New Books in Buddhist Studies

Clark Chilson’s new book, Secrecy’s Power: Covert Shin Buddhists in Japan and Contradictions of Concealment (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014) examines secret groups of Shin (i.e., True Pure Land Buddhist) practitioners from the thirteenth century onward, but focuses primarily on the past 150 years.  Although today at least thirty different lineages of secret Shin continue to operate, with a total estimated membership numbering in the tens of thousands, because they have been so successful at hiding (a technique they have perfected over a period of centuries), few scholars are even aware of their existence.  Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork that he conducted from 1998 onward and a number of reports written by mainstream Shin monks who infiltrated these groups or researchers who befriended them, Chilson explains why certain groups concealed their doctrines and practices (and even existence) and, more importantly, reveals the long-term consequences that secrecy had on these groups.  In addition, Chilson provides an in-depth theoretical introduction, showing that scholarship on secrecy has too often conflated different types of secrecy (e.g., esotericism and social secrecy), a problem that is particularly vexing in the case of Japanese religion, in which the influence of esoteric Buddhism is so pervasive.  Rather than simply confining such theoretical concerns to the introduction and conclusion, Chilson skillfully weaves issues related to concealment into the fabric of each chapter, explaining how the case studies he presents illustrate this or that function or consequence of secrecy. Chilson distinguishes between two types of covert Shin groups—those that went into hiding due to persecution, and those in which secrecy was an integral element from their very genesis—and outlines the similarities and differences between the two.  While much scholarship on secrecy in religion has focused on why groups have secrets in the first place (e.g., to avoid persecution) and on secrecy’s personal power (e.g., personal authority, or the power to avoid detection), Chilson draws our attention instead to how concealment influences the structure, doctrines, and practices of these groups, and to the way in which secrecy, at first a consciously wielded instrument, is eventually incorporated so thoroughly into a tradition that its power becomes structural, a force controlled by no single person but which pervades the group and becomes central to its identity.  In this way, Chilson answers the question that many readers will want to ask: why did the practice of secrecy continue in persecuted groups once the threat of persecution had subsided? On a fascinating journey that takes us from Shinran’s thirteenth-century admonition of his eldest son for claiming to possess secret teachings, to a twenty-first-century covert Shin leader who worries about the dwindling number of adherents, we hear of secret caves in southern Kyushu used for clandestine worship, dietary proscriptions of chicken and milk, punishment of covert Shin members in northeastern Japan (ranging from promises to abandon covert Shin to crucifixion), and a covert Shin group whose members associated themselves with the Kūyadō and became ordained Tendai Buddhist priests in order to deflect suspicion.  In addition, through access to groups that few scholars have been granted, Chilson describes in detail many of the initiation rituals and teachings at the center of certain covert Shin groups, all the while addressing the ethical dilemmas that researchers studying secret groups face.  This book will be of particular interest to those researching or interested in Jōdo shin shū (Japanese True Pure Land Buddhism), secrecy in religion, secret societies, Edo-period regulation of religious groups, modern Japanese religion, and religious identity.

Paul Copp’s new book, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on Chinese interpretations and uses of two written dhāraṇī during the last few centuries of the first millennium.  Based on extensive research on the material forms that these dhāraṇī took, Copp departs from a tradition of scholarship that focuses on the sonic quality and spoken uses of these spells, drawing our attention instead to how written and inscribed dhāraṇī were used to adorn and anoint the body.  A central theme is Copp’s assertion that the diffuse dhāraṇī practices that appeared centuries prior to the flowering of a high Esoteric Buddhism in the eighth century were not simply a crude precursor to the later development of a fully systematized Esoteric Buddhism, but rather were a set of loosely related practices and ideas that continued to develop alongside Esoteric Buddhism.  Through rich descriptions of dhāraṇī use and interpretation, and liberal use of Dunhuang materials, he shows that dhāraṇī were ubiquitous in all sectors of Chinese Buddhism: before, during, and after the eighth century.  In this way Copp challenges the teleological view of early dhāraṇī-based practices as being but one stage leading to the eventual triumph of a comprehensive Chinese Esoteric Buddhism.  In addition, Copp demonstrates how material dhāraṇī practices were a product of both Chinese and Indic input.   Drawing on archeological evidence, he notes that the way in which dhāraṇī were actually worn reflects Indian precedents, while on the other hand Chinese textual records describe and prescribe the wearing of dhāraṇī in terms borrowed from Chinese practices of wearing amulets, seals, medicines, and talismans.  The book contains thirty-two illustrations of amulets, written dhāraṇī, dhāraṇī stamps, dhāraṇī pillars, and funerary jars that help the reader to better visualize and understand the material practices at the center of Copp’s work.  This book will be of particular interest to those researching or wishing to learn more about the history of scholarship on dhāraṇī, Chinese practices of wearing enchanted objects, Chinese interpretations and uses of dhāraṇī (particularly outside of a systematized, ritual-philosophical Esoteric Buddhism), theories about the role of writing and inscription in religious practice, and Chinese Buddhist material culture.

