The Weaving of Mantra

The Weaving of Mantra PDF Author: Ryûichi Abé
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231528870
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 620

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Book Description
The great Buddhist priest Kûkai (774-835) is credited with the introduction and establishment of tantric -or esoteric -Buddhism in early ninth-century Japan. In Ryûichi Abé examines this important religious figure -neglected in modern academic literatu

The Weaving of Mantra

The Weaving of Mantra PDF Author: Ryûichi Abé
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231528870
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 620

Get Book Here

Book Description
The great Buddhist priest Kûkai (774-835) is credited with the introduction and establishment of tantric -or esoteric -Buddhism in early ninth-century Japan. In Ryûichi Abé examines this important religious figure -neglected in modern academic literatu

The Weaving of Mantra

The Weaving of Mantra PDF Author: Ryūichi Abe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231112864
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
"The Weaving of Mantra embeds Kukai within the fabric of political and social life in ninth-century Japan and explains how esoteric Buddhism played a critical role in many societal changes in Japan - from the growth of monasteries into major feudal powers to the formation of the native phonetic alphabet, kana. As Abe illustrates, Kukai's writings and the new type of discourse they spawned also marked Japan's transition from the ancient order to the medieval world, replacing Confucianism as the ideology of the state."--BOOK JACKET.

Tantric Poetry of Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi), Japan's Buddhist Saint

Tantric Poetry of Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi), Japan's Buddhist Saint PDF Author:
Publisher: White Pine Press (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
Includes excerpts from 'The Mahavairocana Sutra' and I-Hsing's 'Commentary of the Sutra'.

Strange Names of God

Strange Names of God PDF Author: Sangkeun Kim
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820471303
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
One of the most precarious and daunting tasks for sixteenth-century European missionaries in the cross-cultural mission frontiers was translating the name of «God» (Deus) into the local language. When the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) introduced the Chinese term Shangti as the semantic equivalent of Deus, he made one of the most innovative cross-cultural missionary translations. Ricci's employment of Shangti was neither a simple rewording of a Chinese term nor the use of a loan-word, but was indeed a risk-taking «identification» of the Christian God with the Confucian Most-High, Shangti. Strange Names of God investigates the historical progress of the semantic configuration of Shangti as the divine name of the Christian God in China by focusing on Chinese intellectuals' reaction to the strangely translated Chinese name of God.

Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism

Icons and Iconoclasm in Japanese Buddhism PDF Author: Pamela D. Winfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019933370X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Winner of the Association of Asian Studies's Southeast Conference Book Prize (2014) Does imagery help or hinder the enlightenment experience? Does awakening involve the imagination or not? Can art ever fully represent the realization of buddahood? In this study, Pamela D. Winfield offers a fascinating comparison of two pre-modern Japanese Buddhist masters and their views on the role of imagery in the enlightenment experience. Kukai (774-835) believed that real and imagined forms were indispensable to his new esoteric Mikky? method for "becoming a Buddha in this very body" (sokushin jobutsu), yet he also deconstructed the significance of such imagery in his poetic and doctrinal works. Conversely, Dogen (1200-1253) believed that "just sitting" in Zen meditation without any visual props or mental elaborations could lead one to realize that ''this very mind is Buddha'' (sokushin zebutsu), but he also privileged select Zen icons as worthy of veneration. In considering the nuanced views of both Kukai and Dogen anew, Winfield updates previous comparisons of their oeuvres and engages their texts and images together for the first time. In so doing, she liberates them from past sectarian scholarship that has pigeon-holed them into iconographic/ritual vs. philological/philosophical categories. She also restores the historical symbiosis between religious thought and artistic expression that was lost in the nineteenth-century disciplinary distinction between religious studies and art history. Finally, Winfield breaks new methodological ground by proposing space and time as organizing principles for analyzing both meditative experience and visual/material culture. As a result, this study presents a wider and deeper vision of how Japanese Buddhists themselves understood the role of imagery before, during, and after awakening.

