Download or read book The Eminent Monk written by John Kieschnick and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1997-07-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an attempt to reconstruct an elusive aspect of the medieval Chinese imagination, The Eminent Monk examines biographies of Chinese Buddhist monks, from the uncompromising ascetic to the unfathomable wonder-worker. While analyzing images of the monk in medieval China, the author addresses some questions encountered along the way: What are we to make of accounts in “eminent monk” collections of deviant monks who violate monastic precepts? Who wrote biographies of monks and who read them? How did different segments of Chinese society contend for the image of the monk and which image prevailed? By placing biographies of monks in the context of Chinese political and religious rhetoric, The Eminent Monk explores both the role of Buddhist literature in Chinese history and the monastic imagination that inspired this literature.

Download or read book Diamond Sutra Narratives written by Chiew Hui Ho and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Diamond Sutra Narratives, Chiew Hui Ho explores Diamond Sutra devotion and its impact on medieval Chinese religiosity, uncovering the complex social history of Tang lay Buddhism through the laity’s production of parasutraic narratives and texts.

Download or read book Empowered Writing Exorcistic and Apotropaic Rituals in Medieval China written by Stephan Peter Bumbacher and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2012 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empowered writing explores the inherent powers of Chinese talismans, petitions, registers, and holy scriptures, presenting a systematic study of their exxorcistic and apotropaic properties. Using a vast arsenal of original sources, the book traces the unfolding and transformation of empowered writing from the Warring States period through the Six Dynasties, closely examining the different kinds of writing, their uses, and interpretation as well as relating uniquely Daoist features to imperial and Buddhist usages. The book is pathbreaking in its endeavor and stunning in its depth of analyis.

Download or read book A History of Chinese Buddhist Faith and Life written by Kai Sheng and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-06-15 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the formation and the practice of Buddhist canons and an attempt to present as fully as possible the panorama of Chinese Buddhist faith. The book uses textual and archaeological sources, including Dunhuang texts, and adopts multiple perspectives such as textual evidence, historical circumstances, social life, as well as the intellectual background at the time.

Download or read book Becoming Guanyin written by Yuhang Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2024 Geiss-Hsu Book Prize for Best First Book, Society for Ming Studies The goddess Guanyin began in India as the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, originally a male deity. He gradually became indigenized as a female deity in China over the span of nearly a millennium. By the Ming (1358–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods, Guanyin had become the most popular female deity in China. In Becoming Guanyin, Yuhang Li examines how lay Buddhist women in late imperial China forged a connection with the subject of their devotion, arguing that women used their own bodies to echo that of Guanyin. Li focuses on the power of material things to enable women to access religious experience and transcendence. In particular, she examines how secular Buddhist women expressed mimetic devotion and pursued religious salvation through creative depictions of Guanyin in different media such as painting and embroidery and through bodily portrayals of the deity using jewelry and dance. These material displays expressed a worldview that differed from yet fit within the Confucian patriarchal system. Attending to the fabrication and use of “women’s things” by secular women, Li offers new insight into the relationships between worshipped and worshipper in Buddhist practice. Combining empirical research with theoretical insights from both art history and Buddhist studies, Becoming Guanyin is a field-changing analysis that reveals the interplay between material culture, religion, and their gendered transformations.

Download or read book Zhipan s Account of the History of Buddhism in China written by Thomas Jülch and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-02-22 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his carefully annotated translation of Fozu tongji, juan 39-42, Thomas Jülch enables an in-depth understanding of a key text of Chinese Buddhist historiography.

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.

Download or read book The Sacred Village written by Thomas DuBois and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2005-01-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until recently, few villagers of rural North China ventured far from their homes. Their intensely local view of the world included knowledge of the immanent sacred realm, which derived from stories of divine revelations, cures, and miracles that circulated among neighboring villages. These stories gave direction to private devotion and served as a source of expert information on who the powerful deities were and what role they played in the human world. The structure of local society also shaped public devotion, as different groups expressed their economic and social concerns in organized worship. While some of these groups remained structurally intact in the face of historical change, others have changed dramatically, resulting in new patterns of religious organization and practice. The Sacred Village introduces local religious life in Cang County, Hebei Province, as a lens through which to view the larger issue of how rural Chinese perspectives and behaviors were shaped by the sweeping social, political, and demographic changes of the last two centuries. Thomas DuBois combines new archival sources in Chinese and Japanese with his own fieldwork to produce a work that is compelling and intimate in detail. This dual approach also allows him to address the integration of external networks into local society and religious mentality and posit local society as a particular sphere in which the two are negotiated and transformed.

Download or read book Here in China I Dwell written by Zhaoguang Ge and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here in ‘China’ I Dwell is a historiographical account of the formation of Chinese historical narratives in light of outside pressures on China — the view from China’s borders. There is a special discussion of the inf luence of Japanese historians on the concept of China and its borders, including the nature of their sources, cultural and religious and more. In Ge’s comparative account, a new portrait of Chinese historical narratives, along with the views and assumptions implicit in these narrat ives, emerges in the context of East Asia, a similarly constructed concept with its own multitudes of frontiers and peoples.

Download or read book The Record of Linji written by Thomas Yuho Kirchner and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2008-10-31 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Linji lu (Record of Linji) has been an essential text of Chinese and Japanese Zen Buddhism for nearly a thousand years. A compilation of sermons, statements, and acts attributed to the great Chinese Zen master Linji Yixuan (d. 866), it serves as both an authoritative statement of Zen’s basic standpoint and a central source of material for Zen koan practice. Scholars study the text for its importance in understanding both Zen thought and East Asian Mahayana doctrine, while Zen practitioners cherish it for its unusual simplicity, directness, and ability to inspire. One of the earliest attempts to translate this important work into English was by Sasaki Shigetsu (1882–1945), a pioneer Zen master in the U.S. and the founder of the First Zen Institute of America. At the time of his death, he entrusted the project to his wife, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, who in 1949 moved to Japan and there founded a branch of the First Zen Institute at Daitoku-ji. Mrs. Sasaki, determined to produce a definitive translation, assembled a team of talented young scholars, both Japanese and Western, who in the following years retranslated the text in accordance with modern research on Tang-dynasty colloquial Chinese. As they worked on the translation, they compiled hundreds of detailed notes explaining every technical term, vernacular expression, and literary reference. One of the team, Yanagida Seizan (later Japan’s preeminent Zen historian), produced a lengthy introduction that outlined the emergence of Chinese Zen, presented a biography of Linji, and traced the textual development of the Linji lu. The sudden death of Mrs. Sasaki in 1967 brought the nearly completed project to a halt. An abbreviated version of the book was published in 1975, but neither this nor any other English translations that subsequently appeared contain the type of detailed historical, linguistic, and doctrinal annotation that was central to Mrs. Sasaki’s plan. The materials assembled by Mrs. Sasaki and her team are finally available in the present edition of the Record of Linji. Chinese readings have been changed to Pinyin and the translation itself has been revised in line with subsequent research by Iriya Yoshitaka and Yanagida Seizan, the scholars who advised Mrs. Sasaki. The notes, nearly six hundred in all, are almost entirely based on primary sources and thus retain their value despite the nearly forty years since their preparation. They provide a rich context for Linji’s teachings, supplying a wealth of information on Tang colloquial expressions, Buddhist thought, and Zen history, much of which is unavailable anywhere else in English. This revised edition of the Record of Linji is certain to be of great value to Buddhist scholars, Zen practitioners, and readers interested in Asian Buddhism.

Download or read book Chanting the Medicine Buddha Sutra written by Criddle, Reed and published by A-R Editions, Inc.. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition, comprising a sound recording, transcription, and English translation, provides a record of the Liberation Rite of Water and Land as a resource for the study, analysis, and further exploration of both the Medicine Buddha Sutra and the accompanying liturgical service. The editor created it at the invitation of Fo Guang Shan monastery, and it outlines both the textual and musical elements of the service. Designed as a chantbook, it is intended to be a tool for all those who wish to participate in the vocal elements of the service, from the uninitiated monastery visitor to musical ensembles that might use these musical fragments as inspiration for appropriately staged performances. It is especially conceived for non-Chinese speaking monastics in the Buddhist college and/or those who have experience reading Western musical notation.

Download or read book Thriving in Crisis written by Dewei Zhang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late imperial Chinese Buddhism was long dismissed as having declined from the glories of Buddhism during the Sui and Tang dynasties (581–907). In recent scholarship, a more nuanced picture of late Ming-era Buddhist renewal has emerged. Yet this alternate conception of the history of Buddhism in China has tended to focus on either doctrinal contributions of individual masters or the roles of local elites in Jiangnan, leaving unsolved broader questions regarding the dynamics and mechanism behind the evolution of Buddhism into the renewal. Thriving in Crisis is a systematic study of the late Ming Buddhist renewal with a focus on the religious and political factors that enabled it to happen. Dewei Zhang explores the history of the boom in enthusiasm for Buddhism in the Jiajing-Wanli era (1522–1620), tracing a pattern of advances and retrenchment at different social levels in varied regions. He reveals that the Buddhist renewal was a dynamic movement that engaged a wide swath of elites, from emperors and empress dowagers to eunuchs and scholar-officials. Drawing on a range of evidence and approaches, Zhang contends that the late Ming renewal was a politically driven exception to a longer-term current of disfavor toward Buddhism and that it failed to establish Buddhism on a foundation solid enough for its future development. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Thriving in Crisis provides a new theoretical framework for understanding the patterns of Buddhist history in China.

Download or read book Dunhuang Manuscript Culture written by Imre Galambos and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.

Download or read book Attaining the Way written by Master Sheng-Yen and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2006-10-10 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an inspiring guide to the practice of Chan (Chinese Zen) in the words of four great masters of that tradition. It includes teachings from contemporary masters Xuyun and Sheng Yen, and from Jiexian and Boshan of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). Though the texts were written over a period of hundreds of years, they are all remarkably lucid and are perfect for beginners as well as more advanced practitioners today. All the main points of spiritual practice are covered: philosophical foundations, methods, approaches to problems and obstacles—all aimed at helping the student attain the way to enlightenment.

Download or read book Wisdom Embodied written by Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.) and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2010 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art --

Download or read book China 5000 Years written by Sherman E. Lee and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Records of Mazu and the Making of Classical Chan Literature written by Mario Poceski and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Records of Mazu and the Making of Classical Chan Literature explores the historical growth and transformation of Chan (Zen) Buddhist literature in medieval China, focusing especially on the earliest records of Mazu Daoyi (709-788). It presents important primary materials about classical Chan Buddhism, some of them translated for the first time into English.