中國佛教=Chinese Buddhism; 唐代佛教=Tang Buddhism; 宋代佛教=Sung Buddhism; 佛教與道教=Buddhism and Taoism;
摘要
The issue of sinification—the manner and extent to which Buddhism and Chinese culture were transformed through their mutual encounter and dialogue—has dominated the study of Chinese Buddhism for much of the past century. Sharf opens this important and far-reaching book by raising a host of historical and hermeneutical problems with the encounter paradigm and the master narrative on which it is based. The book is an extended reflection on the theoretical foundations and conceptual categories that undergird the study of medieval Chinese Buddhism.
Sharf draws his argument in part from a meticulous historical, philological and philosophical analysis of the Treasure Store Treatise (Pao-tsang lun), an 8th-century Buddha-Taoist work apocryphally attributed to the 5th-century master Seng-chao (374–414). In the process of coming to terms with the recondite text, Sharf ventures into all manner of subjects bearing on our understanding of medieval Chinese Buddhism, from the evolution of T'ang "gentry Taoism" and the emergence of early forms of Ch'an or proto-Ch'an, literature, to the pivotal role of image veneration and the problematic status of Chinese Tantra.
Sharf also documents the manner in which eminent Chinese scholiasts explicated seminal Buddhist tenets in terms of classical Chinese cosmology, rendering the alterity of Indian thought largely inaccessible to the Chinese. Thus even in the Sui and T'ang periods fundamental notions such as causation, invocation, liberation, sagehood and the multiple bodies of the Buddha, continued to be viewed through the lens of correlative cosmology and the mechanism of sympathetic resonance.
