Thriving in Crisis: Buddhism and Political Disruption in China, 1522–1620 (The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies)

__Thriving in Crisis__ is a systematic study of the late Ming Buddhist renewal with a focus on the religious and political factors that enabled it. Dewei Zhang explores the history of the boom in enthusiasm for Buddhism in the Jiajing-Wanli era (1522–1620), tracing a pattern of advances and retrenchment at different social levels in varied regions. Late imperial Chinese Buddhism was long dismissed as having declined from the glories of Buddhism during the Sui and Tang dynasties (581–907). In recent scholarship, a more nuanced picture of late Ming-era Buddhist renewal has emerged. Yet this alternate conception of the history of Buddhism in China has tended to focus on either doctrinal contributions of individual masters or the roles of local elites in Jiangnan, leaving unsolved broader questions regarding the dynamics and mechanism behind the evolution of Buddhism into the renewal. Thriving in Crisis is a systematic study of the late Ming Buddhist renewal with a focus on the religious and political factors that enabled it to happen. Dewei Zhang explores the history of the boom in enthusiasm for Buddhism in the Jiajing-Wanli era (1522–1620), tracing a pattern of advances and retrenchment at different social levels in varied regions. He reveals that the Buddhist renewal was a dynamic movement that engaged a wide swath of elites, from emperors and empress dowagers to eunuchs and scholar-officials. Drawing on a range of evidence and approaches, Zhang contends that the late Ming renewal was a politically driven exception to a longer-term current of disfavor toward Buddhism and that it failed to establish Buddhism on a foundation solid enough for its future development. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary study, Thriving in Crisis provides a new theoretical framework for understanding the patterns of Buddhist history in China. "Scholars of Chinese Buddhism long disparaged late-imperial Buddhism, and Ming-era Buddhism in particular, as degenerate, part of a decline from the glories of the Sui-Tang Buddhism of sixth through the tenth centuries CE. In recent decades, scholars have challenged this narrative of decline and degeneration, but their alternate conception of the history of Buddhism in China as one of alternating periods of decline and renewal has tended to focus on the doctrinal or theoretical contributions of individual masters, leaving open the questions of what, practically speaking, a Buddhist renewal is and how one comes to happen. In Thriving in Crisis, Dewei Zhang comes to grips with the idea of Buddhist renewal through a systematic study of the late Ming Buddhist renewal from a religio-political perspective. Zhang explores the history of the boom in enthusiasm for Buddhism in the Jiajing-Wanli era (1522-1620) and reveals the social and political factors that both caused and were caused by the Ming-era renewal. In doing so, he provides a new theoretical framework for the decline/renewal conception of Buddhist history in China"-- Provided by publisher