Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism : A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise

The issue of sinification—the manner and extent to which Buddhism and Chinese culture were transformed through their mutual encounter and dialogue—has dominated the study of Chinese Buddhism for much of the past century. Robert Sharf opens this important and far-reaching book by raising a host of historical and hermeneutical problems with the encounter paradigm and the master narrative on which it is based. __Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism__ is, among other things, an extended reflection on the theoretical foundations and conceptual categories that undergird the study of medieval Chinese Buddhism. Sharf draws his argument in part from a meticulous historical, philological, and philosophical analysis of the __Treasure Store Treatise (Pao-tsang lun),__ an eighth-century Buddho-Taoist work apocryphally attributed to the fifth-century master Seng-chao (374–414). In the process of coming to terms with this recondite text, Sharf ventures into all manner of subjects bearing on our understanding of medieval Chinese Buddhism, from the evolution of T’ang "gentry Taoism" to the pivotal role of image veneration and the problematic status of Chinese Tantra. The volume includes a complete annotated translation of the __Treasure Store Treatise,__ accompanied by the detailed exegesis of dozens of key terms and concepts.

Igniting the Internet examines the development and consequences of Internet-born politics in the twenty-first century. It takes up the new wave of South Korean youth activism that originated online in 2002, when the country's dynamic cyberspace transformed a vehicular accident involving two U.S. servicemen into a national furor that compelled many Koreans to reexamine the fifty-year relationship between the two countries. Responding to the accident, which ended in the deaths of two high school students, technologically savvy youth went online to organize demonstrations that grew into nightly rallies across the nation. Internet-born, youth-driven mass protest has since become a familiar and effective repertoire for activism in South Korea, even as the rest of the world has struggled to find its feet with this emerging model of political involvement.

It focuses on the cultural dynamics that have allowed the Internet to bring issues rapidly to public attention and exert influence on both domestic and international politics. The author combines a robust analysis of online communities with nuanced interview data to theorize a "cultural ignition process" - the mechanisms and implications for popular politics in volatile Internet-driven activism - in South Korea and beyond. She offers a unique perspective on how local actors experience and remember the cultural dynamics of Internet-born activism and how these experiences shape the political identities of a generation who has essentially come of age in cyberspace, the so-called digital natives or millennials.

Readers interested in social movement theory and new media in social context as well as students and scholars of Korean studies will find the work both far-reaching and insightful.

Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Conventions of Usage Introduction. Prolegomenon to the Study of Medieval Chinese Buddhist Literature Part 1. The Historical and Cosmological Background 1. The Date and Provenance of the Treasure Store Treatise 2. Chinese Buddhism and the Cosmology of Sympathetic Resonance Part 2: Annotated Translation of the Treasure Store Treatise Introduction to the Translation 3. The Treasure Store Treatise Chapter One: The Broad Illumination of Emptiness and Being 4. The Treasure Store Treatise Chapter Two: The Essential Purity of Transcendence and Subtlety 5. The Treasure Store Treatise Chapter Three: The Empty Mystery of the Point of Genesis Appendix 1. On Esoteric Buddhism in China Appendix 2. Scriptural Quotations in the Treasure Store Treatise Notes Works Cited Index About the Author "The volume includes a complete annotated translation of the Treasure Store Treatise, accompanied by the detailed exegesis of dozens of key terms and concepts."--Jacket