Wendi L. Adamek - The Mystique of Transmission: On an Early Chan History & Its Contents [ebook - 1 PDF] (Buddhism )

This book primarily concerns the Lidai faboa ji (Record of the Dharma-Jewel Through the Generations) composed sometime between 744 and 780 CE by the short-lived Bao Tang sect of Chan at the Bao Tang Monastery in Yizhou, Jiannan (Sichuan), regarding their master Wuzhu (714-774).  The manuscript was long lost, though known about and quoted in other sources, and only rediscovered in the Dunhuang caves in 1900.  The book “has been called a fabric of self-promoting fictions,” and was largely regarded as such from its beginning.  

It is the subject of the author’s doctoral thesis and has been described as ‘dense’ by one of my professors.  However, overall I found it a very interesting book.  It focuses on a truly obscure and only recently rediscovered Chinese Chan text, the Lidai fabao ji, but it does so in a way that carries with it an enormous amount of history (its contexts) from the period leading up to, during, and just after the time the text was written, the Tang Dynasty or eighth century China, sometimes (erroneously?) called the “Golden Age of Chan.”
~ Monica - http://dharmacowgirl.wordpress.com

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