of intercultural communication in their historical context. Presenting the Chinese reception of Indian medicine as a process of negotiation and adaptation, this innovative and interdisciplinary work provides a dynamic exploration of the medical world of medieval Chinese society. At the center of Salguero's work is an appreciation of the creativity of individual writers as they made sense of disease, health, and the body in the context of regional and transnational traditions. By integrating religious studies, translation studies, and literature with the history of medicine, Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China reconstructs the crucial role of translated Buddhist knowledge in the vibrant medical world of medieval China.

Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru helped create the myth of a nonviolent ancient India while building a modern independence movement on the principle of nonviolence (ahimsa). But this myth obscures a troubled and complex heritage: a long struggle to reconcile the ethics of nonviolence with the need to use violence to rule. Upinder Singh documents the dynamic tension between violence and nonviolence in ancient Indian political thought and practice over twelve hundred years. Political Violence in Ancient India looks at representations of kingship and political violence in epics, religious texts, political treatises, plays, poems, inscriptions, and art from 600 BCE to 600 CE. As kings controlled their realms, fought battles, and meted out justice, intellectuals debated the boundary between the force required to sustain power and the excess that led to tyranny and oppression. Duty (dharma) and renunciation were important in this discussion, as were punishment, war, forest tribes, and the royal hunt. Singh reveals a range of perspectives that defy rigid religious categorization. Buddhists, Jainas, and even the pacifist Maurya emperor Ashoka recognized that absolute nonviolence was impossible for kings. By 600 CE religious thinkers, political theorists, and poets had justified and aestheticized political violence to a great extent. Nevertheless, questions, doubt, and dissent remained. These debates are as important for understanding political ideas in the ancient world as for thinking about the problem of political violence in our own time.

Translinguistics represents a powerful alternative to conventional paradigms of language such as bilingualism and code-switching, which assume the compartmentalization of different 'languages' into fixed and arbitrary boundaries. Translinguistics more accurately reflects the fluid use of linguistic and semiotic resources in diverse communities. This ground-breaking volume showcases work from leading as well as emerging scholars in sociolinguistics and other language-oriented disciplines and collectively explores and aims to reconcile the distinction between 'innovation' and 'ordinariness' in translinguistics. Features of this book include: 18 chapters from 28 scholars, representing a range of academic disciplines and institutions from 11 countries around the world; research on understudied communities and geographic contexts, including those of Latin America, South Asia, and Central Asia; several chapters devoted to the diversity of communication in digital contexts. Edited by two of the most innovative scholars in the field, Translinguistics: Negotiating Innovation and Ordinariness is essential reading for scholars and students interested in the question of multilingualism across a variety of subject areas.

A collection of essays by social theorists, historical sociologists and area specialists in classical, biblical and Asian studies. The contributions deal with cultural transformations in major civilizational centres during the “Axial Age”, the middle centuries of the last millennium BCE, and their long-term consequences.

Southeast Asia ranks among the most significant regions in the world for tracing the prehistory of human endeavor over a period in excess of two million years. It lies in the direct path of successive migrations from the African homeland that saw settlement by hominin populations such as Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis. The first Anatomically Modern Humans, following a coastal route, reached the region at least 60,000 years ago to establish a hunter gatherer tradition that survives to this day in remote forests. From about 2000 BC, human settlement of Southeast Asia was deeply affected by successive innovations that took place to the north and west, such as rice and millet farming. A millennium later, knowledge of bronze casting penetrated along the same pathways. Copper mines were identified and exploited, and metals were exchanged over hundreds of kilometers. In the Mekong Delta and elsewhere, these developments led to early states of the region, which benefitted from an agricultural revolution involving permanent ploughed rice fields. These developments illuminate how the great early kingdoms of Angkor, Champa, and Funan came to be, a vital stage in understanding the roots of the present nation states of Southeast Asia. Assembling the most current research across a variety of disciplines--from anthropology and archaeology to history, art history, and linguistics--The Oxford Handbook of Early Southeast Asia will present an invaluable resource to experienced researchers and those approaching the topic for the first time.