Peter N. Gregory

¿A veritable treasure trove.... Both demanding and tremendously rewarding.... The book is of high scholarly standard, but ... is clear, precise and a pleasure to read - and is certainly accessible to interested laymen. It cannot be recommended highly enough.¿ ¿The Middle Way, November 1993 ¿Each chapter in this volume is sophisticated, tightly argued, and well documented.... An important contribution to the literature on Buddhist meditation.¿ ¿Journal of Asian Studies 47 (1988)

Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism

Robert M. Gimello

¿Contains well-researched and specialized studies in the history of these two important East Asian Buddhist traditions.... It presents some of the best work of younger scholars who are making available to the English-speaking world the fruits of Japanese scholarship and building upon them.¿ ¿Religious Studies Review

Studies in Ch'an and Hua-Yen

Patricia Buckley Ebrey

The Tang (618-907) and Sung (960-1279) dynasties were times of great change in China. The economy grew spectacularly, the population doubled, migration brought more and more people to the fertile south, and printing led to a great increase in the availability of books. Buddhism became a fully sinicized religion that penetrated deeply into ordinary life. New cults and sects appeared and flourished. Chan became the dominant force within institutional Buddhism, Celestial Heart and Thunder Rites teachings gained prominence within Taoism, local gods such as Wen-chang came to be worshiped all over the country, and office-holding gods, such as the gods of city walls, became a common feature of the popular pantheon. Even Neo-Confucianism, often thought of simply as an intellectual movement, was in many ways like a new sect, its followers asked to alter fundamentally their patterns of daily life and even to worship at shrines to Confucian heroes. How were changes in the religions of the Chinese people implicated in the momentous social and cultural changes of this period? This volume represents a collaborative effort of nine scholars of Chinese religion, history, and thought to begin addressing this question. Their separate chapters vividly convey the diversity of the Tang and Sung religious world: gods that communicate through spirit writing; scholars who use veneration of maligned officials as subtle forms of political protest; local residents who try to enhance their power by asserting the power of their gods or getting titles for them; officials who seek the most up-to-date techniques to master occult forces. Still the larger goal of the authors is to contribute toward a more integrated understanding of Chinese culture and the ways it has changed. Basing themselves on close study of often difficult texts, each author has looked for evidence of interconnections: links between social and religious changes, between political or economic developments and religious ideas or practices, between folk religion and institutional religion, between Confucian philosophy and changes in the social and religious landscape, and between the ways religious and secular groups were organized. Taken together, these nine chapters present a new, fuller, and more nuanced view of the Chinese religions in this period of change.

Religion and Society in T'ang and Sung China

Approaches to Enlightenment in Chinese Thought

Sudden and Gradual

Daniel A. Getz

New paperback edition The Sung Dynasty (960–1279) has long been recognized as a major watershed in Chinese history. Although there are recent major monographs on Sung society, government, literature, Confucian thought, and popular religion, the contribution of Buddhism to Sung social and cultural life has been all but ignored. Indeed, the study of Buddhism during the Sung has lagged behind that of other periods of Chinese history. One reason for the neglect of this important aspect of Sung society is undoubtedly the tenacity of the view that the Sung marked the beginning of an inexorable decline of Buddhism in China that extended down through the remainder of the imperial era. As this book attests, however, new research suggests that, far from signaling a decline, the Sung was a period of great efflorescence in Buddhism. This volume is the first extended scholarly treatment of Buddhism in the Sung to be published in a Western language. It focuses largely on elite figures, elite traditions, and interactions among Buddhists and literati, although some of the book’s essays touch on ways in which elite traditions both responded to and helped shape more popular forms of lay practice and piety. All of the chapters in one way or another deal with the two most important elite traditions within Sung Buddhism: Ch’an and T’ien-t’ai. Whereas most previous discussions of Buddhism in the Sung have tended to concentrate on Ch’an, the present volume is notable for giving T’ien-t’ai its due. By presenting a broader and more contextualized picture of these two traditions as they developed in the Sung, this work amply reveals the vitality of Buddhism in the Sung as well as its embeddedness in the social and intellectual life of the time.

Buddhism in the Sung

This study of Tsung-mi is part of the Studies in East Asian Buddhism series. Author Peter Gregory makes extensive use of Japanese secondary sources, which complements his work on the complex Chinese materials that form the basis of the study.

Peter N. Gregory

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