Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies

Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies PDF Author: Albert Welter
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438490909
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This volume focuses on Chinese Chan Buddhism and its spread across East Asia, with special attention to its impacts on Korean Sŏn and Japanese Zen. Zen enthralled the scholarly world throughout much of the twentieth century, and Zen Studies became a major academic discipline in its wake. Interpreted through the lens of Japanese Zen and its reaction to events in the modern world, Zen Studies incorporated a broad range of Zen-related movements in the East Asian Buddhist world. As broad as the scope of Zen Studies was, however, it was clearly rooted in a Japanese context, and aspects of the "Zen experience" that did not fit modern Japanese Zen aspirations tended to be marginalized and ignored. Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies acknowledges the move beyond Zen Studies to recognize the changing and growing parameters of the field. The volume also examines the modern dynamics in each of these traditions.

Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies

Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies PDF Author: Albert Welter
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438490909
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume focuses on Chinese Chan Buddhism and its spread across East Asia, with special attention to its impacts on Korean Sŏn and Japanese Zen. Zen enthralled the scholarly world throughout much of the twentieth century, and Zen Studies became a major academic discipline in its wake. Interpreted through the lens of Japanese Zen and its reaction to events in the modern world, Zen Studies incorporated a broad range of Zen-related movements in the East Asian Buddhist world. As broad as the scope of Zen Studies was, however, it was clearly rooted in a Japanese context, and aspects of the "Zen experience" that did not fit modern Japanese Zen aspirations tended to be marginalized and ignored. Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies acknowledges the move beyond Zen Studies to recognize the changing and growing parameters of the field. The volume also examines the modern dynamics in each of these traditions.

Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies

Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies PDF Author: Heine WELTER
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781438490892
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
A comprehensive treatment of the shared traditions of Chan, Sŏn, and Zen in dynamic interaction across East Asia, acknowledging the changing and growing parameters of the field of Zen studies.

Seeing through Zen

Seeing through Zen PDF Author: John R. Mcrae
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520937074
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
The tradition of Chan Buddhism—more popularly known as Zen—has been romanticized throughout its history. In this book, John R. McRae shows how modern critical techniques, supported by recent manuscript discoveries, make possible a more skeptical, accurate, and—ultimately—productive assessment of Chan lineages, teaching, fundraising practices, and social organization. Synthesizing twenty years of scholarship, Seeing through Zen offers new, accessible analytic models for the interpretation of Chan spiritual practices and religious history. Writing in a lucid and engaging style, McRae traces the emergence of this Chinese spiritual tradition and its early figureheads, Bodhidharma and the "sixth patriarch" Huineng, through the development of Zen dialogue and koans. In addition to constructing a central narrative for the doctrinal and social evolution of the school, Seeing through Zen examines the religious dynamics behind Chan’s use of iconoclastic stories and myths of patriarchal succession. McRae argues that Chinese Chan is fundamentally genealogical, both in its self-understanding as a school of Buddhism and in the very design of its practices of spiritual cultivation. Furthermore, by forgoing the standard idealization of Zen spontaneity, we can gain new insight into the religious vitality of the school as it came to dominate the Chinese religious scene, providing a model for all of East Asia—and the modern world. Ultimately, this book aims to change how we think about Chinese Chan by providing new ways of looking at the tradition.

Chan Buddhism

Chan Buddhism PDF Author: Peter D. Hershock
Publisher: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
ISBN: 9780824827809
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Chan Buddhism has become paradigmatic of Buddhist spirituality. Known in Japan as Zen and in Korea as Son, it is one of the most strikingly iconoclastic spiritual traditions in the world. This succinct and lively work clearly expresses the meaning of Chan as it developed in China more than a thousand years ago and provides useful insights into the distinctive aims and forms of practice associated with the tradition, including its emphasis on the unity of wisdom and practice; the reality of "sudden awakening"; the importance of meditation; the use of "shock tactics"; the centrality of the teacher-student relationship; and the celebration of enlightenment narratives, or koans. Unlike many scholarly studies, which offer detailed perspectives on historical development, or guides for personal practice written by contemporary Buddhist teachers, this volume takes a middle path between these two approaches, weaving together both history and insight to convey to the general reader the conditions, energy, and creativity that characterize Chan. Following a survey of the birth and development of Chan, its practices and spirituality are fleshed out through stories and teachings drawn from the lives of four masters: Bodhidharma, Huineng, Mazu, and Linji. Finally, the meaning of Chan as a living spiritual tradition is addressed through a philosophical reading of its practice as the realization of wisdom, attentive mastery, and moral clarity.

Chan Before Chan

Chan Before Chan PDF Author: Eric M. Greene
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824884434
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
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.

The Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment

The Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment PDF Author:
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438413815
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
The Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment, used in monastic education for more than a millennium, is a concise guide to the key paradigms of the practice systems of the East Asian meditational schools (Ch'an, Sǒn, and Zen). Contained in its twelve chapters are definitive explanations of the meaning of innate and actualized enlightenment, sudden and gradual enlightenment, the true nature of ignorance and suffering, along with numerous examples of methods of contemplation that accord with and reflect the basic Ch'an views on enlightenment and practice. Although the Sutra was popular throughout the East Asian region, it attained its highest canonical status within the Korean Chogye school, where it is still a key text in the core curriculum of modern-day monks and nuns. The Sutra is translated here in full, along with the eloquent and revelatory commentary of the Chǒson monk Kihwa (1376–1433).

The Hongzhou School of Chan Buddhism in Eighth- through Tenth-Century China

The Hongzhou School of Chan Buddhism in Eighth- through Tenth-Century China PDF Author: Jinhua Jia
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791468241
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A comprehensive study of the Hongzhou school of Chan Buddhism, long regarded as the Golden Age of this tradition, using many previously ignored texts, including stele inscriptions.

Discovering the True Self

Discovering the True Self PDF Author: Kodo Sawaki
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640093788
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
In easy-to-understand language, a 20th-century Zen master explains profound teachings from Zen Buddhism, offering an essential resource for anyone interested in Zen meditation. “You can’t see your true Self. [But] you can become it. Becoming your true Self is zazen.” Having come of age as an orphan in the slums of Tsu City, Japan, Kodo Sawaki had to fight his way to adulthood, and became one of the most respected Zen masters of the 20th century. He had a great understanding of Dogen Zenji’s teaching and he knew how to express Dogen’s philosophy in clear, easily–understood language. Sawaki’s primary mission was to bring all people to an awareness of the Self, which he believed came through Zen meditation. His humor and straightforward talk garnered Sawaki followers from all walks of life. Though he remained poor by choice, he was rich in spirit. Two of his students who became known in America as well as in Japan were Kosho Uchiyama, abbot of Antaiji Temple and author of Opening The Hand of Thought, and Gudo Nishijima, Zen teacher and translator of Dogen’s Shobogenzo. A student of Kosho Uchiyama, Arthur Braverman has compiled an anthology of Sawaki’s writings and a garland of sayings gathered from throughout his lifetime. One of a few collections of Sawaki’s teachings published in English, his life and work bracket the most intriguing and influential period of modern Zen practice in Japan and America.

Dōgen and the Kōan Tradition

Dōgen and the Kōan Tradition PDF Author: Steven Heine
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791417737
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This book has three major goals in critically examining the historical and philosophical relation between the writings of Dōgen and the Zen koan tradition. First, it introduces and evaluates recent Japanese scholarship concerning Dōgen's two Shōbōgenzō texts, the Japanese (Kana) collection of ninety-two fascicles on Buddhist topics and the Chinese (Mana) collection of three hundred koan cases also known as the Shōbōgenzō Sanbyakusoku. Second, it develops a new methodology for clarifying the development of the koan tradition and the relation between intellectual history and multifarious interpretations of koan cases based on postmodern literary criticism. Third, the book's emphasis on a literary critical methodology challenges the conventional reading of koans stressing the role of psychological impasse culminating in silence.

The Essence of Chan

The Essence of Chan PDF Author: Guo Gu
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834843080
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Clear and illuminating commentary on one of Bodhidharma’s most important texts—designed to help Chan practitioners apply timeless and essential advice to their practice Legend has it that more than a thousand years ago an Indian Buddhist monk named Bodhidharma arrived in China. His approach to teaching was unlike that of any of the Buddhist missionaries who had come to China before him. He confounded the emperor with cryptic dialogues, traveled the country, lived in a cave in the mountains, and eventually paved the way for a unique and illuminating approach to Buddhist teachings that would later spread across the whole of East Asia in the form of Chan—later to be known as Seon in Korean, Thien in Vietnamese, and Zen in Japanese. This book, a translation and commentary on one of Bodhidharma’s most important texts, explores Bodhidharma’s revolutionary teachings in English. Guo Gu weaves his commentary through modern and relatable contexts, showing that this centuries-old wisdom is just as crucial for life now as it was when it first came to be. Masterfully translated and accompanied by helpful insights to supplement daily practice, The Essence of Chan is the perfect guide for those new to Chan, those returning, or those who have been practicing for years.