Books by K. E. Brashier

K. E. Brashier examines practices of memorializing the dead in early imperial China. After surveying how learning in this period relied on memorization and recitation, he treats the parameters name, age, and kinship as ways of identifying a person in Han public memory, as well as the media responsible for preserving the deceased person's identity.

In this study, the author contends that early Chinese ancestor worship was not merely mechanical and thoughtless. Rather, it was an idea system that aroused serious debates about the nature of postmortem existence, served as the religious backbone to Confucianism, and may even have been the forerunner of Daoist and Buddhist meditation practices.