New Books in Buddhist Studies

In India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), eleven scholars (including editors John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar) examine the Chinese reception of Indian ideas and myth, and address Chinese attempts to recreate India within the central kingdom. Beginning with Victor Mair’s argument that it was Buddhist theories about reality that allowed fiction to flourish in China, and ending with Stephen R. Bokenkamp’s study of celestial scripts that Daoists created in response to the appearance of Sanskrit script in China, the volume focuses primarily on the fourth to tenth centuries but addresses dynamics that were at play both before and after this six-century period. While many previous studies that address the impact of India on China do so by focusing on the Chinese transformation of Buddhism and on the degree to which Chinese Buddhism retained this or that Indian feature, this volume differs in that it looks at the influence of Indian thought (particularly religious thought and myths) beyond the confines of Buddhism proper. Meir Shahar and Bernard Faure’s respective contributions are good examples of this, as they demonstrate that some of the Indian deities and demons who came to China with Tantric Buddhism exchanged their Buddhist robes for Daoist ones, or escaped into the wider world of Chinese religious thought and practice.  Another central theme of the book is the way in which Chinese turned to Indian models for religious and political ends, or, in other cases, attempted to recreate India within China. In addition to the aforementioned scholars, the volume contains chapters by Yamabe Nobuyoshi, Ye Derong, the late John R. McRae, Robert H. Sharf, and Christine Mollier.  This book will be of particular interest to those wanting to learn more about Indian myth in East Asia, the Chinese reception of Indian ideas and symbols, the interaction between Daoism and Buddhism, the adapting of Buddhist monasticism to Chinese familial organization, Bodhidharma, the influence of Buddhism on Chinese literature, and the Chinese response to Buddhist doctrinal dilemmas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

In Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), Charlotte Eubanks examines the relationship between Mahāyāna Buddhist sÅ«tras and the human body, using Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) as a lens through which to understand this particular aspect of Buddhist textual culture and the way in which text and body are not as separate as we usually assume.  Two of the questions she wants to answer are “What do sÅ«tras want?” and “What do sÅ«tras get?”  She examines Buddhist scriptures of continental origin to answer the former, while she turns to Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) to answer the latter. Two ideas central to the book are that bodies can become texts, and that texts can become bodies.  Concerning the first, through reciting, reproducing, and in some sense embodying a sutra, an individual can in effect turn his or her body into the text itself (a result that the sÅ«tras themselves encourage through various admonishments, a move that can be seen as their own quest for survival). As for the second–the idea that texts can become bodies–Eubanks shows that in the Japanese context sÅ«tras literary materialize, becoming independent actors in their own right. While it was largely through setsuwa and other such filters that medieval Japanese understood Buddhist scripture, the ease with which sÅ«tras and bodies moved back and forth along what Eubanks terms “the text-flesh continuum” was dependent upon Mahāyāna sÅ«tras’ concealment of their authorship.  Indeed, certain sÅ«tras went so far as to suggest that their origins are to be found prior to the Buddha himself, the figure who in traditional Buddhism would have been considered the author of these texts.  This move allowed Mahāyāna sÅ«tras to claim agency for themselves, and thus for Japanese setsuwa to later depict sÅ«tras as willful, motivated actors rather than mere containers for the teachings of the Buddha. Besides using setsuwa as a source for understanding the Japanese reception of Buddhist sÅ«tras, Eubanks examines the prefaces and colophons of setsuwa collections in order to understand how the compilers or authors of these tales intended this didactic literature to interact with human bodies (e.g., as food or medicine), showing that in the ideal relationship between setsuwa and reader/listener, the latter not only received ideas and ethical norms but also came to embody (both literally and figuratively) those very ideas and norms. Beside being rewarded with a stimulating reinterpretation of the way in which sÅ«tras and setsuwa make their messages heard and felt, the reader will be treated to a plethora of fascinating accounts from nine medieval setsuwa collections.  