Chün-fang Yü’s new book, Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), focuses on a community of nuns in Taiwan founded in the early 1980s, and discusses the appearance and development of this community within the context of rapidly changing social and economic circumstances in Taiwan during the last half of the twentieth century.  Based on extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews conducted between the mid-1990s and 2013, Yü provides the reader with a vivid picture of daily life in the seminary and a close examination of the Buddhist education classes for laypeople taught by the nuns.  Along the way she explores the appearance of Buddhist seminaries in China during the late Qing and Republican periods, the transformation of Taiwanese nuns from individuals devoted to Buddhist ritual and personal salvation into religious teachers of the Buddhist laity, the changing demographics of the Taiwanese Buddhist nunnery, and the development of curricula that incorporate both traditional Buddhist subjects (e.g., study of the Vinaya) and secular ones (e.g., business management).  Through Yü’s detailed presentations of the instructional materials used to educate both nuns and laypeople, the reader begins to understand the vision that informed the activities of the Incense Light Community as well as the way in which one particular community of nuns dealt with modernization and its concomitant challenges to traditional Buddhist education, practice, and belief.  However, perhaps the most compelling aspect of this work is its ability to draw the reader into the lives of individual nuns and the complex social realities of life as a Taiwanese nun during the past half-century.  This book will be of particular interest to those researching or interested in issues of Buddhist modernization, Buddhist and Chinese views of gender, female monasticism, and Buddhist education.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Psychoanalysis] Being human, much of our energy goes into resisting the basic mess of life, but messy it is nonetheless. The trick (as psychoanalysts know) is to embrace it all anyway.  “Trauma is an indivisible part of human existence. It takes many forms but spares no one,” so writes psychiatrist and practicing Buddhist Dr. Mark Epstein. Epstein illustrates this truth by offering a psychoanalytic reading of the life of the Buddha in his latest work, The Trauma of Everyday Life (Penguin Press, 2013). It’s a brilliant psychobiographical single-case study. Think Erik Erikson’s Ghandi’s Truth or Young Man Luther. A little known detail of the Buddha’s biography is that his mother died when he was just seven days old. The book investigates the nature and repercussions of this early loss as a foundation of the Buddha’s life and salvation. Epstein writes that “primitive agony” (ala Winnicott) lay in the Buddha’s implicit memory coloring his experience in ways he could feel but never know. The unmetabolized grief plays out into Buddha’s young adulthood as he abandons his wife and own young child in renunciation of his cushy and privileged life. The ghosts and psychic ancestors that haunt the Buddha as well as his separation-individuation drama are familiar to modern day clinicians. Epstein describes a Buddha in the throes of repetition compulsion as well as enacting practices of starvation and self-harm – - dissociative defenses that serve to ward off potential fragmentation. Epstein writes that the rhythm of this early trauma and the defenses the Buddha employed run through Buddhism like a “great underground river.” Buddha’s salvation comes about via the discovery of mindfulness which ultimately infuse his life and spiritual teaching. Within the meditative practice of mindfulness, a holding environment is created in which unknown and unexamined aspects of the past can be experienced for the first time in the here and now.  Like the psychoanalytic encounter, therein lies its transformative power. In his detailed depictions of the Buddha as a human subject in formation and borrowing from Winnicott’s metapsychology, Epstein draws the parallel to the psychoanalytic space.  Ultimately the book asks whether trauma itself can be transformational. According to Epstein, yes. Life itself is already broken and since we can’t control the essential traumas of life (whether they be big “T” or little) we must transform our relationship to them to go on being.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Jay Carter’s new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk (Oxford University Press, 2011; paperback edition 2014) is less a traditional biography than a life of an emergent modern nation as told through the experiences of a single individual whose relationships embodied the history of that nation in flesh, bones, and blood. Born in 1875 as Wang Shouchun, the man who would become Tanxu worked various jobs as laborer, minor government official, fortune-teller, and pharmacist before finding his calling, leaving his family, and setting off on a journey to become a Buddhist monk. His travels spanned the physical and spiritual worlds – one of his earliest voyages took him beyond death to the underworld and back. After leaving home, Wang experienced treaty-ports in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer uprising, and Russo-Japanese tension over Manchuria. His life unfolded in a series of Chinese cities that were administered by foreigners, and the transformative power of Sino-foreign relations in this period becomes a recurring trope throughout his story. Ranging north and south, he eventually studied to become a Buddhist monk and, as Tanxu, helped to found temples across China. Carter’s own travels took him from the Bronx (to meet with a Dharma heir disciple of the monk) through more than a dozen Chinese cities, taking Tanxu’s own memoir and itinerary as guidebook and route-map. The resulting book is a beautifully written, historiographically self-reflexive, and humane account of the lived history of modern China.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Big Ideas] Modern liberalism is built on the principle of equality and its corollary, the principle of fairness (treating equals equally). But have we taken the one and the other too far? Are we deceiving ourselves about our ability to treat each others equally, that is, to be “fair?” In his provocative new book Against Fairness (University of Chicago, 2013), Stephen T. Asma makes the case that we have indeed become kind of fairness-mad, and that this madness has led us all to be (at best) hypocrites and (at worst) harmful to ourselves and others. Asma says we should temper our (Western) notion of fairness with one that looks at the causes and benefits of favoritism realistically, and even sympathetically.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Spiritual Practice] The process of dying has traditionally been fraught with anguish and despair in most Western societies, where letting go of our earthly existence is the last thing most of us want to do. Backed by her many years of working with the dying, psychotherapist and longtime spiritual practitioner Kathleen D. Singh opens up an alternative way to look at the process of leaving this existence and transitioning into another form of being. In her book The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort and Spiritual Transformation (HarperOne, 2013 [reprint]), Singh explains her spiritual views, which largely come out of the transpersonal philosophy of Ken Wilber and a number of Buddhist practices, and offers a message of hope and comfort not just to the dying but also to their loved ones, and everyone who wants to explore this stage of life. In this intelligent and engaging book, Singh not just describes her own journey but draws many parallels to other religious and spiritual practices, current as well as ancient ones.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Religion] In popular perception, a certain image arises when we imagine eastern religions. Perhaps, we envision a wise old Asian man in traditional clothing sitting in a meditative state (maybe not). But why does this image emerge? Jane Iwamura, Chair of The Department of Religious Studies at the University of the West, examines this “Oriental Monk” figure in Virtual Orientalism: Religion and Popular Culture in the U.S. (Oxford University Press, 2011). Iwamura outlines the history of popular representations of eastern religions within the American religious landscape of 1950s through 1980s. Over and over again she found that the East was imagined through a particular perception of what eastern spirituality was all about and how one could access it. She presents a short genealogy of this “Oriental Monk” icon through the public representations of D.T. Suzuki, the Japanese scholar and popularizer of Zen Buddhism in the west; Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the celebrity guru for the Beatles; and Kwai Chang Cain from the popular televisions show Kung Fu. In our conversation we discuss the Zen Boom, the hyperreality of images, Jack Kerouac and the Beats, Alan Watts, geographies of East and West, and what makes American Orientalism unique.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Kevin Gray Carr’s beautiful new book explores the figure of Prince Shōtoku (573? – 622?) the focus of one of the most widespread visual cults in Japanese history. Introducing us to a range of stories materialized in both verbal and visual narratives, Plotting the Prince: Shotoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) frames Shōtoku as a symbolic vessel. Part I of the book looks at the changing identities of the prince as objects of devotion and veneration, tracing his visual cult through the fourteenth century. In this context, the figure of Shōtoku, across multiple lives and associations with other religious figures, grounded a new sacred topography whose center had shifted away from India and China and toward the spaces of Japan. Part II of the book focuses on the visual culture that mapped the various identities of the prince onto the Japanese sacral landscape. It guides readers through the experience of the paintings in the Hōryū-ji Picture Hall and places them within a wider cultic landscape. Carr introduces the notion of “cognitive maps” that integrated the elements of time, space, and personhood into the many renderings of Shōtoku’s life that were simultaneously cartographic, narrative, and iconic. In addition to this fine-grained and innovative analysis of the time and space of visual materials, Carr also shows readers the centrality of stories and storytelling in helping us make sense of the world around us, and of our own place in it.

