The Chinese Buddhist canon is a systematic collection of all translated Buddhist scriptures and related literatures created in East Asia and has been regarded as one of the "three treasures" in Buddhist communities. Despite its undisputed importance in the history of Buddhism, research on this huge collection has remained largely the province of Buddhologists focusing on textual and bibliographical studies. We thus aim to initiate methodological innovations to study the transformation of the canon by situating it in its modern context, characterized by intricate interactions between East and West as well as among countries in East Asia. During the modern period the Chinese Buddhist canon has been translated, edited, digitized, and condensed as well as internationalized, contested, and ritualized. The well-known accomplishment of this modern transformation is the compilation of the Taisho Canon during the 1920s. It has become a source of both doctrinal orthodoxy as well as creativity and its significance has greatly increased as Buddhist scholarship and devotionalism has utilized the canon for various ends. However, it is still unclear what led to the creation of the modern editions of the Buddhist canon in East Asia. This volume explores the most significant and interesting developments regarding the Chinese Buddhist canon in modern East Asia including canon formation, textual studies, historical analyses, religious studies, ritual invention, and digital research tools and methods.

Perched on a steep, wooded hillside west of Dunedin in a South Island rainforest in New Zealand is Waipori Falls Village. The "reflections" in this volume were inspired by living in the splendid isolation of this remote village surrounded by a scenic reserve. Perhaps that's why I was there - to rediscover my balance, to get things into perspective. There in the magical isolation of Waipori we could reflect upon life, on our experiences in the different parts of the world where we have lived, finding our way again after so much wandering. After our combined Waipori reflections, there are my reflections back in Clashnessie, my one-time home in the Highlands of Scotland, followed by my reflections during the summer of 2008, which I spent "on the edge of the sea" in Nova Scotia. The book encompasses the three locales, and all the reflections, wherever they are set, have been inspired by my time in Waipori, which began the whole process. -Charles Muller

When the diffident and ineffectual Derek Mann loses his teaching job in a girls' grammar school in England and drifts from one temporary post to another, one of his precocious pupils gives him her grandfather's wartime diary with a mission to return to Apartheid South Africa and find the opal mine she believes to be her rightful inheritance. Intrigue and violence bedevil the quest that ends in a desert under the Southern Cross. The wry, often laconic style gives full reign to the characters' latent sexuality. While the novel takes the form of a thriller, it is also a love story. The plot pivots round the war-diary of a man whose bomber was shot down in action in Egypt in 1941. The man had invested money in partnership with his wartime friend in an opal mine in a place designated by the letters 'C.P.' in 'S.A.'. His granddaughter's search for the mine affects her own as well as her former teacher's destiny.

The moral purpose of Charles Kingsley's novels is pronounced because he was a preacher, and more specifically, a teacher. He was above all a preacher of stirring didactic sermons. It is the didactic content of his writings-in his sermons, his novels, and his essays on natural theology-which is the study of this work. One forgets that Kingsley was not, in the first instance, a social and political reformer. As a preacher, and as a writer, he was pre-eminently a teacher. He was not an evangelical preacher, yet the Christian gospel was at the heart of his teachings and his moral exhortations. This work attempts to look at the Christian message that was the inspiration behind his socio-religious gospel. Writing at the time of Charles Darwin, Kingsley saw no reason to lose his sound Christian faith with the emergence of Darwin's theory of evolution. Instead, he could accept it as a means to a divine end, another example of how Providence might bring about the Kingdom of God on earth.

The Brahma’s Net Sutra plays an important niche role in the development of East Asian Mahayana Buddhism. It is the primary extant Vinaya text that articulates the precepts from a Mahayana perspective. That is, it takes its main audience to be “bodhisattva practitioners,� mainly householders who remain engaged with society rather than becoming renunciant monks or nuns. The Vinayas, and especially the discourse in this sutra, show monastic and lay Buddhist practitioners engaged at every level of society, from top to bottom. Buddhist practitioners were involved in military affairs, political intrigues, matchmaking, and every other sort of “mundane� social activity. The Vinaya texts reveal how the Buddhist community in its time judged and dealt with such matters. The Brahma’s Net Sutra was written in two fascicles, each radically different in structure, content, theme, grammar, etc., from the other. The first fascicle discusses the forty Mahayana stages: the ten departures toward the destination, the ten nourishing states of mind, the ten adamantine states of mind, and the ten bodhisattva grounds. The second fascicle explains the ten grave precepts and the forty-eight minor precepts. These came to be referred to as the “bodhisattva precepts,� the “great Brahma’s Net precepts,� the “buddha precepts,� and so forth. The second fascicle has been especially esteemed, studied, and circulated separately for more than a millennium as the scriptural authority for the Mahayana bodhisattva precepts. [Adapted from the Translators' Introduction.]