Chan Before Chan: Meditation, Repentance, and Visionary Experience in Chinese Buddhism (Kuroda Studies in East Asian Buddhism, 39). Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Chan Before Chan: Meditation, Repentance, and Visionary Experience in Chinese Buddhism (Kuroda Studies in East Asian Buddhism, 39)

"Chan Before Chan is a cultural history of the earliest traditions of Buddhist meditation (chan) in China during the era before the rise of the "Chan School" (better known as "Zen") of the eighth-century and beyond, with a particular focus on the semiotics of meditative and especially visionary experience. Drawing from hagiography, ritual manuals, material culture, and above all the many (but rarely studied by modern scholars) Chinese Buddhist meditation manuals translated from Indic sources into Chineseor composed in China during the 400s, it argues that during this era meditation and the mastery of meditation came for the first time to occupy a real place within the Chinese Buddhist social world. Heirs to wider traditions that during this ere were shared across of the Indian and Central Asian Buddhist worlds, early medieval Chinese Buddhists conceived of "chan" as something that would produce a special state of visionary sensitivity. The concrete visionary experiences that resulted from meditation were understood as being things that could then be interpreted, by a qualified master, as indicative of the meditator's purity or impurity. Buddhist meditation, though an elite practice, was in this way in practice and in theory constitutively integrated into the cultic worlds of divination and "repentance" (chanhui) that were so important within medieval Chinese Buddhism as a whole"--

Eric M. Greene is assistant professor of religious studies at Yale University.

Robert E. Buswell, Jr. holds the Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he is also Distinguished Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and founding director of the university's Center for Buddhist Studies and Center for Korean Studies.