[Cross-posted from New Books in East Asian Studies] Lama Zhang, the controversial central figure in Carl S. Yamamoto’s new book may or may not have participated in animal sacrifice, sneezed out a snake-like creature, and engaged in other acts of putative sorcery early in his life. What we can say about this fascinating character, however, is that he was a powerful military and political figure who sustained a community through the “multidimensional mastery” of time, space, and discourse. Vision and Violence: Lama Zhang and the Politics of Charisma in Twelfth-Century Tibet (Brill, 2012) uses Lama Zhang to explore a key moment in Central Tibetan history, the medieval Buddhist revival sometimes known as the Tibetan Renaissance. Yamamoto’s wonderfully multidisciplinary approach considers the centrality, at many different lev els, of practices that transformed fragments into unified wholes in the context of social groups, political institutions, and religious practices in the history of medieval Tibet and its relationship with Buddhism. The book asks us to rethink our notions of lineage, family, and clan in this larger context, and reimagines literary genres in the context of Tibetan and Buddhist texts. Enjoy!

New media technology changes culture. And when it comes to religion, new technology changes the way people think and practice their traditions. And while we usually think of technology as some new gadget or machine, there was a time when the written word itself was a new technology, and this had a profound impact how Buddhism was practiced in South and South East Asia. This is the subject of Daniel Veidlinger‘s new book, Spreading the Dhamma: Writing, Orality, and Textual Transmission in Buddhist Northern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2006). In today’s interview, the inaugural show for the New Books in Buddhist Studies channel of the New Books Network, we talk with Prof. Veidlinger about his book and the way some other books changed Buddhism in Thailand. The “other books” we’ll be talking about, of course, are the books of the Buddhist canon, a collection of texts that when printed today runs some 15,000 pages. A millennia ago, however, these texts were carved into palm leaves and just as likely to be memorized as read or studied. Daniel Veidlinger is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico. You can learn more about his work in this podcast from the Institute of Buddhist Studies.