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Chan Before Chan - Meditation, Repentance, and Visionary Experience in Chinese Buddhism (Paperback)
Loot Price: R658
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Chan Before Chan - Meditation, Repentance, and Visionary Experience in Chinese Buddhism (Paperback)
Series: Kuroda Studies in East Asian Buddhism
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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What is Buddhist meditation? What is going on-and what should be
going on-behind the closed or lowered eyelids of the Buddha or
Buddhist adept seated in meditation? And in what ways and to what
ends have the answers to these questions mattered for Buddhists
themselves? Focusing on early medieval China, this book takes up
these questions through a cultural history of the earliest
traditions of Buddhist meditation (chan), before the rise of the
Chan (Zen) School in the eighth century. In sharp contrast to what
would become typical in the later Chan School, early Chinese
Buddhists approached the ancient Buddhist practice of meditation
primarily as a way of gaining access to a world of enigmatic but
potentially meaningful visionary experiences. In Chan Before Chan,
Eric Greene brings this approach to meditation to life with a focus
on how medieval Chinese Buddhists interpreted their own and others'
visionary experiences and the nature of the authority they ascribed
to them. Drawing from hagiography, ritual manuals, material
culture, and the many hitherto rarely studied meditation manuals
translated from Indic sources into Chinese or composed in China in
the 400s, Greene argues that during this era meditation and the
mastery of meditation came for the first time to occupy a real
place in the Chinese Buddhist social world. Heirs to wider
traditions that had been shared across India and Central Asia,
early medieval Chinese Buddhists conceived of "chan" as something
that would produce a special state of visionary sensitivity. The
concrete visionary experiences that resulted from meditation were
understood as things that could then be interpreted, by a qualified
master, as indicative of the mediator's purity or impurity.
Buddhist meditation, though an elite discipline that only a small
number of Chinese Buddhists themselves undertook, was thus in
practice and in theory constitutively integrated into the cultic
worlds of divination and "repentance" (chanhui) that were so
important within the medieval Chinese religious world as a whole.
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