By Robert Ford Campany
In early medieval China 1000's of Buddhist miracle texts have been circulated, inaugurating a pattern that might proceed for hundreds of years. every one story acknowledged remarkable occasions related to chinese language folks and locations occasions noticeable as verifying claims made in Buddhist scriptures, demonstrating the truth of karmic retribution, or confirming the efficacy of Buddhist devotional practices. Robert Ford Campany, considered one of North the USA s preeminent students of chinese language faith, provides during this quantity the 1st entire, annotated translation, with in-depth statement, of the most important extant selection of miracle stories from the early medieval interval, Wang Yan s Records of symptoms from the Unseen Realm, compiled round 490 C.E.
In addition to the interpretation, Campany presents a considerable examine of the textual content and its writer of their ancient and non secular settings. He exhibits how those full of life stories helped combine Buddhism into chinese language society while that they served as structures for spiritual contestation and persuasion. Campany bargains a nuanced, transparent methodological dialogue of ways such narratives, being items of social reminiscence, should be learn as beneficial facts for the heritage of faith and culture.
Readers attracted to Buddhism; historians of chinese language religions, tradition, society, and literature; students of comparative faith: All will locate Signs from the Unseen Realm a stimulating and wealthy contribution to scholarship.
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Additional resources for Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China
Example text
Wang Qing, “Jinyang Wangshi de jiashi menfeng,” 143–148, offers the “hypothesis” (tuice 推測, p. 144), based on the fact that Wang Yan’s family lived briefly in the Wuyi area of Jiankang, that he was in fact descended from the Jinyang 晉陽 branch of the Taiyuan Wangs, which, if true, would have a number of very interesting implications, including a long-standing feud between his own clan and that of Fan Zhen (on whom see below) and a line of descent that included Wang Guobao 王國寶. Wang’s suggestion, while fascinating, remains highly speculative.
He must have developed a relationship at this time with a monk at the nearby Duobao monastery 多寶寺 in the capital, for he speaks of having entrusted his beloved Sound Observer image to this monk and temple for safekeeping while he traveled about the southeast. He mentions having passed through the gorges of the middle Yangzi region in 478–479 and having returned to the capital in that year, recovering his image at the monastery. The date of this recovery (in the middle of 479) is significant, for this was the year in which the Southern Qi dynasty supplanted the Song.
The story ends by saying that Daoshan, for his part, later crossed the Yangzi river and “told of this incident in detail to the layman Xie Fu”—Xie Fu being the compiler of the earliest collection of Sound Observer miracle tales. 70 Item 65 ends by naming a monk who, though not claimed to have witnessed the recounted miraculous events himself, had grown up in the same hamlet as the protagonist, had given him the lay precepts, had heard him tell of the miracle, and had been at his bedside when he died.