In addition, Eubanks addresses gender at various points throughout the work, showing how Japanese and non-Japanese scholars alike have treated this genre as an erotic object, and the way in which setsuwa were conceived by their own authors and compilers as elderly female matchmakers (to give but two examples).  And in the final chapter Eubanks discusses the relationship between material form and the practice of reading, seeking to understand the development of the revolving sÅ«tra library and the persistence of the scroll in East Asian Buddhism long after the codex has come into use. This book will be of particular interest to those researching medieval Japanese Buddhism, Mahāyāna sÅ«tras as a genre, setsuwa, Buddhist textual culture, gender symbolism in Japanese Buddhism, medieval traditions of preaching and proselytization, and the body in religious thought and practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

In his recent book, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (Columbia University Press, 2013), R. Keller Kimbrough provides us with eight beautifully translated sekkyō and ko-jōruri. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Erik Braun‘s recent book, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013), examines the spread of Burmese Buddhist meditation practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the social, political, and intellectual historical contexts that gave rise to this development. Braun accomplishes this by focusing on the role that the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923) played in this movement, drawing primarily on Ledi Sayadaw’s own writings, three biographies, polemical responses to Ledi Sayadaw’s writings, and contemporaneous periodicals. Central to the book is the importance of the Abhidhamma (Buddhist metaphysics or psychology) in Burmese Buddhist monasticism and, more specifically, the way in which Ledi Sayadaw spread the study of the Abhidhamma among the laity and used it as the foundation for insight meditation. In contrast to many recent proponents of insight meditation (both Asian and not), who emphasize technique at the expense of study and theory, Ledi Sayadaw saw insight meditation and study of the Abhidhamma as an inseparable pair, with the latter serving as a basis for the former. Braun places Ledi Sayadaw’s approach in the larger context of Buddhist and Burmese theories about meditation, exploring the different views on the relationships among samatha (concentration meditation), the jhanas (stages of meditative absorption), insight meditation as direct awareness of sensory and mental experience, and insight meditation as discursive thinking informed by Abhidhammic categories. Exploring the cultural milieu of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Burma, Braun demonstrates that Ledi Sayadaw exhibits characteristics that we would regard as traditional (e.g., the importance he grants to literary competence, his belief in Buddhist cosmology) as well as those we might think of as modern (e.g., his charismatic style of preaching, his focus on the laity). In addition, as opposed to Buddhist reformers who argued that Buddhism was in fact applicable to and accorded with modernity (being synonymous with the West, in most such cases), Ledi Sayadaw flipped this relationship on its head by asserting that modernity (e.g., Western science) was in agreement with Buddhism. In so doing he avoided the usual contradictions between Buddhism and modernity but without apparently compromising the Buddhist worldview in the process. Braun places Ledi Sayadaw’s thoughts on these matters in the larger historical context of colonialism: Burma was annexed by the British (in three stages: 1826, 1852, 1886) and many Burmese believed that Buddhism’s final days were nigh. Ledi Sayadaw’s theories, then, were in part a response to a new environment in which Buddhist monks were losing their traditional position as educators, and in which the age-old relationship between the sa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Jacob Dalton‘s recent book, The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (Yale University Press, 2011), examines violence (both symbolic and otherwise) in Tibetan Buddhism. Dalton focuses in particular on the age of fragmentation (here 842-986 CE), and draws on previously unexamined Dunhuang manuscripts to show that this period was one of great creativity and innovation, and a time when violent myths and rituals were instrumental in adapting Buddhism to local interests, thereby allowing Buddhism to firmly establish itself in Tibet. While much twentieth-century scholarship faithfully followed Tibetan historiography’s assertion that the age of fragmentation was a dark time during which the light of Buddhism faded completely, Dalton not only confirms that Buddhism continued throughout this period, but also looks to the Dunhuang materials to show that it was in fact the age-of-fragmentation narratives of demon taming that laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new, pan-Tibetan Buddhist identity beginning in the eleventh century. Central to Dalton’s project are a myth and a ritual. The myth is that of the subjugation of the demoness Rudra, in which a compassionate but wrathful Buddhist deity violently defeats the wild Rudra, using a means that Buddhism condemns (violence) and yet is used as a force for good in this case. This narrative encapsulates a theme that runs throughout the book: the Buddhist ambivalence towards violence, an ambivalence present in the tradition from its earliest days but which found its fullest expression in Tantric Buddhism. The ritual, on the other hand, is the so-called liberation ritual, in which a victim–usually an effigy is prescribed–is ritually murdered and then purified. Dalton focuses in particular on a Dunhaung ritual manual, which, incidentally, makes no mention of an effigy, thus leaving some doubt as whether or not the manual intends an actual human victim. This rite and the story of Rudra constitute a pair of sorts, and together served as a theoretical, historical, mythic, and practical model whereby the native, evil demons of Tibet could be tamed (i.e., ritually murdered and purified) and employed in the service of Buddhism. Dalton also demonstrates how the themes of violence and demon taming continued beyond the age of fragmentation. For example, a composite work called the Pillar Testament (late-eleventh to mid-twelfth c.) contains a legend in which the seventh-century king Songtsen Gampo had to subjugate the land of Tibet–envisioned as (and thus identified as none other than) a huge rāká¹£asÄ« demoness lying on her back–by pinning this demoness down with thirteen temples. In this way the legend carries the model of demon subjugation that was used at the local level during the age of fragmentation to a national level during the second imperial period. Later on, as Tibetans ceased to think of their own evil nature and autochthonous demons as the greatest threat to Buddhism and instead shifted their attention to peoples and powers at the periphery of their realm, the same model of demon subjugation was applied, with Tibet’s perceived enemies (particularly the Mongols) taking the role of sacrificial victim. The book’s content is wide ranging yet skillfully woven together through the dual themes of violence and liberation (i.e., demon subjugation).  Along the way we hear about the differences between Chinese and Tibetan receptions of Buddhist scriptural attitudes toward violence, Padmasambhava as a demon tamer, the Indian Kālikā Purāṇa, King Yeshe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Clark Chilson‘s new book, Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014) examines secret groups of Shin (i.e., True Pure Land Buddhist) practitioners from the thirteenth century onward, but focuses primarily on the past 150 years. Although today at least thirty different lineages of secret Shin continue to operate, with a total estimated membership numbering in the tens of thousands, because they have been so successful at hiding (a technique they have perfected over a period of centuries), few scholars are even aware of their existence. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork that he conducted from 1998 onward and a number of reports written by mainstream Shin monks who infiltrated these groups or researchers who befriended them, Chilson explains why certain groups concealed their doctrines and practices (and even existence) and, more importantly, reveals the long-term consequences that secrecy had on these groups.In addition, Chilson provides an in-depth theoretical introduction, showing that scholarship on secrecy has too often conflated different types of secrecy (e.g., esotericism and social secrecy), a problem that is particularly vexing in the case of Japanese religion, in which the influence of esoteric Buddhism is so pervasive.Rather than simply confining such theoretical concerns to the introduction and conclusion, Chilson skillfully weaves issues related to concealment into the fabric of each chapter, explaining how the case studies he presents illustrate this or that function or consequence of secrecy. Chilson distinguishes between two types of covert Shin groups–those that went into hiding due to persecution, and those in which secrecy was an integral element from their very genesis–and outlines the similarities and differences between the two. While much scholarship on secrecy in religion has focused on why groups have secrets in the first place (e.g., to avoid persecution) and on secrecy’s personal power (e.g., personal authority, or the power to avoid detection), Chilson draws our attention instead to how concealment influences the structure, doctrines, and practices of these groups, and to the way in which secrecy, at first a consciously wielded instrument, is eventually incorporated so thoroughly into a tradition that its power becomes structural, a