Chán Buddhism in Dūnhuáng and Beyond

Chán Buddhism in Dūnhuáng and Beyond
Author: Christoph Anderl
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2020-11-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004439242

Chán Buddhism in Dūnhuáng and Beyond traces the development of early Chán in the Northern region, based on a study of Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur and Tangut manuscripts.

Ordinary Mind as the Way

Ordinary Mind as the Way
Author: Mario Poceski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2007-04-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0198043201

Under the leadership of Mazu Daoyi (709-788) and his numerous disciples, the Hongzhou School emerged as the dominant tradition of Chan (Zen) Buddhism in China during the middle part of the Tang dynasty(618-907). Mario Poceski offers a systematic examination of the Hongzhou School's momentous growth and rise to preeminence as the bearer of Chan orthodoxy, and analyzes its doctrines against the backdrop of the intellectual and religious milieus of Tang China. Poceski demonstrates that the Hongzhou School represented the first emergence of an empire-wide Chan tradition that had strongholds throughout China and replaced the various fragmented Schools of early Chan with an inclusive orthodoxy. Poceski's study is based on the earliest strata of permanent sources, rather than on the later apocryphal "encounter dialogue" stories regularly used to construe widely-accepted but historically unwarranted interpretations about the nature of Chan in the Tang dynasty. He challenges the traditional and popularly-accepted view of the Hongzhou School as a revolutionary movement that rejected mainstream mores and teachings, charting a new path for Chan's independent growth as a unique Buddhist tradition. This view, he argues, rests on a misreading of key elements of the Hongzhou School's history. Rather than acting as an unorthodox movement, the Hongzhou School's success was actually based largely on its ability to mediate tensions between traditionalist and iconoclastic tendencies. Going beyond conventional romanticized interpretations that highlight the radical character of the Hongzhou School, Poceski shows that there was much greater continuity between early and classical Chan-and between the Hongzhou School and the rest of Tang Buddhism-than previously thought.

Chan Buddhism in Ritual Context

Chan Buddhism in Ritual Context
Author: Bernard Faure
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2005-09-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1134431163

The essays in this volume attempt to place the Chan and Zen tradition in their ritual and cultural contexts, looking at various aspects heretofore largely (and unduly) ignored. In particular, they show the extent to which these traditions, despite their claim to uniqueness, were indebted to larger trends in East Asian Buddhism, such as the cults of icons, relics and the monastic robe. The book emphasises the importance of ritual for a proper understanding of this allegedly anti-ritualistic form of Buddhism. In doing so, it deconstructs the Chan/Zen 'rhetoric of immediacy' and its ideological underpinnings.

Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies

Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies
Author: Albert Welter
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2022-11-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438490909

This volume focuses on Chinese Chan Buddhism and its spread across East Asia, with special attention to its impacts on Korean Sŏn and Japanese Zen. Zen enthralled the scholarly world throughout much of the twentieth century, and Zen Studies became a major academic discipline in its wake. Interpreted through the lens of Japanese Zen and its reaction to events in the modern world, Zen Studies incorporated a broad range of Zen-related movements in the East Asian Buddhist world. As broad as the scope of Zen Studies was, however, it was clearly rooted in a Japanese context, and aspects of the "Zen experience" that did not fit modern Japanese Zen aspirations tended to be marginalized and ignored. Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies acknowledges the move beyond Zen Studies to recognize the changing and growing parameters of the field. The volume also examines the modern dynamics in each of these traditions.

Monks, Rulers, and Literati : The Political Ascendancy of Chan Buddhism

Monks, Rulers, and Literati : The Political Ascendancy of Chan Buddhism
Author: Asian Religions University of Winnipeg Albert Welter Professor
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2006-01-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780199721191

The Chan (Zen in Japanese) school began when, in seventh-century China, a small religious community gathered around a Buddhist monk named Hongren. Over the centuries, Chan Buddhism grew from an obscure movement to an officially recognized and eventually dominant form of Buddhism in China and throughout East Asia. It has reached international popularity, its teachings disseminated across cultures far and wide. In Monks, Rulers, and Literati, Albert Welter presents, for the first time in a comprehensive fashion in a Western work, the story of the rise of Chan, a story which has been obscured by myths about Zen. Zen apologists in the twentieth century, Welter argues, sold the world on the story of Zen as a transcendental spiritualism untainted by political and institutional involvements. In fact, Welter shows that the opposite is true: relationships between Chan monks and political rulers were crucial to Chan's success. The book concentrates on an important but neglected period of Chan history, the 10th and 11th centuries, when monks and rulers created the so-called Chan "golden age" and the classic principles of Chan identity. Placing Chan's ascendancy into historical context, Welter analyzes the social and political factors that facilitated Chan's success as a movement. He then examines how this success was represented in the Chan narrative and the aims of those who shaped it. Monks, Rulers, and Literati recovers a critical period of Zen's past, deepening our understanding of how the movement came to flourish. Welter's groundbreaking work is not only the most comprehensive history of the dominant strand of East Asian Buddhism, but also an important corrective to many of the stereotypes about Zen.

Historical Dictionary of Chan Buddhism

Historical Dictionary of Chan Buddhism
Author: Youru Wang
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2017-06-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1538105527

The popular name for Chan Buddhism, in the West, is Zen Buddhism, as it was Japanese scholars who first introduced Chan Buddhism to the West with this translation. Indeed, chan is a shortened form of the Chinese word channa, rendered from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which denotes practices of the concentration of the mind through meditation or contemplation. Although rooted in the Indian tradition of yoga, which aims at the unification of the individual with the divine, meditative concentration became integrated into the Buddhist path to enlightenment as one of the three learnings (sanxue) of Buddhism. Early Buddhist (or the so-called Hinayana Buddhist) scriptures include the teachings on four stages of meditation, four divine abodes, four formless meditations, the tranquility (samatha) and insight (vipassanā) meditations, and so on. Early Buddhist communities commonly practiced these meditations, along with the moral disciplines and the study of the scriptures and doctrines. Mahayana Buddhism, in India and East Asia, continued the practice of meditation as one of the six perfections (or virtues) of the bodhisattva path. In this general context, some eminent monks might have composed scriptures/treatises for the training of meditation or have become more famed with meditation. However, the school of Chan is more than just a group of meditation practitioners. As one of the Chinese Buddhist schools, it involves its own ideology, its own community, and its own genealogical history, serving to establish its own identity. The Historical Dictionary of Chan Buddhism contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, schools, texts, vocabularies, doctrines, rituals, temples, events, and other practices. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Chan Buddhism.

Chan Buddhism in Ritual Context

Chan Buddhism in Ritual Context
Author: Bernard Faure
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2005-09-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1134431171

The essays in this volume attempt to place the Chan and Zen tradition in their ritual and cultural contexts, looking at various aspects heretofore largely (and unduly) ignored. In particular, they show the extent to which these traditions, despite their claim to uniqueness, were indebted to larger trends in East Asian Buddhism, such as the cults of icons, relics and the monastic robe. The book emphasises the importance of ritual for a proper understanding of this allegedly anti-ritualistic form of Buddhism. In doing so, it deconstructs the Chan/Zen 'rhetoric of immediacy' and its ideological underpinnings.

Dunhuang Manuscript Culture

Dunhuang Manuscript Culture
Author: Imre Galambos
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2020-12-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110727102

“Dunhuang Manuscript Culture” explores the world of Chinese manuscripts from ninth-tenth century Dunhuang, an oasis city along the network of pre-modern routes known today collectively as the Silk Roads. The manuscripts have been discovered in 1900 in a sealed-off side-chamber of a Buddhist cave temple, where they had lain undisturbed for for almost nine hundred years. The discovery comprised tens of thousands of texts, written in over twenty different languages and scripts, including Chinese, Tibetan, Old Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian and Sanskrit. This study centres around four groups of manuscripts from the mid-ninth to the late tenth centuries, a period when the region was an independent kingdom ruled by local families. The central argument is that the manuscripts attest to the unique cultural diversity of the region during this period, exhibiting—alongside obvious Chinese elements—the heavy influence of Central Asian cultures. As a result, it was much less ‘Chinese’ than commonly portrayed in modern scholarship. The book makes a contribution to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads.

Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism

Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism
Author: Don A. Pittman
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2001-02-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 082486526X

The Venerable Master Taixu (1890–1947) is the most important and controversial Chinese Buddhist reformer of the twentieth century. Viewed as dangerously rash by conservative Buddhists, irrelevant by secular humanists, and spiritually misguided by Christian missionaries, Taixu was nevertheless committed to forging a socially engaged form of Buddhism and to organizing a Buddhist mission in the West. His bold and inventive "Buddhist revolution" continues to shape aspects of a revitalized Buddhism in East Asia and around the world. The present volume is the first major study in English to focus on the charismatic reformer and his teachings and provides a comprehensive and absorbing interpretation of Taixu’s aims and the divisive controversies that surrounded him. This nuanced work is richly documented with quotations from Taixu’s own writings and from various Chinese intellectuals and evangelists of the period. As the most politically involved of all the Buddhist leaders in the Republican period, Taixu sought to present Mahâyâna Buddhism as the core of a new Chinese culture and the only adequate foundation for a truly global civilization. Distancing himself from those masters who focused on otherworldly paradises and stressed dependence on celestial buddhas and bodhisattvas, he emphasized what could actually be accomplished in this world through the work of thousands of living bodhisattvas dedicated to building a pure land here and now. A realist who acknowledged the complexities of the human condition in an increasingly interdependent and violent world, Taixu was also a utopian who tried to imagine how Buddhists could begin to realize their ultimate ideals—ideals that in fact lay beyond the preservation of institutional Buddhism itself. Students of Buddhism, Chinese religion, contemporary Chinese history and culture, and Taiwan studies will welcome this study of a crucially important and intriguingly complex individual whose life encapsulates many of the forces and possibilities apparent within Chinese Buddhism in the contemporary world.