Domesticating the Dharma: Buddhist Cults and the Hwaŏm Synthesis in Silla Korea. By Richard McBride. . University of Hawai'i Press, 2008. 228 pages. $52.00.
摘要
Do not be fooled by the fact that this first book by the young scholar Richard McBride is less than 230 pages long. Do not put Domesticating the Dharma: Buddhist Cults and the Hwaŏm Synthesis in Silla Korea aside because of a misperception that McBride cannot possibly have much to contribute to our understanding of early Korean Buddhism when, after subtracting the index, the bibliography, the Sinitic glossary, a couple of appendixes, and endnotes, he leaves himself only 145 pages to make his argument. There is much more substance in this volume than its brevity would suggest. McBride provides both new information and original insights that challenge the way we have thought about Buddhism on the Korean peninsula 1,000 to 1,500 years ago.
The standard depiction of Korean Buddhism highlights the contributions of a few philosophically talented monks, such as Wŏnhyo (617–686), in an effort to identify separate and distinct schools in Korean Buddhist thought. A typical example of such an approach, available in English, is Buddhist Thought in Korea (Seoul: Dongguk University Press, 1994), produced by the Korean Buddhist Research Institute at Dongguk University, Korea's leading Buddhist university. That survey of the history of Buddhism in Korea is divided into eight chapters, each one of which, aside from the introduction, is dedicated to a discussion of one particular school of Korean Buddhism and the monks who articulated its doctrines. Anyone who relied on that work for an overview of Buddhism in Korea would come away with the impression that Korean Buddhism was divided into separate denominations, one for meditative Buddhism, one for …
