This is volume 13 of the Kuroda Institute's excellent Studies in East Asian Buddhism series. The present volume grew out of the conference "Buddhism in the Sung," hosted by the University of Illinois in April 1996. Peter Gregory, in his fine introduction, "The Vitality of Buddhism in the Sung," clearly outlines the major interests of the essays in this volume. The title of his own essay is indicative of the rejection of the idea that Buddhism entered a period of decline during the Sung dynasty (960-1279 C.E.). The other essays, by noted scholars, amply reveal "the vitality of Buddhism in the Sung as well as its embeddedness in the social and intellectual life of the time" (p. 2). T'ien-t'ai, the other major Buddhist school, for example, "virtually recreated itself in the Sung" (p. 5). "Proponents of T'ien-t'ai and Ch'an were not only involved in lively dialogue among themselves but were also engaged in complex interactions with Sung society at large. These interactions were seen as being mutually beneficial and the forms that they took were basically transactional, although what was understood as being transacted varied according to the circumstance and the people involved. The different forms these interactions took reveal the variety of ways in which Buddhism had become a part of Chinese culture" (p. 11). Gregory concludes his introduction by saying that the study of Buddhism in the Sung affords an important opportunity to integrate the study of Buddhism in China more fully within Chinese studies as a whole: "The study of Chinese Buddhism has long suffered from a twofold disciplinary isolation. On the one hand, it is often marginalized within Buddhist studies, which still tends to focus on Indian Buddhism as normative for the field. On the other hand, it is often ignored or given short shrift by scholars working in Chinese social and intellectual history" (p. 19).
