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This article examines a group of Song-dynasty biji (miscellaneous jottings) anecdotes featuring the Northern Song literary giant Su Shi (style name Dongpo, 1037-1101) playfully engaging with Buddhist encounter dialogues. These religious accounts are well known for their riddle-like language and the baffling effect they create among their readers, prompting the question of whether they were read for humor. Previous scholarship on encounter dialogues focuses on the religious perspective, demonstrating that their perplexing language and rhetoric serve pedagogical and monastic functions. By contrast, this article explores Chan Buddhist humor from the perspective of the literati and vernacular culture by examining how encounter dialogues were incorporated in Song-dynasty vernacular plays and literati storytelling. Focusing on stories that depict Su Shi's playful engagement with encounter dialogues as a case study, this article reveals that an important part of Su Shi's humorous image is inspired and shaped by Buddhism. It also shows that humor in these biji stories is contingent on the readers' knowledge of Chan literature such as 'recorded dialogues' (yulu) and 'transmission records' (denglu), which were popular among literati during the Song. The anecdotal materials preserved in biji suggests a mutual influence between Chan literature and vernacular entertainment during the Song. I argue that, in addition to religious functions, literary factors of performance and aesthetics played significant roles in conditioning the entertaining effect of encounter dialogues, particularly when they were received outside of monastic circles., INTRODUCTION The Song dynasty (960-1279) witnessed a surge of interest in anecdotal writing by educated elites, resulting in a large corpus of personal collections known as biji (miscellaneous jottings). (1) [...]

Shen Gua's Empiricism. By YA ZUO. Cambridge. MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 2018. Pp. xiii + 333. $49.95. Song-dynasty scholar-official Shen Gua (sometimes rendered as Shen Kua or Shen Kuo [...]

This article examines accounts of women during war and social turmoil in Hong Mai's (1123-1202) collection of anomalous occurrences, the Yijian zhi (Record of the listener). Recent scholarship, relying on Song-period women's biographies, contends that the wars of the twelfth century contributed to Southern Song elite men's increasing efforts to analogize female fidelity to men's political loyalty in China since the Song. This article conveys another dimension: the emotional trauma of Southern Song society's war-time experiences. Such reading unveils at least three types of Yijian zhi accounts on women during war: the model virtue type, which falls neatly into the heroic women narrative tradition; the moral uncanny type, which features the scary side of righteous cruelty; and the lighthearted joking type, which mitigates the intensity of the traumatic experience of displacement. An examination of female fidelity in these eclectic accounts suggests that gendered moral discourses attached to women's biographies do not fully reflect how Southern Song society remembered women's suffering during national crises. This article demonstrates that, struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of wars and social disorder, Hong Mai and his contemporaries were still in the process of grappling with the tenet of female fidelity and its implications for men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective To investigate the risk factors for neonatal asphyxia in Hubei Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture and establish a nomogram model for predicting the risk of neonatal asphyxia. Methods A retrospective study was conducted with 613 cases of neonatal asphyxia treated in 20 cooperative hospitals in Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture from January to December 2019 as the asphyxia group, and 988 randomly selected non-asphyxia neonates born and admitted to the neonatology department of these hospitals during the same period as the control group. Univariate and multivariate analyses were used to identify risk factors for neonatal asphyxia. R software (4.2.2) was used to establish a nomogram model. Receiver operator characteristic curve, calibration curve, and decision curve analysis were used to assess the discrimination, calibration, and clinical usefulness of the model for predicting the risk of neonatal asphyxia, respectively. Results Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that minority (Tujia), male sex, premature birth, congenital malformations, abnormal fetal position, intrauterine distress, maternal occupation as a farmer, education level below high school, fewer than 9 prenatal check-ups, threatened abortion, abnormal umbilical cord, abnormal amniotic fluid, placenta previa, abruptio placentae, emergency caesarean section, and assisted delivery were independent risk factors for neonatal asphyxia (P<0.05). The area under the curve of the model for predicting the risk of neonatal asphyxia based on these risk factors was 0.748 (95%CI: 0.723-0.772). The calibration curve indicated high accuracy of the model for predicting the risk of neonatal asphyxia. The decision curve analysis showed that the model could provide a higher net benefit for neonates at risk of asphyxia. Conclusions The risk factors for neonatal asphyxia in Hubei Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture are multifactorial, and the nomogram model based on these factors has good value in predicting the risk of neonatal asphyxia, which can help clinicians identify neonates at high risk of asphyxia early, and reduce the incidence of neonatal asphyxia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]