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Chan before Chan : meditation, repentance, and visionary experience in Chinese Buddhism /

"Chan Before Chan is a cultural history of the earliest traditions of Buddhist meditation (chan) in China during the era before the rise of the "Chan School" (better known as "Zen") of the eighth-century and beyond, with a particular focus on the semiotics of meditative and...

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Bibliographic Details
Call Number:Libro Electrónico
Main Author: Greene, Eric M. (Author)
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:Inglés
Published: Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, 2021.
Series:Kuroda Studies in East Asian Buddhism Ser.
Subjects:
Online Access:Texto completo
Description
Summary:"Chan Before Chan is a cultural history of the earliest traditions of Buddhist meditation (chan) in China during the era before the rise of the "Chan School" (better known as "Zen") of the eighth-century and beyond, with a particular focus on the semiotics of meditative and especially visionary experience. Drawing from hagiography, ritual manuals, material culture, and above all the many (but rarely studied by modern scholars) Chinese Buddhist meditation manuals translated from Indic sources into Chinese or composed in China during the 400s, it argues that during this era meditation and the mastery of meditation came for the first time to occupy a real place within the Chinese Buddhist social world. Heirs to wider traditions that during this ere were shared across of the Indian and Central Asian Buddhist worlds, 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 being things that could then be interpreted, by a qualified master, as indicative of the meditator's purity or impurity. Buddhist meditation, though an elite practice, was in this way in practice and in theory constitutively integrated into the cultic worlds of divination and "repentance" (chanhui) that were so important within medieval Chinese Buddhism as a whole"--
Item Description:Description based upon print version of record.
Physical Description:1 online resource (xii, 313 pages) : illustrations
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:9780824886875
0824886879
9780824886882
0824886887
9780824884437
0824884434