Search Results

In the first half of the eighth century, the cities of Chang'an and Luoyang in northern China were the greatest urban centers in the world. The Chang'an walls formed a nearly square rectangle enclosing a neatly ordered set of government centers, market areas, and neighborhoods. For students of Chan Buddhism, Luoyang is also known as the city just north of Mount Song, with which Bodhidharma had been associated since at least 645. This chapter discusses imperial patronage and the Chan style during the metropolitan Chan, Shenhui's campaign against the “Northern School” and his attack on Shenxiu's students, the Oxhead school and the crisis between the Northern and Southern schools, the Platform Sūtra as the climax text of early Chan, Huineng and the evolution of Chan, and three major events in the eighth century that significantly altered the evolution of Chan.

Chapter 2 examines how the Tang–Five Dynasties transition impacted Buddhist monastics, their traditions, and regional religious cultures. With the onset of the Five Dynasties, just as some southern rulers recruited former Tang officials and local leaders to their administrations, they also appointed Chang’an’s displaced court clerics and prominent native monks to the abbacies of major monasteries in their territories. Traditions of learning and practice popular in the northern capitals during the late Tang were disseminated to and reconstituted in the capitals of southern kingdoms, most notably Shu and Wuyue. The continuity of elite Tang Buddhist traditions is then contrasted with the elevation of local clerics, many of whom belonged to Chan lineages, in less developed regions like Jiangxi and Fujian. The political empowerment and economic development of southeastern regions situated resident Chan monks at the centers of newly sovereign states.

The Chinese Christian texts produced in the Tang dynasty can be read only against the political, cultural, and religious background in which the Christian communities lived in the Chinese Tang Empire. This chapter offers a summary of the historical data that have come down to us and are attested to by the sources (Chinese, Syriac, Arabic, and others), together with an attempt to reconstruct the geographical location of Christian monasteries in the Chinese territory, the ethnic composition and internal hierarchical structure of Christian communities, as well as the different denominations of Christianity in China between about 635 and 845.