This is the first English translation of the earliest Chinese Buddhist text, but it is more than a translation. Keenan shows that Mou-tzu's Treatise on Alleviating Doubt is a Buddhist hermeneutic on the Chinese classics. Using a reader-response method of examining the text, Keenan shows how the rhetoric convinces readers that one can remain culturally Chinese yet be a Buddhist. The Introduction explains the reader-response methodology, develops the movement of the dialogue in terms of this method, and clarifies the rhetorical impact of Master Mou's argument. The Introduction is followed by the thirty-seven articles of the text. Each article is first translated into English, then the contextual images and ideas are unpacked for each, and finally each article is subjected to a reader-response critique that shows what the argument accomplishes in each of its progressive steps.

This volume is the first in a series of full-length English translations from one of the foremost classics in Daoist religious literature, the Zhen gao or Declarations of the Perfected. The Declarations is a collection of poems, accounts of the dead, instructions, and meditation methods received by the Daoist Yang Xi (330–ca. 386 BCE) from celestial beings and shared by him with his patrons and students. These fragments of revealed material were collected and annotated by the eminent scholar and Daoist Tao Hongjing (456–536), allowing us access to these distant worlds and unfamiliar strategies of self-perfection. Bokenkamp's full translation highlights the literary nature of Daoist revelation and the place of the Declarations in the development of Chinese letters. It further details interactions with the Chinese throne and the aristocracy and demonstrates ways that Buddhist borrowings helped shape Daoism much earlier than has been assumed. This first volume also contains heretofore unrecognized reconfigurations of Buddhist myth and practice that Yang Xi introduced to his Daoist audience.

In a Tiantai theology, conventional truth is conventionally arisen, which means that such truth is never set once and for all, but is to be cherished and rethought in new circumstances, whether interreligious or scientific—but always in critical consonance with its ancient embodiments. Contexts shift frameworks, but life in Christ is translatable across cultures. Christian faith and theology discourage the assumption that the point of it can be clearly pinned down. God’s appearance to Elijah out of the whirlwind is an eternal reminder of the paltriness of all human perspectives. Symbolic worlds of faith and wisdom are not themselves finished products. Because it has a past and a future, the cosmos itself is unfinished. Christian creeds ought not be defended as last-word ideological positions and bastions against relativity, but instead recognized in their cultural contexts and affirmed as grammars of communal and personal assent.

This is volume 2 of a wide-ranging interfaith reading of the Letter to the Ephesians—a New Testament text whose words have inspired and enhanced Christian spiritual life and liturgy over the centuries. Unfortunately, at the same time, Ephesians has provided apparent scriptural support to those who would defend slavery, patriarchy, misogyny, and the physical power of Christ over the cosmos. How on earth are today’s Christians to receive and understand such a text as this? Earthing the Cosmic Christ of Ephesians: The Universe, Trinity, and Zhiyi’s Threefold Truth draws upon a broad array of scientific, theological, and philosophical thinkers who enable us both to marvel at today’s ever-expanding knowledge of our vast cosmos and to appreciate the importance of the Ephesian letter in the canon of our Christian scriptures, even while we acknowledge the archaic geocentric cosmology that underlies its claims about the cosmic Christ and reject its accommodation to the patriarchal, misogynistic, and slaveholding norms of its first-century culture. Throughout this reading of Ephesians, we look to Chinese Buddhist master Zhiyi and his “threefold truth” to enhance our understanding of trinity and the nascent trinitarian themes within this letter. As a whole, this work constitutes a new appreciation for Ephesians as well as a twenty-first century apologetic for doctrinal humility and for theologizing within a global theological commons.

"Imperiled Destinies" examines the evolution of Daoist beliefs about human liability and redemption over eight centuries and outlines ritual procedures for rescuing an ill‐starred destiny. From the second through the tenth century CE, Daoism emerged as a liturgical organization that engaged vigorously with Buddhism and transformed Chinese thinking about suffering, the nature of evil, and the aims of liberation. In the fifth century, elements of classical Daoism combined with Indian yogic practices to interiorize the quest for deliverance. The medieval record portrays a world engulfed by evil, where human existence was mortgaged from birth and burdened by increasing debts and obligations in this world and the next. Against this gloomy outlook, Daoism offered ritual and sacramental instruments capable of acting on the unseen world, providing therapeutic relief and ecstatic release from apprehensions of death, disease, war, spoilt harvests, and loss. Drawing on prayer texts, liturgical sermons, and experiential narratives, Franciscus Verellen focuses on the Daoist vocabulary of bondage and redemption, the changing meanings of sacrifice, and metaphoric conceptualizations bridging the visible and invisible realms. The language of medieval supplicants envisaged the redemption of an imperiled destiny as debt forgiveness, and deliverance as healing, purification, release, or emergence from darkness into light.

