Meaning and Controversy within Chinese Ancestor Religion

Download or read book Meaning and Controversy within Chinese Ancestor Religion written by Paulin Batairwa Kubuya and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese practices related to ancestors have long been the subject of conflicting interpretations. These practices are rooted in the lived experience of practitioners, and therefore need to be considered as embodied expressions of the quest for existential meaning. For practitioners, the achievement of existential meaning requires the inclusion, implication, and mediation of the ancestors. When gestures in ancestor rites are analyzed from this perspective it is possible to appreciate their essence as constitutive of “ancestor religion.” This book uses an inquisitive method that investigates the discrepancies between foreign and local explanations, and proposes another hermeneutic framework for ancestor related praxes.