Chan before chan : meditation, repentance, and visionary experience in Chinese Buddhism / Eric M. Greene.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Greene, Eric M., author.

Series:

Studies in East Asian Buddhism ; no. 28.

Studies in East Asian Buddhism ; 28

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Meditation--Buddhism.

Meditation.

Zen Buddhism--China.

Zen Buddhism.

China.

Physical Description:

xii, 313 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press, [2021]

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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Meditation Practice, Meditation Masters, and Meditation Texts p. 21

Meditation in China before 400 p. 25

The Meditation Master as a- Social Category p. 28

The Chan Scriptures p. 45

The Formation of a Social Field of Meditation in the Fifth Century p. 54

Chapter 2 Confirmatory Visions and the Semiotics of Meditative Experience p. 57

Evidence of Meditative Attainment p. 58

Confirmatory Visions and Kumarajïva's Meditation Scripture p. 64

The Chan Scripture of Dharmatrata p. 71

Confirmatory Visions in the Five Gates p. 75

Confirmatory Visions in the Chan Essentials p. 83

The Semiotics of Meditative Experience p. 91

The Affordances of a Semiotic Form p. 98

Personal Experience and Institutional Authority p. 106

Chapter 3 Visions of Karma p. 110

Meditation as Divination p. 111

Zhiyi on Basic Meditative Experience p. 113

Visions of Karma in the Chan Essentials p. 125

Meditation and Repentance p. 132

The Scripture on Meditation Most Sublime p. 138

Meditation and Dreams p. 141

Deathbed Visions p. 147

Meditation and the Hermeneutics of Purity p. 155

Chapter 4 Repentance p. 159

Chanhui p. 162

Repentance for Meditators p. 169

The Scope of Repentance p. 179

Repentance in the Formation of Chinese Buddhism p. 190

Chapter 5 From chan to Chan p. 205

Rejecting the Chan Scriptures p. 208

Meditative Attainment in East Mountain Texts p. 212

Visions of Chan and Visions in Chan p. 225

Rewriting the Scriptures at the Wofoyuan p. 230

The Politics of Meditative Attainment p. 238

Toward a New Era p. 247.

Notes:

"A Kuroda Institute book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780824884437

0824884434

OCLC:

1153898470