Chinul (1158–1210) was the founder of the Korean tradition of Zen. He provides one of the most lucid and accessible accounts of Zen practice and meditation to be found anywhere in East Asian literature. Tracing Back the Radiance, an abridgment of Buswell’s Korean Approach to Zen: The Collected Works of Chinul, combines an extensive introduction to Chinul’s life and thought with translations of three of his most representative works.

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Of all the great religions, it is Buddhism that has focused most intensively on that aspects of religion that we call spirituality. No religion has ste a higher value on states of spiritual insight and liberation, and none has set forth so methodologically and with such a wealth of reflection the various paths and with such a wealth of reflection the various paths and disciplines by which such states are reached. The aim of the volumes on Buddhism is to survey the entire tradition both chronologically and geographically in the varieties of its historical forms and in the great diversity of its teachings.

Numinous Awareness Is Never Dark examines the issue of whether enlightenment in Zen Buddhism is sudden or gradual—that is, something intrinsic to the mind that is achieved in a sudden flash of insight or something extrinsic to it that must be developed through a sequential series of practices. This “sudden/gradual issue” was one of the crucial debates that helped forge the Zen school in East Asia, and the Korean Zen master Chinul’s (1158–1210) magnum opus, Excerpts, offers one of the most thorough treatments of it in all of premodern Buddhist literature. According to Chinul’s analysis, enlightenment is both sudden and gradual. Zen practice must begin with a sudden awakening to the “numinous awareness”—the “sentience,” or buddha-nature—that is inherent in all “sentient” beings. Such an awareness does not need to be developed but must simply be recognized (or better “re-cognized”), through the unmediated experience of insight. Even after this initial awakening, however, deeply engrained proclivities of thought and conduct may continue to disturb the practitioner; these can only be removed gradually as his or her practice matures. Chinul’s “sudden awakening/gradual cultivation” soteriology became emblematic of the Buddhist tradition in Korea. Excerpts, translated here in its entirety by the preeminent Western specialist in the Korean Buddhist tradition, goes on to examine Chinul’s treatments of many of the quintessential practices of Zen Buddhism, including nonconceptualization, or no-thought, and the concurrent development of meditation and wisdom, as well as, for the first time in Korean Zen, “examining meditative topics” (kanhwa Sŏn)—what we in the West know better as kōans, after its later Japanese analogues. Fitting this new technique into his preferred soteriological schema of sudden awakening/gradual cultivation was no simple task for Chinul. Numinous Awareness Is Never Dark offers an extensive study of the contours of the sudden/gradual debate in Buddhist thought and practice and traces the influence of Chinul’s analysis of this issue throughout the history of the Korean tradition. Copiously annotated, the work contains extensive selections from the two traditional Korean commentaries to the text. In Buswell’s treatment, Chinul’s Excerpts emerges as the single most influential work written by a Korean Buddhist author.

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.

Mysticism and Intellect in Medieval Christianity and Buddhism explores two influential intellectual and religious leaders in Christianity and Buddhism, Bonaventure (c. 1217–74) and Chinul (1158–1210), a Franciscan theologian and a Korean Zen master respectively, with respect to their lifelong endeavors to integrate the intellectual and spiritual life so as to achieve the religious aims of their respective religious traditions. It also investigates an associated tension between different modes of discourse relating to the divine or the ultimate—positive (cataphatic) discourse and negative (apophatic) discourse. Both of these modes of discourse are closely related to different ways of understanding the immanence and transcendence of the divine or the ultimate. Through close studies of Bonaventure and Chinul, the book presents a unique dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism and between West and East.

This is a collection of sermons from one of Korea's greatest Zen masters, with instruction in meditation techniques.

With the increase in computing speed and due to the high quality of the optical effects it achieves, ray tracing is becoming a popular choice for interactive and animated rendering. This book takes readers through the whole process of building a modern ray tracer from scratch in C++. All concepts and processes are explained in detail with the aid o

This book provides insights into new developments and persistent traditions in Zen teacher training and education through the use of historical archival research and original interviews with living Zen Masters. It argues that some contemporary Euro-American social values of gender equality, non-discrimination, rationality, ecumenicism and democracy permeate not only the organizational aspects of the Kwan Um School of Zen case study, but soteriological processes and goals of the training more widely. Each chapter showcases the ways important facets of Zen education—from meditation to curriculum development to school management — have absorbed Euro-American cultural and social ideals in both community and educational practices. Giving dedicated scholarly attention and conceptualising new adaptations in transnational Zen communities, it constitutes an important and timely addition to the literature and will appeal to researchers and scholars of religion and education, Asian pedagogies, contemporary Buddhism, transnational Zen, and Zen education.