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

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Books of 1992

Paper | 1994 | $52.00 / £35.95
416 pp. | 6 x 9 | 5 halftones 4 line drawings

Shopping Cart | Reviews

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.

Reviews:

"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

Other Princeton books by Bernard Faure:

• Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition.
• The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender.
• The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality.
• Visions of Power: Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism.

Subject Areas:

• Mind, Body, Spirit
• Asian and Asian American Studies
• Asian and Asian American Studies
• Religion

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Paper: $52.00 ISBN13: 978-0-691-02963-4

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Paper: £35.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-02963-4

Prices subject to change without notice

File created: 11/4/2009

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