© Columbia University Press
Zongmi on Chan
May, 2009
Cloth, 376 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14392-9
$45.00
/ £31.00
"This work is a very important contribution to Chan studies, and indeed to the study of Chinese Buddhism. Broughton's introduction and annotation are extremely erudite and, at the same time, eminently readable. His book contains information that has only been available heretofore in a very limited and patchwork fashion." — John McRae, Komazawa University
"This is an excellent, impeccably researched, and well-translated piece of work. Modern Japanese scholarship, which has dominated the field of Zen studies for the past century, has downplayed Zongmi and tried to marginalize him. Yet Jeffrey Broughton is absolutely right in claiming Zongmi's central, even foundational influence on the tradition. This book helps to redress the balance and is a major contribution to the field." — T. Griffith Foulk, Sarah Lawrence College
"While Zongmi is one of the most important figures in Chinese and East Asian Buddhism, under a Japanese Zen interpretive hegemony, he has been reduced to the status of textual exegete and, by definition, isolated from the ranks of the 'true' Chan masters. Jeffrey Broughton's masterful work restores Zongmi's reputation and, in the process, recovers an authentic tradition of East Asian Chan to its rightful stature. The translations Broughton provides in this book will serve as standard sources for generations to come." — Albert Welter, author of Monks, Rulers, and Literati: the Political Ascendancy of Chan Buddhism and The Linji Lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy