‘Buddhism’ as a unified religious phenomenon is increasingly understood as having been shaped by the desires, interests, and ideals of elite western scholars, and thus grounded in the various intellectual debates and confrontations of the 19th and 20th centuries. This textual and doctrinal focus has provided a template to understand Buddhism in China largely in terms of schools and doctrines, excluding important beliefs and practices which constituted the daily lives of the vast majority of adherents. As result, the discussions of Chinese Buddhism found in textbooks and academic surveys offer a skewed and inaccurate understanding of the religion, one built largely on elite interests rather than grounded in lived realities. This volume,
Chinese Buddhism, will offer a more accurate and comprehensive picture of Buddhism’s development in China by drawing on a wider range of primary source materials than previous studies and by incorporating recent scholarship challenging prior assumptions. In doing so, it will address previous omissions and, notably, refocus discussion of the religion around the concerns of practitioners themselves.
Structured as a chronological narrative, Chinese Buddhism begins with an elaboration of core themes which have continuously informed Chinese religious and social experience. As Buddhist beliefs and practices entered East Asia, they adapted to notions of personal welfare configured according to the specifics of the family and ancestors, death and the afterlife, healing and shamanic practices, and imperial authority, all as understood within the Chinese context. Each chapter of the book localizes and illustrates this on-going negotiation through the presentation of primary source materials such as texts, rituals and their paraphernalia, and historical events as manifestations of those concerns. These concrete entities serve to anchor in the particulars of time and place the larger social, institutional, and philosophical developments in Chinese Buddhism. In employing this format and these thematically organized concerns throughout the book, the student, scholar, and general reader will encounter in discursive fashion the most recent research on Buddhist textual, material, and ritual culture. As a result, this volume avoids the omissions in previous works by foregrounding the multi-layered means through which adherents made sense of their world in specifically Buddhist terms.
