How to read Buddhist texts? How to understand the claim that Chan Buddhism does not teach Chan practice? For more than 100 years, academics have studied Buddhism from a variety of perspectives guided by the science of religion, excluding Buddhism's own methodological approach and First-Person Experience, In the 21^(st) century today, new science has gone beyond materialistic view of the world, we may need to re-examine the approach of current academic studies on Buddhism, to overcome the subject-object dichotomy, and to re-read Buddhist literature, history, and tradition from the perspective of Buddhism itself. This paper first examines the approach of studying Buddhist texts from philosophical perspective as adopted by western scholars, and then from a methodological perspective, re-reads Chan texts to discover and explore the long-neglected significance of meditation practice.
