Chinese Transformation of Buddhism & Crossborder Transmission of Buddhism (Hardcover)

Chinese Transformation of Buddhism & Crossborder Transmission of Buddhism: Pan-Asian Spread of Tiantai/Ch’?nt’ae/Tendai Texts, Ideas and Practices and Its Position in East Asian Society. Series on Famed Mountains and Great Monasteries III. Edited by Jing Yue 月淨, Jinhua Chen 陳金華, Song Wang 王頌, 2022.

This is Volume III of the FROGBEAR Series on Famed Mountains and Great Temples. Sacred space is an essential component of any religious tradition and especially significant for transcultural religions such as Buddhism. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of holy sites in Buddhist history. While the far-reaching and widespread significance of Buddhist sacred territories has attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines, there remains much work to be done both on specific locales of practice and interpretative strategies for understanding sacred sites in medieval China generally. This book series proposes to fill this scholarly gap through the collaborative and in-depth studies of ‘famed mountains and great temples’ (mingshan dasi 名山大寺), territories of exceptional importance in China and, in many cases, throughout the whole of East Asia.

This volume collects 16 of the over 40 papers presented to the International Symposium of Tiantai Studies under the theme of ‘From Tiantai to Hiei: Transborder and Transcultural Spread of Tiantai/Chontae/Tendai Buddhism & East Asian Societies,’ held in the winter of December 2019 at Peking University, hosted by the Center for Buddhist Studies at Peking University 北京大學佛??究中心, sponsored by the Cultural Exchange Center of Mount Tiantai 天台山文化交流中心 and co-organized by the UBC FROGBEAR project. The conference was arguably the single most important conference on Tiantai/Chontae/Tendai Buddhism since the Tendai Congress at Mount Hiei in 1997. It showcases some of the most remarkable work on the subject over the past few decades.