http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/east-asian-history/astrology-and-cosmology-early-china-conforming-earth-heaven
The ancient Chinese were profoundly influenced by the Sun, Moon and stars, making persistent efforts to mirror astral phenomena in shaping their civilization. In this pioneering text, David W. Pankenier introduces readers to a seriously understudied field, illustrating how astronomy shaped the culture of China from the very beginning and how it influenced areas as disparate as art, architecture, calendrical science, myth, technology, and political and military decision-making. As elsewhere in the ancient world, there was no positive distinction between astronomy and astrology in ancient China, and so astrology, or more precisely, astral omenology, is a principal focus of the book. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including archaeological discoveries, classical texts, inscriptions and paleography, this thought-provoking book documents the role of astronomical phenomena in the development of the 'Celestial Empire' from the late Neolithic through the late imperial period.

Between the seventh and ninth centuries, the Chinese mind became preoccupied with a concept of the afterlife that persists into modern times. To be reborn, the deceased must successfully negotiate passage through ten courts of law, each ruled by a magistrate or king. The pains of transition from death to rebirth can be alleviated by the intercession of the living with contributions to the Buddhist church and bribes of spirit money. The cosmology, morality, and rituals of the ten kings are described for the first time in surviving sources in an illustrated text, The Scripture on the Ten Kings, which is here translated for the first time.

Burning for the Buddha is the first book-length study of the theory and practice of "abandoning the body"(self-immolation) in Chinese Buddhism. It examines the hagiographical accounts of all those who made offerings of their own bodies and places them in historical, social, cultural, and doctrinal context. Rather than privilege the doctrinal and exegetical interpretations of the tradition, which assume the central importance of the mind and its cultivation, James Benn focuses on the ways in which the heroic ideals of the bodhisattva present in scriptural materials such as the Lotus Sutra played out in the realm of religious practice on the ground.