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Sharf draws his argument in part from a meticulous historical, philological, and philosophical analysis of the Treasure Store Treatise (Pao-tsang lun), an eighth-century Buddho-Taoist work apocryphally attributed to the fifth-century master Seng-chao (374–414). In the process of coming to terms with this recondite text, Sharf ventures into all manner of subjects bearing on our understanding of medieval Chinese Buddhism, from the evolution of T’ang “gentry Taoism” to the pivotal role of image veneration and the problematic status of Chinese Tantra.
In East Asia perhaps the most important countercurrent of influence came from Korea, the focus of this volume. Chapters examine the role played by the Paekche kingdom in introducing Buddhist material culture (especially monastic architecture) to Japan and the impact of Korean scholiasts on the creation of several distinctive features that eventually came to characterize Japanese Pure Land Buddhism. The lives and intellectual importance of the monks Sungnang (fl. ca. 490) and Wonch’uk (613–696) are reassessed, bringing to light their role in the development of early intellectual schools within Chinese Buddhism. Later chapters discuss the influential teachings of the semi-legendary master Musang (684–762), the patriarch of two of the earliest schools of Ch’an; the work of a dozen or so Korean monks active in the Chinese T’ient’ai tradition; and the Huiyin monastery. Source: University of Hawai'i Press
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In the presentation to follow I would like to set out two spiritual traditions for us to consider: the image-likeness tradition based on Genesis 1:26 and developed by the Latin and Greek Fathers of the Church until approximately A.D. 1200, and the tathāgatagarbha teachings on Buddha-nature in Mahayana Buddhism, which flourished in India and then spread to Tibet and other parts of the Far East in the first six centuries C.E. I shall do this bby presenting two texts: the Golden Epistle of William of St, Thierry, and the Ratnagotravibhāga (third to fifth centuries A.D.), variously attributed to Saramati or Maitreya. My thesis here is that while the language and concepts used in these two treatises are different, and the two worldviews of which they are representative also vary widely, we can find nonetheless underlying themes that express central concerns of each tradition, especially concerning the brith of a basic nature in the person, and the inability of either sin or defilements (kleśa) to cover over that nature that is coming to birth.'"`UNIQ--ref-00000D60-QINU`"' (Groves, "Image-likeness and Tathāgatagarbha," 97–98)
The primary concept underlying Dōgen's Zen practice is “oneness of practice-enlightenment”. In fact, this concept is considered so fundamental to Dōgen's variety of Zen—and, consequently, to the Sōtō school as a whole—that it formed the basis for the work Shushō-gi, which was compiled in 1890 by Takiya Takushō of Eihei-ji and Azegami Baisen of Sōji-ji as an introductory and prescriptive abstract of Dōgen's massive work, the Shōbōgenzō (“Treasury of the Eye of the True Dharma”).
Chinese Buddhist thought. Unlike other more technical expositions of Buddhist teachings, Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity (Yuan Jen lun) does not presuppose a detailed knowledge of Buddhist doctrine. In a brief and accessible fashion, it presents a systematic overview of the major teachings within Chinese Buddhism. The organizational framework used by Tsung-mi, moreover, represents one of the primary methods devised by Chinese Buddhists to organize and make sense of the diverse body of teachings they received from India. Finally, Tsung-mi's essay is especially noteworthy in that it sheds light on the interaction of Buddhism with the
indigenous intellectual and religious traditions of Confucianism and Taoism. Peter N. Gregory's commentary, which follows a running translation of the work, will help bridge the temporal and cultural gap separating contemporary Western readers from the text's intended medieval Chinese audience. (Source: back cover)
Scholars and commentators have long recognized the historical importance of original enlightenment thought but differ heatedly over how it is to be understood. Some tout it as the pinnacle of the Buddhist philosophy of absolute non-dualism. Others claim to find in it the paradigmatic expression of a timeless Japanese spirituality. According other readings, it represents a dangerous anti-nomianism that undermined observance of moral precepts, precipitated a decline in Buddhist scholarship, and denied the need for religious discipline. Still others denounce it as an authoritarian ideology that, by sacralizing the given order, has in effect legitimized hierarchy and discriminative social practices. Often the acceptance or rejection of original enlightenment thought is seen as the fault line along which traditional Buddhist institutions are to be differentiated from the new Buddhist movements (Zen, Pure Land, and Nichiren) that arose during Japan’s medieval period.
