Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan

Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan

by Charlotte Eubanks
Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan

Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan

by Charlotte Eubanks

Hardcover(First Edition)

$85.00 
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Overview

Miracles of Book and Body is the first book to explore the intersection of two key genres of sacred literature in medieval Japan: sutras, or sacred Buddhist texts, and setsuwa, or “explanatory tales,” used in sermons and collected in written compilations. For most of East Asia, Buddhist sutras were written in classical Chinese and inaccessible to many devotees. How, then, did such devotees access these texts? Charlotte D. Eubanks argues that the medieval genre of “explanatory tales” illuminates the link between human body (devotee) and sacred text (sutra). Her highly original approach to understanding Buddhist textuality focuses on the sensual aspects of religious experience and also looks beyond Japan to explore pre-modern book history, practices of preaching, miracles of reading, and the Mahayana Buddhist “cult of the book.”

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780520265615
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication date: 01/01/2011
Series: Buddhisms , #10
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 288
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Charlotte D. Eubanks is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature , Japanese, and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Note on Sutras
Note on Setsuwa
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Cult of the Book and the Culture of Text

1. The Ontology of Sutras
2. Locating Setsuwa in Performance
3. Decomposing Bodies, Composing Texts
4. Textual Transubstantiation and the Place of Memory

Conclusion: On Circumambulatory Reading

Glossary
Works Cited
Index

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"An ambitious and largely successful project. . . . [This book] should fruitfully provoke scholars studying any culture."

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