Bøger af Alan Cole

The truth of Chan Buddhismbetter known as ';Zen'is regularly said to be beyond language, and yet Chan authorsmedieval and modernproduced an enormous quantity of literature over the centuries.To make sense of this well-known paradox, Patriarchs on Paperexplores several genres of Chan literature that appeared during the Tang and Song dynasties (c. 6001300), including genealogies, biographies, dialogues, poems, monastic handbooks, and koans. Working through this diverse body of literature, Alan Cole details how Chan authors developed several strategies to evoke images of a perfect Buddhism in which wonderfully simple masters transmitted Buddhism's final truth to one another, suddenly and easily, and, of course, independent of literature and the complexities of the Buddhist monastic system.Chan literature, then, reveled in staging delightful images of a Buddhism free of Buddhism, tempting the reader, over and over, with the possibility of finding behind the thick faade of real Buddhismwith all its rules, texts, doctrines, and institutional solidityan ethereal world of pure spirit. Patriarchs on Papercharts the emergence of this kind of ';fantasy Buddhism' and details how it interacted with more traditional forms of Chinese Buddhism in order to show how Chan's illustrious ancestors were created in literature in order to further a wide range of real-world agendas.

This beautifully written work sheds new light on the origins and nature of Mahayana Buddhism with close readings of four well-known texts-the Lotus Sutra, Diamond Sutra, Tathagatagarbha Sutra, and Vimalakirtinirdesa. Treating these sutras as literary works rather than as straightforward philosophic or doctrinal treatises, Alan Cole argues that these writings were carefully sculpted to undermine traditional monastic Buddhism and to gain legitimacy and authority for Mahayana Buddhism as it was veering away from Buddhism's older oral and institutional forms. His sophisticated and sustained analysis of the narrative structures and seductive literary strategies used in these sutras suggests that they were specifically written to encourage devotion to the written word instead of other forms of authority, be they human, institutional, or iconic.

Offers a rereading of the early history of Chan Buddhism (Zen). This work focuses on the narrative logics of the early Chan genealogies - the seventh-and eighth-century lineage texts that claimed that certain high-profile Chinese men were descendents of Bodhidharma and the Buddha.