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The Secrets of Buddhist Meditation - Visionary Meditation Texts from Early Medieval China (Paperback)
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The Secrets of Buddhist Meditation - Visionary Meditation Texts from Early Medieval China (Paperback)
Series: Kuroda Classics in East Asian Buddhism
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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.
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