Buddhist Healing in Medieval China and Japan

Buddhist Healing in Medieval China and Japan

Author: C. Pierce Salguero

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2020-08-31

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0824884221

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From its inception in northeastern India in the first millennium BCE, the Buddhist tradition has advocated a range of ideas and practices that were said to ensure health and well-being. As the religion developed and spread to other parts of Asia, healing deities were added to its pantheon, monastic institutions became centers of medical learning, and healer-monks gained renown for their mastery of ritual and medicinal therapeutics. In China, imported Buddhist knowledge contended with a sophisticated, state-supported system of medicine that was able to retain its influence among the elite. Further afield in Japan, where Chinese Buddhism and Chinese medicine were introduced simultaneously as part of the country’s adoption of civilization from the “Middle Kingdom,” the two were reconciled by individuals who deemed them compatible. In East Asia, Buddhist healing would remain a site of intercultural tension and negotiation. While participating in transregional networks of circulation and exchange, Buddhist clerics practiced locally specific blends of Indian and indigenous therapies and occupied locally defined social positions as religious and medical specialists. In this diverse and compelling collection, an international group of scholars analyzes the historical connections between Buddhism and healing in medieval China and Japan. Contributors focus on the transnationally conveyed aspects of Buddhist healing traditions as they moved across geographic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. Simultaneously, the chapters also investigate the local instantiations of these ideas and practices as they were reinvented, altered, and re-embedded in specific social and institutional contexts. Investigating the interplay between the macro and micro, the global and the local, this book demonstrates the richness of Buddhist healing as a way to explore the history of cross-cultural exchange.


Tantric Buddhism in East Asia

Tantric Buddhism in East Asia

Author: Richard K. Payne

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0861714873

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Although Indian and Tibetan versions of tantric Buddhism are increasingly recognized, the East Asian variations on this practice remain largely overlooked. The only book to present the entire breadth of tantric Buddhism in East Asia, this collection remedies that situation with 12 key essays drawn from rare sources. Organized into four sections--China and Korea, Japan, Deities and Practices, and Influences on Japanese Religion--the book brings together a "critical mass" of scholarship, with the potential to create a sea change in the understanding of this subject


Shinra Myōjin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean”

Shinra Myōjin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean”

Author: Sujung Kim

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2019-11-30

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0824881737

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This ambitious work offers a transnational account of the deity Shinra Myōjin, the “god of Silla” worshipped in medieval Japanese Buddhism from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries. Sujung Kim challenges the long-held understanding of Shinra Myōjin as a protective deity of the Tendai Jimon school, showing how its worship emerged and developed in the complex networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean”—a “quality” rather than a physical space defined by Kim as the primary conduit for cross-cultural influence in a region that includes the Yellow Sea, the Sea of Japan (East Sea), the East China Sea, and neighboring coastal areas. While focusing on the transcultural worship of the deity, Kim engages the different maritime arrangements in which Shinra Myōjin circulated: first, the network of Korean immigrants, Chinese merchants, and Japanese Buddhist monks in China’s Shandong peninsula and Japan’s Ōmi Province; and second, that of gods found in the East Asian Mediterranean. Both of these networks became nodal points of exchange of both goods and gods. Kim’s examination of temple chronicles, literary writings, and iconography reveals Shinra Myōjin’s evolution from a seafaring god to a multifaceted one whose roles included the god of pestilence and of poetry, the insurer of painless childbirth, and the protector of performing arts. Shinra Myōjin and Buddhist Networks of the East Asian “Mediterranean” is not only the first monograph in any language on the Tendai Jimon school in Japanese Buddhism, but also the first book-length study in English to examine Korean connections in medieval Japanese religion. Unlike other recent studies on individual Buddhist deities, it foregrounds the need to approach them within a broader East Asian context. By shifting the paradigm from a land-centered vision to a sea-centered one, the work underlines the importance of a transcultural and interdisciplinary approach to the study of Buddhist deities.


Zen Buddhist Rhetoric in China, Korea, and Japan

Zen Buddhist Rhetoric in China, Korea, and Japan

Author: Christoph Anderl

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-11-25

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 9004185569

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Through a diachronic and comparative approach this book offers a comprehensive study of Zen Buddhist linguistic and rhetoric devices in China, Korea, and Japan. It draws a vivid picture of the complexity of Zen Buddhist literary production in interaction with doctrinal and ritual issues, as well as in response to the sociopolitical contexts.


Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia

Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia

Author: Ann Heirman

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-05-07

Total Pages: 453

ISBN-13: 9004366156

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Encounters, networks, identities and diversity are at the core of the history of Buddhism. They are also the focus of Buddhist Encounters and Identities across East Asia, edited by Ann Heirman, Carmen Meinert and Christoph Anderl. While long-distance networks allowed Buddhist ideas to travel to all parts of East Asia, it was through local and trans-local networks and encounters, and a diversity of people and societies, that identities were made and negotiated. This book undertakes a detailed examination of discrete Buddhist identities rooted in unique cultural practices, beliefs and indigenous socio-political conditions. Moreover, it presents a fascinating picture of the intricacies of the regional and cross-regional networks that connected South and East Asia.


Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia

Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia

Author: Charles Orzech

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 1223

ISBN-13: 9004184910

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This volume, the result of an international collaboration of forty scholars, provides a comprehensive resource on Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in their Chinese, Korean, and Japanese contexts from the first few centuries of the common era to the present.


Buddhism

Buddhism

Author: Paul Williams

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 9780415332262

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This eight-volume set brings together seminal papers in Buddhist studies from a vast range of academic disciplines published over the last forty years. With a new introduction by the editor, this collection is a unique and unrivalled research resource for both student and scholar. Coverage includes: - Buddhist origins; early history of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia - early Buddhist Schools and Doctrinal History; Theravada Doctrine - the Origins and nature of Mahayana Buddhism; some Mahayana religious topics - Abhidharma and Madhyamaka - Yogacara, the Epistemological tradition, and Tathagatagarbha - Tantric Buddhism (Including China and Japan); Buddhism in Nepal and Tibet - Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia, and - Buddhism in China, East Asia, and Japan.


Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism

Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism

Author: Robert H. Sharf

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2005-11-30

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780824830281

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The issue of sinification—the manner and extent to which Buddhism and Chinese culture were transformed through their mutual encounter and dialogue—has dominated the study of Chinese Buddhism for much of the past century. Robert Sharf opens this important and far-reaching book by raising a host of historical and hermeneutical problems with the encounter paradigm and the master narrative on which it is based. Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism is, among other things, an extended reflection on the theoretical foundations and conceptual categories that undergird the study of medieval Chinese Buddhism. Sharf draws his argument in part from a meticulous historical, philological, and philosophical analysis of the Treasure Store Treatise (Pao-tsang lun), an eighth-century Buddho-Taoist work apocryphally attributed to the fifth-century master Seng-chao (374–414). In the process of coming to terms with this recondite text, Sharf ventures into all manner of subjects bearing on our understanding of medieval Chinese Buddhism, from the evolution of T’ang "gentry Taoism" to the pivotal role of image veneration and the problematic status of Chinese Tantra. The volume includes a complete annotated translation of the Treasure Store Treatise, accompanied by the detailed exegesis of dozens of key terms and concepts.


Buddhism Across Asia

Buddhism Across Asia

Author: Tansen Sen

Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies

Published: 2014-04-02

Total Pages: 517

ISBN-13: 9814519324

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"Buddhism across Asia is a must-read for anyone interested in the history and spread of Buddhism in Asia. It comprises a rich collection of articles written by leading experts in their fields. Together, the contributions provide an in-depth analysis of Buddhist history and transmission in Asia over a period of more than 2000 years. Aspects examined include material culture, politics, economy, languages and texts, religious institutions, practices and rituals, conceptualisations, and philosophy, while the geographic scope of the studies extends from India to Southeast Asia and East Asia. Readers' knowledge of Buddhism is constantly challenged by the studies presented, incorporating new materials and interpretations. Rejecting the concept of a reified monolithic and timeless 'Buddhism', this publication reflects the entangled 'dynamic and multi-dimensional' history of Buddhism in Asia over extended periods of 'integration,' 'development of multiple centres,' and 'European expansion,' which shaped the religion's regional and trans-regional identities." -- Max Deeg, Cardiff University "Buddhism Across Asia presents new research on Buddhism in comprehensive spatial and temporal terms. From studies on transmission networks to exegesis on doctrinal matters, linguistics, rituals and practices, institutions, Buddhist libraries, and the religion's interactions with political and cultural spheres as well as the society at large, the volume presents an assemblage of essays of breathtaking breadth and depth. The goal is to demonstrate how the transmission of Buddhist ideas serves as a cultural force, a lynchpin that had connected the societies of Asia from past to present. The volume manifests the vitality and maturity of the field of Buddhist studies, and for that we thank the editor and the erudite authors. " -- Dorothy C. Wong, University of Virginia