Narratives of Buddhist Practice
Editor: CHEN Jinhua
Editorial Assistants: SUN Mingli and LIN Weiyu
Paperback ISBN 978-981-18-2081-6
Hardcopy ISBN 978-981-18-2284-1
Date of Publication: 2021-01-01Pages: 624
PRODUCT INFO
Narratives of Buddhist Practice: Studies on Chinese-Language Canonical Compilations and Translations (Selected Essays by Koichi Shinohara). Hualin Series on Buddhist Studies III. Edited by CHEN Jinhua, with assistance of SUN Mingli and LIN Weiyu, 2021.
Kōichi Shinohara is a retired Senior Lecturer of Religious Studies and East Asian Languages & Literatures at Yale University. His career has so far spanned half a century, during which time he has studied many aspects of medieval Chinese and Japanese Buddhist texts and images. Although he primarily taught at McMaster and Yale universities, Dr. Shinohara’s research has inspired or deeply touched nearly everyone working in the broader field of East Asian Buddhist Studies.
This volume contains ten of the most important long papers by Kōichi, each averaging more than fifty pages. For the most part, the papers collected in this volume were first presented in conferences organized around central themes in Religious Studies, such as hagiography, sacred places, moments of death, and sin and repentance. In these conferences, multiple religious traditions were represented, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Daoism from Asia, and often Judeo-Christian traditions from Europe and North America. The topics and the style of analysis in these papers reflect this larger context. Though the material comes from one large tradition, and the discussion sometimes becomes technical, Kōichi does not privilege the insider’s viewpoint but rather adopts the outsider’s comparative perspective. These papers explore these themes through focused readings of a variety of works from the Chinese Buddhist canon. Some of these texts are large compilations produced in China; others are Chinese translations of Indian Buddhist scriptures. The discussion attempts to retrace the texts’ evolution and the lines of thinking that guided the process of compilation.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Hualin Series on Buddhist Studies: Preface
Preface
1. Biography and Sacred Place
1.1. Two Sources of Chinese Buddhist Biographies: Stūpa Inscriptions and Miracle Stories
1.2. From Local History to Universal History: The Construction of the Song Tiantai Lineage
1.3. The Story of the Buddha’s Begging Bowl: Imagining a Biography and Sacred Places
2. Monastic Practices: Rules and Stories
2.1. The Kāṣāya Robe of the Past Buddha Kāśyapa in the Miraculous Instruction Given to the Vinaya Master Daoxuan (596–667)
2.2. Stories of Miraculous Images and Paying Respect to the Three Jewels: A Discourse on Image Worship in the Seventh-Century China
2.3. The Moment of Death in Daoxuan’s Vinaya Commentary
2.4. Writing the Moment of Death in Biographies of Eminent Monks
3. Esoteric Buddhist Ritual
3.1. Removal of Sins in Esoteric Buddhist Rituals: A Study of the Da fangdeng Tuoluoni jing
3.2. The Esoteric Buddhist Ritual of Image Installation
3.3. The Ritual of the Buddhoṣṇīṣa Vijaya Dhāraṇī Maṇḍala
General Bibliography
Index
About the Author
