An examination of medieval Chinese Buddhist thanatonic practices. Bridging area studies and the history of religions, Teiser explores the concerns, practices and beliefs of 9th- and 10th-century Chinese Buddhists.
Largely unstudied until now, the religious festivals that attracted Chinese people from all walks of life provide the most instructive examples of the interaction between Chinese forms of social life and the Indian tradition of Buddhism. Stephen Teiser examines one of the most important of such annual celebrations. He provides a comprehensive interpretation of the festivities of the seventh lunar month, in which laypeople presented offerings to Buddhist monks to gain salvation for their ancestors. Teiser uncovers a wide range of sources, many translated or analyzed for the first time in any language, to demonstrate how the symbolism, rituals, and mythology of the ghost festival pervaded the social landscape of medieval China.
The Ten Kings hanging scrolls at Tokyo’s Seikadō Bunko Art Museum are among the most resplendent renderings of the Buddhist purgatory extant, but their origin and significance have yet to be fully explored. Cheeyun Kwon unfurls this exquisite set of scrolls within the existing Ten Kings painting tradition while investigating textual, scriptural, archaeological, and visual materials from East Asia to shed light on its possible provenance. She constructs a model scheme of the paintings’ evolution based on more than five hundred works and reveals channels of popularization, mass production, and agglomeration. The earliest images of the Ten Kings are found in the tenth-century sūtra The Scripture on the Ten Kings, known to be the work of the monk Zangchuan. By the mid-twelfth century, typological conventions associated with the Ten Kings were widely established, and paintings depicting them, primarily large-scale and stand-alone, became popular export commodities, spreading via land and sea routes to the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. An examination of materials in Korea suggests a unique development path for Ten Kings subject matter, and this—in conjunction with a close analysis of the Seikadō paintings—forms the core of Kwon’s book. Among the Korean works discussed is a woodblock edition of The Scripture on the Ten Kings from 1246. It is markedly different from its Chinese counterparts and provides strong evidence of the subject’s permutations during the Koryŏ period (918–1392), when Northern Song (960–1127) visual art and culture were avidly imported. In the Seikadō paintings, Northern Song figural, architectural, landscape, and decorative elements were acculturated to the Koryŏ milieu, situating them in the twelfth to early thirteenth centuries and among the oldest and most significant surviving examples of Koryŏ Buddhist painting. Efficacious Underworld fills major lacunae in Korean, East Asian, and Ten Kings painting traditions while illuminating Korea’s contribution to the evolution of a Buddhist theme on its trajectory across East Asia. With its rich set of color reproductions and detailed analysis of textual and visual materials, this volume will invite significant revision to previously held notions on Koryŏ painting.
In its teachings, practices and institutions, Buddhism in its varied Asian forms is centrally concerned with death and the dead. This title offers a comparative investigation of this topic across the major Buddhist cultures of India, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Tibet and Burma.
This volume concludes the two-volume sequel to Masao Abe's Zen and Western Thought. Like its companion, Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue, this work contains many previously published essays and papers by Abe. Here he clarifies the true meaning of Buddhist emptiness in comparison with the Aristotelian notion of substance and the Whiteheadean notion of process.
What are the foundational scriptures and major schools for Chinese Buddhists? What divinities do they worship? What festivals do they celebrate? These are some of the basic questions addressed in this book, the first introduction to Chinese Buddhism written expressly for students and those interested in an accessible yet authoritative overview of the subject based on current scholarship. After presenting the basic tenets of the Buddha’s teachings and the Chinese religious traditions, the book focuses on topics essential for understanding Chinese Buddhism: major scriptures, worship of buddhas and bodhisattvas, rituals and festivals, the monastic order, Buddhist schools such as Tiantai and Chan, Buddhism and gender, and current trends—notably humanistic Buddhism in Taiwan and the resurgence of Buddhism in post-Mao China. Each chapter ends with discussion questions and suggestions for further reading. A convenient glossary of common terms, titles, and names is included.
"Precious volumes," or pao-chüan, were produced by popular sects in the Ming and early Qing dynasties. These scriptures were believed to have been divinely revealed to sect leaders and contain teachings and ritual instructions that provide valuable information about a lively and widespread religious tradition outside mainstream Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Largely neglected until now, they testify to the imagination and devotion of popular religious leaders. This book, the most detailed and comprehensive study of pao-chüan in any language, studies 34 early examples of this literature in order to understand the origins and development of this textual tradition. Although the work focuses on content and structure, it also treats the social context of these works as well as their transmission and ritual use.
The ERC-funded research project BuddhistRoad aims to create a new framework to enable understanding of the complexities in the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia. Buddhism was one major factor in this exchange: for the first time the multi-layered relationships between the trans-regional Buddhist traditions (Chinese, Indian, Tibetan) and those based on local Buddhist cultures (Khotanese, Uyghur, Tangut) will be explored in a systematic way. The second volume Buddhism in Central Asia II—Practice and Rituals, Visual and Materials Transfer based on the mid-project conference held on September 16th–18th, 2019, at CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) focuses on two of the six thematic topics addressed by the project, namely on "practices and rituals", exploring material culture in religious context such as mandalas and talismans, as well as “visual and material transfer”, including shared iconographies and the spread of ‘Khotanese’ themes.
"Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to both earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Shih-shan Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, and paintings, as well as other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not static, but entails an active journey of seeing underlying and secret phenomena.This book’s structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea that the inner and outer mirror each other and the boundary demarcating the two is fluid. Huang also reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism—aniconic, immaterial, and ephemeral—and shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart."
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.