Discerning Buddhas

Authority, Agency, and Masculinity in Chan Buddhism

Kevin Buckelew

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English

Columbia University Press
19 November 2024

Zen Buddhism

Series: The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies

In Song-period China (960–1279 CE), masters in the Chan (Japanese Zen) school of Buddhism were presented as sources of religious authority on par with the Buddha, an almost unthinkably lofty status before the rise of Chan. This claim carried great rhetorical power, facilitating Chan's appeal to Buddhist monastics and powerful patrons alike. But it also raised a challenging question for Chan Buddhists, who insisted that buddhahood properly transcends all worldly marks: By what signs could one recognize a Chan master as a buddha?

Discerning Buddhas argues that Chan Buddhists wove together tropes of sovereignty, hospitality, and martial heroism drawn from both Buddhist tradition and China's cultural heritage to develop a distinctive vision of what it meant for a Chan master to be a buddha in Song-period China. Kevin Buckelew analyzes the ways Chan Buddhists deployed such tropes in ritual, literature, and visual culture in order to stage the comparison of Chan mastery with buddhahood. He examines how they used the concept of buddhahood to work through questions about the ideal Chan master's authority, agency, and masculinity, in the process rendering buddhahood in terms highly legible to elite Chinese society.

Chan Buddhists, Buckelew shows, developed their own ""signature"" of buddhahood, according to which enlightened Chan masters who truly deserved comparison to the Buddha were supposed to be distinguished from everyone else. By exploring the resulting Chan culture of discernment, which raised fundamental questions about Buddhist authority at a pivotal inflection point in Chinese history, this book offers fresh insight into the place of Buddhism in Chinese society.

By: Kevin Buckelew
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780231214247
ISBN 10: 0231214243
Series: The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies
Pages: 384
Publication Date: 19 November 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Signs of Authority and the “Marks of a Great Man” 2. Great Manhood and Martial Masculinity 3. Sovereign Authority and Violence 4. Sovereign Selfhood and Agency 5. Chan Hospitality Conclusion: A Discerning Age Conventions Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

Kevin Buckelew is assistant professor of religious studies at Northwestern University. He is coeditor of Buddhist Masculinities (Columbia, 2023).

Reviews for Discerning Buddhas: Authority, Agency, and Masculinity in Chan Buddhism

An accessible, informative, and entertaining book on the complex rhetoric employed in Chan Buddhist circles to cast the figure of the Chan master as a full-fledged buddha. Buckelew makes a clear, judicious argument about the centrality of the trope of sovereignty in Chan discourse concerning the spiritual liberation and authority of masters. -- T. Griffith Foulk, editor of Record of the Transmission of Illumination, Volume 1, and author of Volume 2 Professor Buckelew’s brilliant study of masculinity in Chan Buddhism during the Song Dynasty shows how Chan masters cultivating a martially masculine spiritual disposition led to the popularity of their version of Buddhism. -- Miriam Levering, author of Zen: Images, Texts, and Teachings With academic rigor and intellectual creativity, Discerning Buddhas ranks among the best new work in Chan Studies. Buckelew’s research is terrifically original. His lucid translations and thoughtful analyses bring to life both familiar and previously unstudied Chan texts. -- Jason Protass, author of The Poetry Demon: Song-Dynasty Monks on Verse and the Way How was it that Chan masters were taken to be buddhas in Song China? In answering this question, Kevin Buckelew shows both the immense sophistication the tradition demanded of its practitioners—as writers, as readers, and as ritual performers—and the complex workings of institutional power in Song Buddhism. -- Paul Copp, author of The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism