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Miao Fa Lian Hua Jing Zhu Jie
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Book Synopsis New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness by : Shili Xiong
Download or read book New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness written by Shili Xiong and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Originally published in Chinese as Xin weishi lun by Zhejiang Provincial Library. This translation is based on the 2001 edition published by Hubei Education Press."
Book Synopsis The Taoist Canon by : Kristofer Schipper
Download or read book The Taoist Canon written by Kristofer Schipper and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 1684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taoism remains the only major religion whose canonical texts have not been systematically arranged and made available for study. This long-awaited work, a milestone in Chinese studies, catalogs and describes all existing texts within the Taoist canon. The result will not only make the entire range of existing Taoist texts accessible to scholars of religion, it will open up a crucial resource in the study of the history of China. The vast literature of the Taoist canon, or Daozang, survives in a Ming Dynasty edition of some fifteen hundred different texts. Compiled under imperial auspices and completed in 1445—with a supplement added in 1607—many of the books in the Daozang concern the history, organization, and liturgy of China's indigenous religion. A large number of works deal with medicine, alchemy, and divination. If scholars have long neglected this unique storehouse of China's religious traditions, it is largely because it was so difficult to find one's way within it. Not only was the rationale of its medieval classification system inoperable for the many new texts that later entered the Daozang, but the system itself was no longer understood by the Ming editors; hence the haphazard arrangement of the canon as it has come down to us. This new work sets out the contents of the Daozang chronologically, allowing the reader to follow the long evolution of Taoist literature. Lavishly illustrated, the first volume ranges from antiquity through the Middle Ages, while the second spans the modern period. Within this frame, texts are grouped by theme and subject. Each one is the subject of a historical abstract that identifies the text's contents, date of origin, and author. Throughout the first two volumes, introductions outline the evolution of Taoism and its spiritual heritage. A third volume offering biographical sketches of frequently mentioned Taoists, multiple indexes, and an extensive bibliography provides critical tools for navigating this guide to one of the fundamental aspects of Chinese culture.
Book Synopsis Harmonizing the Hundred Teachings by : Yi Neunghwa
Download or read book Harmonizing the Hundred Teachings written by Yi Neunghwa and published by Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism. This book was released on with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Baekgyo hoetong 百敎會通, originally authored by Yi Neunghwa in 1912, is a book of comparative religion written from a Buddhist point of view. As the first book authored by Yi, a prominent Buddhist scholar and one of the top three researchers of Korean folk culture during modern times, the Baekgyo hoetong is a significant work in the history of academic endeavors on Korean culture and Korean Buddhism. While the title of the book can be translated as “harmonizing the hundred teachings,” the content of the book reveals that the author considers Buddhism an important key in this harmonizing. Initially, Yi compares Buddhism with eleven teachings — traditional, foreign and indigenous — showing that Buddhism has points of similarity with all of them. After proceeding to produce an outline of basic Buddhist doctrine, he concludes by arguing against the common criticisms of Buddhism at the time, often using comparative examples from other religions. Although the Baekgyo hoetong is written in the traditional styles of arraying quotes in the structure of a series of questions and answers, it reflects well the complexity of Korea’s newly-modernizing society that was teeming with intellectual diversity for the first time in centuries. Yi, an avid scholar of Chinese classics, Buddhist scriptures, western science and Korean folk culture, makes the book possible by his broad erudition. Yi uses his newly acquired knowledge to “harmonize the hundred teachings” from a Buddhist point of view, warning readers that dogmatic belief in one’s own truth is in fact what is farthest from the truth.
Book Synopsis Numinous Awareness Is Never Dark by :
Download or read book Numinous Awareness Is Never Dark written by and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Numinous Awareness Is Never Dark examines the issue of whether enlightenment in Zen Buddhism is sudden or gradual—that is, something intrinsic to the mind that is achieved in a sudden flash of insight or something extrinsic to it that must be developed through a sequential series of practices. This “sudden/gradual issue” was one of the crucial debates that helped forge the Zen school in East Asia, and the Korean Zen master Chinul’s (1158–1210) magnum opus, Excerpts, offers one of the most thorough treatments of it in all of premodern Buddhist literature. According to Chinul’s analysis, enlightenment is both sudden and gradual. Zen practice must begin with a sudden awakening to the “numinous awareness”—the “sentience,” or buddha-nature—that is inherent in all “sentient” beings. Such an awareness does not need to be developed but must simply be recognized (or better “re-cognized”), through the unmediated experience of insight. Even after this initial awakening, however, deeply engrained proclivities of thought and conduct may continue to disturb the practitioner; these can only be removed gradually as his or her practice matures. Chinul’s “sudden awakening/gradual cultivation” soteriology became emblematic of the Buddhist tradition in Korea. Excerpts, translated here in its entirety by the preeminent Western specialist in the Korean Buddhist tradition, goes on to examine Chinul’s treatments of many of the quintessential practices of Zen Buddhism, including nonconceptualization, or no-thought, and the concurrent development of meditation and wisdom, as well as, for the first time in Korean Zen, “examining meditative topics” (kanhwa Sŏn)—what we in the West know better as kōans, after its later Japanese analogues. Fitting this new technique into his preferred soteriological schema of sudden awakening/gradual cultivation was no simple task for Chinul. Numinous Awareness Is Never Dark offers an extensive study of the contours of the sudden/gradual debate in Buddhist thought and practice and traces the influence of Chinul’s analysis of this issue throughout the history of the Korean tradition. Copiously annotated, the work contains extensive selections from the two traditional Korean commentaries to the text. In Buswell’s treatment, Chinul’s Excerpts emerges as the single most influential work written by a Korean Buddhist author.
Book Synopsis Disciplinary Rituals in Dunhuang Buddhism by : Ru Zhan
Download or read book Disciplinary Rituals in Dunhuang Buddhism written by Ru Zhan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-06-19 with total page 787 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on Dunhuang manuscripts and the latest scholarship in Dunhuang and Buddhist Studies, this translation analyzes Buddhist monasticism via such topics as the organizational forms of Dunhuang Buddhist monasteries, the construction and operation of ordination platforms, ordination certificates and government ordination licenses, and meditation retreats, etc. Assuming a pan-Asian perspective, the monograph also made trailblazing contributions to the study of Buddhist Sinicization and Sino-Indian cultural exchanges and is bound to exert long-lasting influences on the worldwide academic study of Buddhism.
Book Synopsis The Secrets of Buddhist Meditation by : Eric M. Greene
Download or read book The Secrets of Buddhist Meditation written by Eric M. Greene and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-01-31 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 400s, numerous Indian and Central Asian Buddhist “meditation masters” (chanshi) traveled to China, where they established the first enduring traditions of Buddhist meditation practice in East Asia. The forms of contemplative practice that these missionaries brought with them, and which their Chinese students further developed, remained for several centuries the basic understanding of “meditation” (chan) in China. Although modern scholars and readers have long been familiar with the approaches to meditation of the Chan (Zen) School that later became so popular throughout East Asia, these earlier and in some ways more pervasive forms of practice have long been overlooked or ignored. This volume presents a comprehensive study of the content and historical formation, as well as complete English translations, of two of the most influential manuals in which these approaches to Buddhist meditation are discussed: the Scripture on the Secret Essential Methods of Chan (Chan Essentials) and the Secret Methods for Curing Chan Sickness (Methods for Curing). Translated here into English for the first time, these documents reveal a distinctly visionary form of Buddhist meditation whose goal is the acquisition of concrete, symbolic visions attesting to the practitioner’s purity and progress toward liberation. Both texts are “apocryphal” scriptures: Taking the form of Indian Buddhist sutras translated into Chinese, they were in fact new compositions, written or at least assembled in China in the first half of the fifth century. Though written in China, their historical significance extends beyond the East Asian context as they are among the earliest written sources anywhere to record certain kinds of information about Buddhist meditation that hitherto had been the preserve of oral tradition and personal initiation. To this extent they indeed divulge, as their titles claim, the “secrets” of Buddhist meditation. Through them, we witness a culture of Buddhist meditation that has remained largely unknown but which for many centuries was widely shared across North India, Central Asia, and China.
Book Synopsis Chinesische und Manjurische Handschriften und Seltene Drucke by : Toshitaka Hasuike
Download or read book Chinesische und Manjurische Handschriften und Seltene Drucke written by Toshitaka Hasuike and published by Franz Steiner Verlag. This book was released on 2005 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship by : Jennifer Eichman
Download or read book A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship written by Jennifer Eichman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a detailed analysis of epistolary writing, A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship: Spiritual Ambitions, Intellectual Debates, and Epistolary Connections brings to life the Buddhist discourse of a network of lay disciples who debated the value of Chan versus Pure Land, sudden versus gradual enlightenment, adherence to Buddhist precepts, and animal welfare. By highlighting the differences between their mentor, the monk Zhuhong 袾宏 (1535-1615), and his nemesis, the Yangming Confucian Zhou Rudeng 周汝登 (1547-1629), this work confronts long-held scholarly views of Confucian dominance to conclude that many classically educated, elite men found Buddhist practices a far more attractive option. Their intellectual debates, self-cultivation practices, and interpersonal relations helped shape the contours of late sixteenth-century Buddhist culture.
Book Synopsis Paradoxes of Traditional Chinese Literature by : Eva Hung
Download or read book Paradoxes of Traditional Chinese Literature written by Eva Hung and published by Chinese University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of nine articles on various paradoxical aspects of traditional Chinese literature. The literary works chosen for analysis range from the Tang dynasty to the late Qing. Besides providing new approaches to the well known classic authors such as Honglou Meng, Jin Ping Mei, Xixiang ji, and Liaozhai zhiyi, there are also detailed analysis of such diverse works as Liu Zongyuan's fiction, analogues of the Liu Yi story, lesser known versions of the play White Rabbit, as well as a number of late Qing fictions. Contributors to this volume include some of the most respected names in sinology today.
Download or read book The Body Incantatory written by Paul Copp and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether chanted as devotional prayers, intoned against the dangers of the wilds, or invoked to heal the sick and bring ease to the dead, incantations were pervasive features of Buddhist practice in late medieval China (600Ð1000 C.E.). Material incantations, in forms such as spell-inscribed amulets and stone pillars, were also central to the spiritual lives of both monks and laypeople. In centering its analysis on the Chinese material culture of these deeply embodied forms of Buddhist ritual, The Body Incantatory reveals histories of practiceÑand logics of practiceÑthat have until now remained hidden. Paul Copp examines inscribed stones, urns, and other objects unearthed from anonymous tombs; spells carved into pillars near mountain temples; and manuscripts and prints from both tombs and the Dunhuang cache. Focusing on two major Buddhist spells, or dharani, and their embodiment of the incantatory logics of adornment and unction, he makes breakthrough claims about the significance of Buddhist incantation practice not only in medieval China but also in Central Asia and India. His work vividly captures the diversity of Buddhist practice among medieval monks, ritual healers, and other individuals lost to history, offering a corrective to accounts that have overemphasized elite, canonical materials.
Book Synopsis Considering the End: Mortality in Early Medieval Chinese Poetic Representation by : TImothy Wai Keung Chan
Download or read book Considering the End: Mortality in Early Medieval Chinese Poetic Representation written by TImothy Wai Keung Chan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-05-11 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the representation of human mortality in medieval Chinese literature. This theme is observed and reconstructed through analysis of the work of eminent writers of the period, texts that have never been examined from an eschatological perspective.
Book Synopsis Mahāyāna Texts Translated Into Western Languages by : Peter Pfandt
Download or read book Mahāyāna Texts Translated Into Western Languages written by Peter Pfandt and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1986 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Function and Meaning in Buddhist Art by : K.R. van Kooij
Download or read book Function and Meaning in Buddhist Art written by K.R. van Kooij and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-08-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the function of Buddhist art at the time Buddhism was a major religion in large areas of South, East, and South-East Asia? Can we establish what these sculptures and paintings meant to Buddhist believers living at a time when this art fulfilled important religious needs? These questions are discussed, not answered, in a volume about ‘Function and Meaning of Buddhist Art’ which contains the papers of a workshop on this theme held at Leiden University in 1991. While dealing with a variety of themes and subject-matter, sometimes in great detail, sixteen specialists focus on ritual and semantic aspects of Buddhist works of art from countries such as India, China, Japan, Tibet, Thailand, and Indonesia. Recent non-western art-historical publications show an increasing tendency to work with methodological frameworks developed by specialists on western art. Moreover, there are more similarities between Buddhist and other religious art ‘than, literally, meet the eye’. For this reason, two comparative studies are included in which parallels and universals are brought forward. Two main lines emerge in the results offered in this book, the one indicating a tendency to focus on intended meanings; the other concentrating on more than one level of reception of Buddhist art in a liturgical context.
Book Synopsis The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History by : Barend ter Haar
Download or read book The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History written by Barend ter Haar and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-13 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a new hypothesis for understanding the real nature of the term White Lotus Teachings. The author argues that there are actually two different phenomena covered by similar terms: from c. 1130 until 1400, a real lay Buddhist movement existed, which can be called the White Lotus movement. It enjoyed the respect of contemporary literati and religious elites. The movement used the autonym White Lotus Society, which came to be prohibited in the early Ming and was discarded as a result. After 1525, the name reappeared in the form White Lotus Teachings, but now only as a derogatory label, used by officials and literati rather than by believers themselves. As a result of this hypothesis, the history of the "White Lotus Teachings" changes from one of religious groups and magicians into one of elite ideology and religious persecution. The book is therefore important both for historians and anthropologists of Chinese religion and society, and for comparative historians interested in the ideological and social construction of "heterodoxy".
Book Synopsis The Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China by : Professor Yifa
Download or read book The Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China written by Professor Yifa and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2009-08-18 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China contains the first complete translation of China’s earliest and most influential monastic code. The twelfth-century text Chanyuan qinggui (Rules of Purity for the Chan Monastery) provides a wealth of detail on all aspects of life in public Buddhist monasteries during the Sung (960–1279). Part One consists of Yifa’s overview of the development of monastic regulations in Chinese Buddhist history, a biography of the text’s author, and an analysis of the social and cultural context of premodern Chinese Buddhist monasticism. Of particular importance are the interconnections made between Chan traditions and the dual heritages of Chinese culture and Indian Buddhist Vinaya. Although much of the text’s source material is traced directly to the Vinayas and the works of the Vinaya advocate Daoan (312–385) and the Lü master Daoxuan (596–667), the Chanyuan qinggui includes elements foreign to the original Vinaya texts—elements incorporated from Chinese governmental policies and traditional Chinese etiquette. Following the translator’s overview is a complete translation of the text, extensively annotated.
Book Synopsis The Making of a Savior Bodhisattva by : Shi Zhiru
Download or read book The Making of a Savior Bodhisattva written by Shi Zhiru and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2007-08-14 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In modern Chinese Buddhism, Dizang is especially popular as the sovereign of the underworld. Often represented as a monk wearing a royal crown, Dizang helps the deceased faithful navigate the complex underworld bureaucracy, avert the punitive terrors of hell, and arrive at the happy realm of rebirth. The author is concerned with the formative period of this important Buddhist deity, before his underworldly aspect eclipses his connections to other religious expressions and at a time when the art, mythology, practices, and texts of his cult were still replete with possibilities. She begins by problematizing the reigning model of Dizang, one that proposes an evolution of gradual sinicization and increasing vulgarization of a relatively unknown Indian bodhisattva, Ksitigarbha, into a Chinese deity of the underworld. Such a model, the author argues, obscures the many-faceted personality and iconography of Dizang. Rejecting it, she deploys a broad array of materials (art, epigraphy, ritual texts, scripture, and narrative literature) to recomplexify Dizang and restore (as much as possible from the fragmented historical sources) what this figure meant to Chinese Buddhists from the sixth to tenth centuries. Rather than privilege any one genre of evidence, the author treats both material artifacts and literary works, canonical and noncanonical sources. Adopting an archaeological approach, she excavates motifs from and finds resonances across disparate genres to paint a vibrant, detailed picture of the medieval Dizang cult. Through her analysis, the cult, far from being an isolated phenomenon, is revealed as integrally woven into the entire fabric of Chinese Buddhism, functioning as a kaleidoscopic lens encompassing a multivalent religio-cultural assimilation that resists the usual bifurcation of doctrine and practice or "elite" and "popular" religion. The Making of a Savior Bodhisattva presents a fascinating wealth of material on the personality, iconography, and lore associated with the medieval Dizang. It elucidates the complex cultural, religious, and social forces shaping the florescence of this savior cult in Tang China while simultaneously addressing several broader theoretical issues that have preoccupied the field. Zhiru not only questions the use of sinicization as a lens through which to view Chinese Buddhist history, she also brings both canonical and noncanonical literature into dialogue with a body of archaeological remains that has been ignored in the study of East Asian Buddhism.
Book Synopsis Goddess on the Frontier by : Megan Bryson
Download or read book Goddess on the Frontier written by Megan Bryson and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-02 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dali is a small region on a high plateau in Southeast Asia. Its main deity, Baijie, has assumed several gendered forms throughout the area's history: Buddhist goddess, the mother of Dali's founder, a widowed martyr, and a village divinity. What accounts for so many different incarnations of a local deity? Goddess on the Frontier argues that Dali's encounters with forces beyond region and nation have influenced the goddess's transformations. Dali sits at the cultural crossroads of Southeast Asia, India, and Tibet; it has been claimed by different countries but is currently part of Yunnan Province in Southwest China. Megan Bryson incorporates historical-textual studies, art history, and ethnography in her book to argue that Baijie provided a regional identity that enabled Dali to position itself geopolitically and historically. In doing so, Bryson provides a case study of how people craft local identities out of disparate cultural elements and how these local identities transform over time in relation to larger historical changes—including the increasing presence of the Chinese state.
