Coming to Terms With Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise

by Sharf, Robert H.

• ISBN13: 9780824824433
• ISBN10: 0824824431
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Hawaii Pr

Summary

Chinese Buddhism is often portrayed as the product of a protracted encounter between Indian Buddhism and Chinese civilization, an encounter that led to the "sinification" of Buddhist teachings and practices. In a masterful display of scholarship, Robert Sharf makes a major contribution to the re-evaluation of the encounter. He shows that, although the Chinese were cognizant of the foreign origins of Buddhism, their actual exposure to South Asian clerics and Sanskrit texts was limited throughout medieval times. For the most part, Sharf argues, the Chinese dialogue with Buddhism took place among the Chinese themselves. That being the case, Chinese Buddhism is more properly approached as a product of sinitic culture, not a distorted reflection of normative Indian Buddhist prototypes.

Sharf draws his argument in part from a close analysis of an obscure, nominally Buddhist text, the Treasure Store Treatise (Pao-tsang lun). The book begins with a careful reconstruction of historical and religious provenance of the text. It next turns to an analysis of internal evid

Author Biography

Robert H. Sharf is associate professor of Buddhist studies at the University of Michigan.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Abbreviations	xi
Conventions of Usage	xii
Introduction: Prolegomenon to the Study of Medieval Chinese Buddhist Literature	1	(30)
Part 1: The Historical and Cosmological Background
The Date and Provenance of the Treasure Store Treatise	31	(46)
Chinese Buddhism and the Cosmology of Sympathetic Resonance	77	(66)
Part 2: Annotated Translation of the Treasure Store Treatise
Introduction to the Translation	137	(6)
The Treasure Store Treatise The Broad Illumination of Emptiness and Being	143	(50)
The Treasure Store Treatise The Essential Purity of Transcendence and Subtlety	193	(35)
The Treasure Store Treatise The Empty Mystery of the Point of Genesis	228	(35)
Appendix 1: On Esoteric Buddhism in China	263	(16)
Appendix 2: Scriptural Quotations in the Treasure Store Treatise	279	(8)
Notes	287	(58)
Works Cited	345	(34)
Index	379