The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism

(Paperback)

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Description

Exploring key concepts and metaphors, Bernard Faure guides readers to an appreciation of some of the more elusive aspects of the Chinese traditions of Chan Buddhism and Japanese Zen. Faure focuses on Chan's insistence on "immediacy"--its denial of all traditional meditations, including scripture, ritual, good works--and yet shows how these mediations have always been present in Chan.

Reviews

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1992 "Not since D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966) has any responsible scholar attempted in English to synthesize such a broad stretch of the history of Zen Buddhism as has Bernard Faure... [The book] offers the best narration in English of the role that magicians, healers, jesters, relics, mummies, dreams, funerals, deities, and mundane rituals play in a tradition that lays claim to emptiness."--Stephen F. Teiser, Journal of Religion "Readers will be rewarded by truly insightful vistas of bottomless chasms and distant peaks, flowering puns and mutant etymologies, stunning flights of free association, and encounters with many species of exotic facts, not to mention the tracks and droppings of latter-day giants of social-historical theory."--Monumenta Nipponica

Author Bio

Bernard Faure, Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, is the author of Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition (Princeton).