Jacqueline Stone’s groundbreaking study moves beyond the treatment of the original enlightenment doctrine as abstract philosophy to explore its historical dimension. Drawing on a wealth of medieval primary sources and modern Japanese scholarship, it places this discourse in its ritual, institutional, and social contexts, illuminating its importance to the maintenance of traditions of lineage and the secret transmission of knowledge that characterized several medieval Japanese elite culture. It sheds new light on interpretive strategies employed in pre-modern Japanese Buddhist texts, an area that hitherto has received a little attention. Through these and other lines of investigation, Stone problematizes entrenched notions of “corruption” in the medieval Buddhist establishment. Using the examples of Tendai and Nichiren Buddhism and their interactions throughout the medieval period, she calls into question both overly facile distinctions between "old" and "new" Buddhism and the long-standing scholarly assumptions that have perpetuated them. This study marks a significant contribution to ongoing debates over definitions of Buddhism in the Kamakura era (1185–1333), long regarded as a formative period in Japanese religion and culture. Stone argues that "original enlightenment thought" represents a substantial rethinking of Buddhist enlightenment that cuts across the distinction between "old" and "new" institutions and was particularly characteristic of the medieval period.
Unlike the recluses and eccentrics that have so often attracted Western readers of Buddhism, Ryogen was a consummate politician and builder. Because he lost his major monastic sponsor at an early age, he was forced to find ways to advance his career with little support. His activities reveal much about the path to success for monks during the tenth century. Skill in debate, the performance of Esoteric Buddhist ritual, and strategic alliances with powerful lay and monastic figures were important to his advance. In 966 Ryogen was appointed head of the Tendai School and served until his death nineteen years later. He has been vilified at times for his loyalty to his own faction within Tendai at the expense of other groups. Careful analysis of the political and social factors behind his attitudes, however, places his activities in their appropriate context.
The study concludes with a discussion of the ordinations and roles of nuns during the early Heian period. An examination of Ryogen's close relation with his mother helps define the ambiguities of a school that prohibited women from the precincts of its temple yet performed rituals to insure safe childbirth and frequently attracted their patronage. A number of primary sources are translated in the appendices. (Source: University of Hawai'i Press)
The factors contributing to this change in the nature and place of East Asian Buddhist Studies are too numerous to list in their entirety, and it is likely that not all of them are yet fully understood. No doubt influential are the new definitions of Religious and Intellectual History that have been entertained throughout the academy. New designs of advanced graduate training in the relevant disciplines and areas have surely also had their effects. However, two rather more specific factors deserve special notice, particularly in view of their relevance to the work here at hand. The first of these that needs to be appreciated is the extent to which western scholars of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Buddhism have put themselves wisely in debt to Japanese scholarship. The Japanese have led the field of East Asian Buddhist Studies for several generations, and in recent decades they have succeeded in adding to the breadth and depth of their traditional learning in the subject a measure of critical sophistication in Philology and History that has set the standard which all others in the field must match. No
serious work on East Asian Buddhism is now being done in Europe or America that has not been deliberately
informed by the Japanese model. The other particular factor to be noted is the importance of the discovery
and exploitation of previously unknown or very little known primary sources of information. Foremost among
these, of course, are the manuscripts and xylographs of the now well known Tun-huang trove. Of a significance for the study of East Asian Buddhism comparable to the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for the early history of Judaism and Christianity, these texts have had especially revolutionary effects upon our
knowledge of the origins and early phases of Ch'an (Zen). Again, it has been Japanese scholars who have
taken the lead in editing, analyzing, and interpreting the hundreds of these texts in Chinese and Tibetan that bear on the early history of Ch'an, but now French scholars are also making very important contributions, and for some years yet to come the study of early Ch'an will continue to be one of the most exciting frontiers of advancement in East Asian Buddhist Studies wherever conducted. Also to be considered are the many other primary sources, apart from the Tun-huang materials, that have come to light in the past forty years or so and are now attracting scholarly attention. One thinks particularly of texts discovered in Korean monastic libraries or in hitherto little explored Japanese collections. These too have helped stimulate the growth and redefinition of East Asian Buddhist Studies that is currently underway.