The Buddhist Dead

The Buddhist Dead PDF Author: Bryan J. Cuevas
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824860160
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
In its teachings, practices, and institutions, Buddhism in its varied Asian forms has been—and continues to be—centrally concerned with death and the dead. Yet surprisingly "death in Buddhism" has received little sustained scholarly attention. The Buddhist Dead offers the first comparative investigation of this topic across the major Buddhist cultures of India, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Tibet, and Burma. Its individual essays, representing a range of methods, shed light on a rich array of traditional Buddhist practices for the dead and dying; the sophisticated but often paradoxical discourses about death and the dead in Buddhist texts; and the varied representations of the dead and the afterlife found in Buddhist funerary art and popular literature. This important collection moves beyond the largely text—and doctrine—centered approaches characterizing an earlier generation of Buddhist scholarship and expands its treatment of death to include ritual, devotional, and material culture. Contributors: James A. Benn, Raoul Birnbaum, Jason A. Carbine, Bryan J. Cuevas, Hank Glassman, John Clifford Holt, Matthew T. Kapstein, D. Max Moerman, Mark Rowe, Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Gregory Schopen, Koichi Shinohara, Jacqueline I. Stone, John S. Strong.13 illus.

Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries

Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries PDF Author: Mikael S. Adolphson
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824862813
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
"This exceptionally rich set of essays substantially advances our understanding of the Heian era, presenting the period as more fascinating, multi-faceted, and integrated than it has ever been before. This volume marks a turning point in the study of early Japanese culture and will be indispensable for future explorations of the era." —Andrew Edmund Goble, University of Oregon "As a Japanese historian, I enthusiastically recommend Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries, the first multi-author English-language academic work to offer a synthetic treatment of the Heian period. Japan’s emperor system is the last remaining sovereignty of its kind in human history, and this volume is indispensable when considering what sovereignty itself means in the present. To that end, the classical patterns established in the Heian period are superbly analyzed in this volume through the dual approach of ‘centers and peripheries.’" —Hotate Michihisa, Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo The first three centuries of the Heian period (794–1086) saw some of its most fertile innovations and epochal achievements in Japanese literature and the arts. It was also a time of important transitions in the spheres of religion and politics, as aristocratic authority was consolidated in Kyoto, powerful court factions and religious institutions emerged, and adjustments were made in the Chinese-style system of ruler-ship. At the same time, the era’s leaders faced serious challenges from the provinces that called into question the primacy and efficiency of the governmental system and tested the social/cultural status quo. Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries, the first book of its kind to examine the early Heian from a wide variety of multidisciplinary perspectives, offers a fresh look at these seemingly contradictory trends. Essays by fourteen leading American, European, and Japanese scholars of art history, history, literature, and religions take up core texts and iconic images, cultural achievements and social crises, and the ever-fascinating patterns and puzzles of the time. The authors tackle some of Heian Japan’s most enduring paradigms as well as hitherto unexplored problems in search of new ways of understanding the currents of change as well as the processes of institutionalization that shaped the Heian scene, defined the contours of its legacies, and make it one of the most intensely studied periods of the Japanese past. Contributors: Ryûichi Abé, Mikael Adolphson, Bruce Batten, Robert Borgen, Wayne Farris, Karl Friday, G. Cameron Hurst III, Edward Kamens, D. Max Moerman, Samuel Morse, Joan R. Piggott, Fukutò Sanae, Ivo Smits, Charlotte von Verschuer.

The Wind from Vulture Peak

The Wind from Vulture Peak PDF Author: Stephen D. Miller
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1933947764
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description


Language in the Buddhist Tantra of Japan

Language in the Buddhist Tantra of Japan PDF Author: Richard K. Payne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350037281
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Language in the Buddhist Tantra of Japan dismantles the preconception that Buddhism is a religion of mystical silence, arguing that language is in fact central to the Buddhist tradition. By examining the use of 'extraordinary language'-evocations calling on the power of the Buddha-in Japanese Buddhist Tantra, Richard K. Payne shows that such language was not simply cultural baggage carried by Buddhist practitioners from South to East Asia. Rather, such language was a key element in the propagation of new forms of belief and practice. In contrast to Western approaches to the philosophy of language, which are grounded in viewing language as a form of communication, this book argues that it is the Indian and East Asian philosophies of language that shed light on the use of language in meditative and ritual practices in Japan. It also illuminates why language was conceived as an effective means of progress on the path from delusion to awakening.

From Sovereign to Symbol

From Sovereign to Symbol PDF Author: Thomas Conlan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199778108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Rather than looking at the collapse of Japan's first warrior government as the manipulation of rival courts by warrior factions, this study argues that the crucial ideological conflict of the 14th century was between the conservative forces of ritual precedent and the ritual determinists steeped in Shingon Buddhism.