Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan
Charlotte Eubanks
Abstract
This book explores the intersection of two key genres of sacred literature in medieval Japan: sutras, or sacred Buddhist texts; and setsuwa, or “explanatory tales,” used in sermons and collected in written compilations. For most of East Asia, Buddhist sutras were written in classical Chinese and inaccessible to many devotees. How, then, did such devotees access these texts? The book argues that the medieval genre of “explanatory tales” illuminates the link between human body (devotee) and sacred text (sutra). The author's approach to understanding Buddhist textuality focuses on the sensual asp ... More
Keywords: medieval Japan, sutras, sacred Buddhist texts, setsuwa, explanatory tales, classical Chinese, human body, preaching, reading, Mahāyāna
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 | Print ISBN-13: 9780520265615 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: May 2012 | DOI:10.1525/california/9780520265615.001.0001 |