It is the belief of the editors of the present volume that the essays which comprise it exemplify the trends sketched above. They either broach new topics or address older topics from new theoretical and methodological perspectives, and they are based in large measure on primary literature—much of it from the Tun-huang collection—which has been only recently discovered or which has previously eluded extended investigation. Moreover, all five of the essays are written by scholars who owe much to their Japanese teachers and who try to emulate those teachers in philological and historiographical rigor.
Ch'an and Hua-yen (Kegon) Buddhism have been chosen as the dual focus of this group of studies essentially for three reasons: First, because they
are major traditions of East Asian Buddhist thought and practice which were roughly contemporary with each
other in their origins and which influenced each other in important ways during the early centuries of their
development. Second, because they both loom large as examples of the East Asian transformation of Buddhism, i.e., of the remarkable process by which that originally Indian tradition took on the shape and substance first of a Chinese, and later of a Korean and a Japanese, religion; as such they serve as valuable
The articles by Broughton, Gómez and McRae deal with early Ch'an and are based on texts in Chinese and Tibetan that were found among the Tun-huang manuscripts. All three shed substantively new light on the rise of what was to become one of the most crucial East Asian developments of Buddhism. The articles by Gregory and Gimello treat somewhat of Ch'an but mostly of Hua-yen—the latter especially in its "classical" phase during the eighth and ninth centuries, although they give some attention also to its later influences in other traditions of East Asian Buddhism. The Hua-yen articles are based primarily on materials which have long been available in standard editions of the Chinese Buddhist canon but which have been studied hardly at all in the West and only in the most preliminary way even in Japan. It is hoped that they will show, among other things, that the Hua-yen tradition is something more than its conventional reputation as a purely theoretical and rather cerebral form of Buddhism might lead one to believe.
Four of the five articles are much revised and expanded versions of papers delivered in 1980 at a Conference on East Asian Buddhism held in Los Angeles under the sponsorship of the Kuroda Institute for the Study of Buddhism and Human Values. The fifth, that by Luis Gómez, was especially solicited for the volume well after the conference. All of the articles were designed to comprise a collection that would serve not to introduce, survey, or sum up a field of study but to communicate new and ongoing advanced research. This will be the purpose also of the series, Studies in East Asian Buddhism, which this volume inaugurates. (Gimello, preface, 1983)
In the analysis of the texts, the author suggests that Mo-ho-yen's doctrinal position was that of an extreme non-dualist who thought practice came after enlightenment. Consequently Mo-ho-yen denied the value of means to that enlightenment, yet he still had to allow for a means for people of lesser abilities. This admission probably gave his opponents grounds for criticism.
There is a glossary of Tibetan terms and their Chinese equivalents based on a comparison of the fragments in Tibetan with the Chinese of the Tun-wu Ta-sheng cheng-li chüeh which depicts Mo-ho-yen's side of the dispute (for which it may have been profitable to consult Hasebe Koichi's edition from the Pelliot and Stein Chinese manuscripts, the "Toban Bukkyō to Zen", Aichigakuin Daigaku bungakubu kiyō no. 1). Gomez in fact suggests that terminological ambiguity was one source of misunderstanding between the Chinese and Indian parties. Recently R.A. Stein has begun work on the Tibetan translations of Chinese and Indian vocabulary ("Tibetica Antiqua", BEFEO 72, 1983) which sheds more light on the subject. For example, lun and mdo (Gomez p. 87, notes 23 and 39), or gzhung and gzhun (Gomez p. 140) are interpreted slightly differently by Stein (pp. 175-6 and p. 179 respectively). (John Jorgensen, "Review of Studies in Ch'an and Hua-yan," JIABS 9, no. 2 (1986): 177–78).
I propose in this paper to challenge Matsumoto and Hakamaya’s reading of Buddha-nature thought. In my understanding, while Buddha-nature thought uses some of the terminology of essentialist and monistic philosophy, and thus may give the reader the impression that it is essentialist or monistic, a careful study of how those terms are used—how they actually function in the text—leads the reader to a very different conclusion. I will attempt to demonstrate that Buddha-nature thought is by no means dhātu-vāda as charged, but is instead an impeccably Buddhist variety of thought, based firmly on the idea of emptiness, which in turn is a development of the principle of pratītyasamutpāda
In making my remarks I draw upon the exposition of Buddha-nature thought given in the Buddha-Nature Treatise (Fo hsing lun), attributed to Vasubandhu and translated into Chinese by Paramārtha.'"`UNIQ--ref-00001FD9-QINU`"' The Buddha-Nature Treatise is a particularly useful text to consult in this matter inasmuch as it constitutes a considered attempt, by an author of great philosophical sophistication, to articulate the Buddha-nature concept per se and to explain both its philosophical meaning and its soteriological function. Indeed, the author is savvy enough to have anticipated the criticisms that this concept would face, including the particular criticisms leveled in our time by Matsumoto and Hakamaya, and to have effectively countered them in the 6th century CE. In this chapter, then, I will consider some of these criticisms in turn and see how the author of the Buddha-Nature Treatise defends as Buddhist the concept of Buddha-nature and the language in which it is expressed.'"`UNIQ--ref-00001FDA-QINU`"' (King, "The Doctrine of Buddha-Nature Is Impeccably Buddhist," 174–75)
The idea of dhātu-vāda is thus an integral part of the Critical Buddhism critique and as such merits careful examination in any evaluation of the overall standpoint. Since Matsumoto first found the dhātu-vāda structure in Indian tathāgata-garbha and Yogācāra literature, we need to begin with a look at the texts in question. My approach here will be purely philological and will limit itself to the theoretical treatises (śāstras). (Yamabe, introductory remarks, 193)
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Nevertheless, given their very different theoretical upbringings and doctrinal affiliations, it is inevitable that they would carry to their explanations of the Buddha-nature concept some of the basic principles and assumptions of their respective philosophical traditions. In examining and comparing the Buddha-nature teachings of Hui-yüan and Chi-tsang our present study attempts to show how the Buddha-nature concept has come to assume divergent significances when read in the context of the two main streams of thought in Mahāyāna Buddhism: Yogācāra and Mādhyamika. (Liu, "The Yogācāra and Mādhyamika Interpretations of the Buddha-nature Concept in Chinese Buddhism," 171)
Pages in category "University of Hawai'i Press"
The following 15 pages are in this category, out of 15 total.
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- Articles/The Buddha Within: Tathagatagarbha Doctrine according to the Shentong Interpretation of the Ratnagotravibhāga-Review by Need
- Articles/The Direct and Gradual Approaches of Zen Master Mahāyāna: Fragments of the Teachings of Mo-ho-yen
- Articles/The Doctrine of Buddha-Nature Is Impeccably Buddhist
- Articles/The Idea of Dhātu-vāda in Yogācāra and Tathāgata-garbha Texts
- Articles/The Mind as the Buddha-Nature: The Concept of the Absolute in Ch'an Buddhism
- Articles/The Yogācārā and Mādhyamika Interpretations of the Buddha-nature Concept in Chinese Buddhism
- Articles/Two Main Streams of Thought in Yogācāra Philosophy