Introduction To Buddhist East Asia

This anthology provides an accessible introduction to East Asian Buddhism, focusing specifically on China, Korea, and Japan. It begins with a detailed historical introduction that includes an overview of the development of the various schools of Buddhism in East Asia and traces the transmission of Buddhism from Northwest India to China in the first century CE, and then to Korea and Japan in the fourth and sixth centuries CE. The first part of the book contains five chapters that offer creative pedagogies that can help college professors infuse East Asian Buddhism into their courses. The second part includes six interdisciplinary chapters that explore thematic links between East Asian Buddhism and religious studies, philosophy, film studies, literature, and environmental studies.

Although Indian and Tibetan versions of tantric Buddhism are increasingly recognized, the East Asian variations on this practice remain largely overlooked. The only book to present the entire breadth of tantric Buddhism in East Asia, this collection remedies that situation with 12 key essays drawn from rare sources. Organized into four sections--China and Korea, Japan, Deities and Practices, and Influences on Japanese Religion--the book brings together a "critical mass" of scholarship, with the potential to create a sea change in the understanding of this subject

Buddhist Encounters and Identities across East Asia offers a fascinating picture of the intricacies of regional and cross-regional networks and the complexity of Buddhist identities emerging across Asia.

In the first or second century CE, Chinese officials began to hear rumours of a powerful new deity somewhere in the far off ‘western region’. Golden hued, able to fly through the air, and of superhuman size, he was the source of unspeakable power. The Chinese Emperor sent out an exploratory expedition, images of the Buddha began to appear at court, and thus began the gradual spread of Buddhism through East Asia; from India to China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan. This book presents an up-to-date introduction to Buddhism in East Asia, taking a timely regional focus and covering history, geography and culture, doctrine and texts, practice and tradition. Written by a leading scholar, it surveys the field by means of vivid and accessible explanations made readily understandable by features such as boxed summaries, charts and timelines, a glossary, further reading lists and illustrations. The regional focus and the stress on practice and material culture is in tune with contemporary research in the field and brings the East Asian Buddhist world enjoyably to life.

An unparalleled portrait, Donald K. Swearer's Buddhist World of Southeast Asia has been a key source for all those interested in the Theravada homelands since the work's publication in 1995. Expanded and updated, the second edition offers this wide ranging account for readers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Swearer shows Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia to be a dynamic, complex system of thought and practice embedded in the cultures, societies, and histories of Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. The work focuses on three distinct yet interrelated aspects of this milieu. The first is the popular tradition of life models personified in myths and legends, rites of passage, festival celebrations, and ritual occasions. The second deals with Buddhism and the state, illustrating how King Asoka serves as the paradigmatic Buddhist monarch, discussing the relationship of cosmology and kingship, and detailing the rise of charismatic Buddhist political leaders in the postcolonial period. The third is the modern transformation of Buddhism: the changing roles of monks and laity, modern reform movements, the role of women, and Buddhism in the West.

This book examines the Buddhist responses to the Neo-Confucian critiques of their tradition. It presents full translations of two dominant Buddhist apologetic essays—the Hufa lun, written by a Chinese politician, and the Yusŏk chirŭi non, authored by a Korean monk.

This book examines the Buddhist responses to the Neo-Confucian critiques of their tradition. It presents full translations of two dominant Buddhist apologetic essays—the Hufa lun, written by a Chinese politician, and the Yusŏk chirŭi non, authored by a Korean monk.

This volume, the result of an international collaboration of forty scholars, provides a comprehensive resource on Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in their Chinese, Korean, and Japanese contexts from the first few centuries of the common era to the present.