Tun-huang; Liturgical; Pure Lands; Chinese Buddhism; Teiser, Stephen F.; 太史文; 敦煌; 儀規; 淨土; 中國佛教
摘要
This paper surveys a range of liturgical texts discovered in the Tunhuang caves, most of which date from the end of the T'ang dynasty. The texts are "Liturgical" in the sense that they were originally used in or make reference to public rituals. They include colophons to texts expressing the vows of the commissioners, scriptures describing or prescribing funerary rites, separate prayers used in funeral and memorial rituals, and bows for rebirth buried with the dead. Many of these texts refer to a variety of social classes, including monks and nuns and laypeople,as well as rich and poor. The conception of the Pure Land they present is not exclusively affiliated with the texts of the Pure Land "school" in China, thus suggestion that belief in rebirth in a Pure Land after death was a widespread phenomenon in medieval Chinese Buddhism.