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

by Bernard Faure

Overview

Through a highly sensitive exploration of key concepts and metaphors, Bernard Faure guides Western readers in appreciating some of the more elusive aspects of the Chinese tradition of Chan Buddhism and its outgrowth, Japanese Zen. He focuses on Chan's insistence on "immediacy"—its denial of all traditional mediations, including scripture, ritual, good works—and yet shows how these mediations have always been present in Chan. Given this apparent duplicity in its discourse, Faure reveals how Chan structures its practice and doctrine on such mental paradigms as mediacy/immediacy, sudden/gradual, and center/margins.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691029634
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	12/04/1994
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	7.75(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

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).

Editorial Reviews

"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

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1992

From the Publisher

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.

Journal of Religion - Stephen F. Teiser

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