Buddhism comes in many forms, but in Japan it stands apart from all the rest in one most striking way--the monks get married. In Neither Monk nor Layman, the most comprehensive study of this topic in any language, Richard Jaffe addresses the emergence of an openly married clergy as a momentous change in the history of modern Japanese Buddhism. He demonstrates, in clear and engaging prose, that this shift was not an easy one for Japanese Buddhists. Yet the transformation that began in the early Meiji period (1868-1912)--when monks were ordered by government authorities to adopt common surnames and allowed to marry, to have children, and to eat meat--today extends to all the country's Buddhist denominations. Jaffe traces the gradual acceptance of clerical marriage by Japanese Buddhists from the premodern emergence of the "clerical marriage problem" in the Edo period to its widespread practice by the start of the Second World War. In doing so he considers related issues such as the dissolution of clerical status and the growing domestication of Japanese temple life. This book reveals the deep contradictions between sectarian teachings that continue to idealize renunciation and a clergy whose lives closely resemble those of their parishioners in modern Japanese society. It will attract not only scholars of religion and of Japanese history, but all those interested in the encounter-conflict between regimes of modernization and religious institutions and the fate of celibate religious practices in the twentieth century.

How do Chinese and Western ethical traditions interact today? In this collection of articles both Chinese and Western scholars carefully examine the issue, one of fundamental importance for the mutual understanding between China and the West. The volume is the result of the second symposium which focused on a dialogue between China and the West on questions of ethics, in particular concerning their commensurability and a possible common ground. The first part of the book discusses general problems of ethics in a cross-cultural context, followed by articles on ethical bases of Chinese and Western societies respectively. Further topics range from moral traditions in the context of social transformation in China today to developments in Western societies, politics, education and religion. The last part deals with controversial issues such as human rights vs. human duties and medical ethics.

The Zhenzheng lun 甄正論 (T 2112, Treatise of Revealing the Correct) is a Chinese Buddhist apologetic treatise with a distinct anti-Daoist stance in three juan. It is organized as a dialogue between a Daoist, the "Venerable Obstructed by Customs" (zhisu gongzi 滯俗公子), and the Buddhist "Master Revealing the Correct" (zhenzheng xiansheng 甄正先生) in which the former is gradually led towards an orthodox Buddhist understanding by the latter through the refutation of his various arguments against Buddhism. Composed in the late 7th century, the text was authored depending on the political interests and strategies of Wu Zhao武曌 (624–705), who in 690 was enthroned as Empress Wu Zetian 武則天. This study of Thomas Jülch offers a richly annotated and complete translation of the Zhenzheng lun along with an introductory part that focuses on reconstructing the political and propagandistic circumstances relevant to the understanding of the Zhenzheng lun.

In the first century of the Common Era, two new belief systems entered long-established cultures with radically different outlooks and values: missionaries started to spread the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in Rome and the Buddha in China. Rome and China were not only ancient cultures, but also cultures whose elites felt no need to receive the new beliefs. Yet a few centuries later the two new faiths had become so well-established that their names were virtually synonymous with the polities they had entered as strangers. Although there have been numerous studies addressing this phenomenon in each field, the difficulty of mastering the languages and literature of these two great cultures has prevented any sustained effort to compare the two influential religious traditions at their initial period of development. This book brings together specialists in the history and religion of Rome and China with a twofold aim. First, it aims to show in some detail the similarities and differences each religion encountered in the process of merging into a new cultural environment. Second, by juxtaposing the familiar with the foreign, it also aims to capture aspects of this process that could otherwise be overlooked. This approach is based on the general proposition that, when a new religious belief begins to make contact with a society that has already had long honored beliefs, certain areas of contention will inevitably ensue and changes on both sides have to take place. There will be a dynamic interchange between the old and the new, not only on the narrowly defined level of "belief," but also on the entire cultural body that nurtures these beliefs. Thus, this book aims to reassess the nature of each of these religions, not as unique cultural phenomena but as part of the whole cultural dynamics of human societies.

"Fathering Your Father is indubitably an important, timely work. In this incisive re-reading of the sources for the early history of Chinese Chan Buddhism, Cole conveys a new understanding of material familiar to scholars that might well make students engage with these sources more imaginatively. Hitherto scholars have pored over the five or six key sources; now we are invited to read them as successive literary inventions. In short, this study has no competition and is bound to provoke debate."—T. H. Barrett, Professor of East Asian History, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and author of The Woman Who Discovered Printing