Acknowledgments Introduction: Contextualizing Animals The Animal and the Daemon Animals as Images 1. Defining Animals Problems of Definition Animals in Texts Naming Animals and Animal Names Conclusion 2. Animals and Officers Managing Animals Ritual Animals Animals and Spirits Calendrical Animals Conclusion 3. Categorizing Animals Qi and Blood Yinyang and the Five Phases: Correlative Taxonomies Toward a Moral Taxonomy Conclusion 4. The Animal and Territory Animal Patterns as Social Patterns Animals and Territory Animals beyond Territory Conclusion 5. Transforming the Beasts Animals and the Origins of Music Animals, Music, and Moral Transformation The Transformation of Animals through Virtue Moral Hybrids "Speaking with Birds and Beasts" Conclusion 6. Changing Animals A Cosmogony of Change Demonic Transformations Functional Metamorphosis Autonomous Transformations Symbolic Metamorphosis Portentous Transformations Metamorphosing Agents Critique of Change Conclusion 7. Strange Animals Defining the Strange Interpreting the Strange Confucius Names the Beasts When the Grackos Nest in Lu The Dog as Daemon The Capture of the White Unicorn Conclusion Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
Roel Sterckx is University Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Cambridge and a former Junior Research Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.
"With his [Sterckx's] enormous knowledge ... and meticulous arguing ... he provides us with a unique work that will remain standard in the field for many years, an immense source of information full of stimulating new insights and interpretations dealing with the subject of the mutual relations between man and animal." - East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine "...a fascinating study of animals as metaphors for human behaviour and character, as well as of the anthropomorphism of animals thought subject to moral laws and human virtue." - Archives of Natural History "Sterckx's study deserves wide attention, for it broadens one's perspective of the historical, crossing disciplinary boundaries to suggest a fuller, more complete Chinese universe." - Journal of Asian History "This book provides a sumptuous and detailed typology of an important theme in early Chinese thought. It adumbrates the ways in which the animal world was appropriated by the early Chinese to create some of the most fundamental ideals concerning the spiritual, social, and political aspects of sagehood in Warring States and Han China. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of the way in which the early Chinese perceived the natural world and how such perceptions reflected on and shaped their views of the human world and what it meant to be human." - Sarah A. Queen, author of From Chronicle to Canon: The Hermeneutics of the Spring and Autumn, According to Tung Chung-Shu "I know of no other book, either in a European language or in Chinese or Japanese, which provides such a fascinating portrait of early Chinese interpretations of animals. I suspect that it will be a major reference work for everyone who deals with the intellectual and religious world of early China." - John H. Berthrong, author of Concerning Creativity: A Comparison of Chu Hsi, Whitehead, and Neville
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