Benjamin Penny: 4 books

In July 1999, a mere seven years after the founding of the religious movement known as the Falun Gong, the Chinese government banned it. Falun Gong is still active in other countries, and its suppression has become a primary concern of human rights activists and is regularly discussed in dealings...

The Chinese and Tibetan traditions value biography as a primary historiographical and literary genre. This volume analyses biographies as texts, taking seriously the literary turn in historical and religious studies and applying some of its insights to an understudied but central corpus of material in Chinese and Tibetan religion.

'Of ways you may speak, but not the Perennial Way; By names you may name, but not the Perennial Name.' The best-loved of all the classical books of China and the most universally popular, the Daodejing or Classic of the Way and Life-Force is a work that defies definition. It encapsulates the main...

This book explores how religion is and has been created, transmitted, embodied and changed in specific locations in late imperial, modern and contemporary Taiwan and China. Locating research not only on temples, mosques, churches, schools, tea houses, festival sites, burial grounds and shrines, but...