Chan before Chan: Meditation, Repentance, and Visionary Experience in Chinese Buddhism. By Eric M. Greene. Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism 28. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021. Pp. 336. $68.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).
摘要
Eric M. Greene’s book Chan before Chan offers a lucid and fascinating examination of Buddhist meditation in medieval China from around 400 CE to the first emergence of the Chan tradition (Japanese Zen), ending around 750 CE. As scholars of Chinese Buddhism know, the Chinese word chan transcribes the Indic word dhyāna, which refers both to a kind of meditation practice and to the abilities and states of realization understood to follow from that practice. The title Chan before Chan thus identifies the book’s topic as chan in China before chan became the proper name of an institution, the Chan school. Greene fruitfully mines several key meditation texts and a wide variety of other textual and visual materials for information on medieval Chinese Buddhist ideas about and practices of meditation, much of it predating and informing the influential synthesis achieved by the famous Tiantai Zhiyi (538–97).