force controlled by no single person but which pervades the group and becomes central to its identity.In this way, Chilson answers the question that many readers will want to ask: why did the practice of secrecy continue in persecuted groups once the threat of persecution had subsided? On a fascinating journey that takes us from Shinran’s thirteenth-century admonition of his eldest son for claiming to possess secret teachings, to a twenty-first-century covert Shin leader who worries about the dwindling number of adherents, we hear of secret caves in southern Kyushu used for clandestine worship, dietary proscriptions of chicken and milk, punishment of covert Shin members in northeastern Japan (ranging from promises to abandon covert Shin to crucifixion), and a covert Shin group whose members associated themselves with the KÅ«yadÅ and became ordained Tendai Buddhist priests in order to deflect suspicion.In addition, through access to groups that few scholars have been granted, Chilson describes in detail many of the initiation rituals and teachings at the center of certain covert Shin groups, all the while addressing the ethical dilemmas that researchers studying secret groups face. This book will be of particular interest to those researching or interested in Jōdo shin shÅ« (Japanese True Pure Land Buddhism), secrecy in religion, secret societies, Edo-period regulation of religious groups, modern Japanese religion, and religious identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Paul Copp‘s new book, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on Chinese interpretations and uses of two written dharani during the last few centuries of the first millennium. Based on extensive research on the material forms that these dharani took, Copp departs from a tradition of scholarship that focuses on the sonic quality and spoken uses of these spells, drawing our attention instead to how written and inscribed dharani were used to adorn and anoint the body. A central theme is Copp’s assertion that the diffuse dharani practices that appeared centuries prior to the flowering of a high Esoteric Buddhism in the eighth century were not simply a crude precursor to the later development of a fully systematized Esoteric Buddhism, but rather were a set of loosely related practices and ideas that continued to develop alongside Esoteric Buddhism. Through rich descriptions of dharani use and interpretation, and liberal use of Dunhuang materials, he shows that dharani were ubiquitous in all sectors of Chinese Buddhism: before, during, and after the eighth century. In this way Copp challenges the teleological view of early dharani-based practices as being but one stage leading to the eventual triumph of a comprehensive Chinese Esoteric Buddhism. In addition, Copp demonstrates how material dharani practices were a product of both Chinese and Indic input. Drawing on archeological evidence, he notes that the way in which dharani were actually worn reflects Indian precedents, while on the other hand Chinese textual records describe and prescribe the wearing of dharani in terms borrowed from Chinese practices of wearing amulets, seals, medicines, and talismans. The book contains thirty-two illustrations of amulets, written dharani, dharani stamps, dharani pillars, and funerary jars that help the reader to better visualize and understand the material practices at the center of Copp’s work. This book will be of particular interest to those researching or wishing to learn more about the history of scholarship on dharani, Chinese practices of wearing enchanted objects, Chinese interpretations and uses of dharani (particularly outside of a systematized, ritual-philosophical Esoteric Buddhism), theories about the role of writing and inscription in religious practice, and Chinese Buddhist material culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Chan-fang Yu‘s new book, Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), focuses on a community of nuns in Taiwan founded in the early 1980s, and discusses the appearance and development of this community within the context of rapidly changing social and economic circumstances in Taiwan during the last half of the twentieth century.  Based on extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews conducted between the mid-1990s and 2013, Yu provides the reader with a vivid picture of daily life in the seminary and a close examination of the Buddhist education classes for laypeople taught by the nuns.  Along the way she explores the appearance of Buddhist seminaries in China during the late Qing and Republican periods, the transformation of Taiwanese nuns from individuals devoted to Buddhist ritual and personal salvation into religious teachers of the Buddhist laity, the changing demographics of the Taiwanese Buddhist nunnery, and the development of curricula that incorporate both traditional Buddhist subjects (e.g., study of the Vinaya) and secular ones (e.g., business management).  Through Yu’s detailed presentations of the instructional materials used to educate both nuns and laypeople, the reader begins to understand the vision that informed the activities of the Incense Light Community as well as the way in which one particular community of nuns dealt with modernization and its concomitant challenges to traditional Buddhist education, practice, and belief.  However, perhaps the most compelling aspect of this work is its ability to draw the reader into the lives of individual nuns and the complex social realities of life as a Taiwanese nun during the past half-century.  This book will be of particular interest to those researching or interested in issues of Buddhist modernization, Buddhist and Chinese views of gender, female monasticism, and Buddhist education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Being human, much of our energy goes into resisting the basic mess of life, but messy it is nonetheless. The trick (as psychoanalysts know) is to embrace it all anyway. “Trauma is an indivisible part of human existence. It takes many forms but spares no one,” so writes psychiatrist and practicing Buddhist Dr. Mark Epstein. Epstein illustrates this truth by offering a psychoanalytic reading of the life of the Buddha in his latest work, The Trauma of Everyday Life (Penguin Press, 2013). It’s a brilliant psychobiographical single-case study. Think Erik Erikson’s Ghandi’s TruthorYoung Man Luther. A little known detail of the Buddha’s biography is that his mother died when he was just seven days old. The book investigates the nature and repercussions of this early loss as a foundation of the Buddha’s life and salvation. Epstein writes that “primitive agony” (ala Winnicott) lay in the Buddha’s implicit memory coloring his experience in ways he could feel but never know. The unmetabolized grief plays out into Buddha’s young adulthood as he abandons his wife and own young child in renunciation of his cushy and privileged life. The ghosts and psychic ancestors that haunt the Buddha as well as his separation-individuation drama are familiar to modern day clinicians. Epstein describes a Buddha in the throes of repetition compulsion as well as enacting practices of starvation and self-harm—dissociative defenses that serve to ward off potential fragmentation. Epstein writes that the rhythm of this early trauma and the defenses the Buddha employed run through Buddhism like a “great underground river.” Buddha’s salvation comes about via the discovery of mindfulness which ultimately infuse his life and spiritual teaching. Within the meditative practice of mindfulness, a holding environment is created in which unknown and unexamined aspects of the past can be experienced for the first time in the here and now. Like the psychoanalytic encounter, therein lies its transformative power. In his detailed depictions of the Buddha as a human subject in formation and borrowing from Winnicott’s metapsychology, Epstein draws the parallel to the psychoanalytic space. Ultimately the book asks whether trauma itself can be transformational. According to Epstein, yes. Life itself is already broken and since we can’t control the essential traumas of life (whether they be big “T” or little) we must transform our relationship to them to go on being. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Jay Carter‘s new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk (Oxford University Press, 2011; paperback edition 2014) is less a traditional biography than a life of an emergent modern nation as told through the experiences of a single individual whose relationships embodied the history of that nation in flesh, bones, and blood. Born in 1875 as Wang Shouchun, the man who would become Tanxu worked various jobs as laborer, minor government official, fortune-teller, and pharmacist before finding his calling, leaving his family, and setting off on a journey to become a Buddhist monk. His travels spanned the physical and spiritual worlds – one of his earliest voyages took him beyond death to the underworld and back. After leaving home, Wang experienced treaty-ports in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer uprising, and Russo-Japanese tension over Manchuria. His life unfolded in a series of Chinese cities that were administered by foreigners, and the transformative power of Sino-foreign relations in this period becomes a recurring trope throughout his story. Ranging north and south, he eventually studied to become a Buddhist monk and, as Tanxu, helped to found temples across China. Carter’s own travels took him from the Bronx (to meet with a Dharma heir disciple of the monk) through more than a dozen Chinese cities, taking Tanxu’s own memoir and itinerary as guidebook and route-map. The resulting book is a beautifully written, historiographically self-reflexive, and humane account of the lived history of modern China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies