"This book dispels popular understandings of Buddhism as a religion that emphasizes the renunciation of worldly goods, by examining how Buddhist temples and the monastic community (the sangha) require tangible resources in order to sustain themselves. The first book to focus on …
"Zen teachers are fond of saying things like don't make man, don't make woman. Other Buddhist teachers may not use the same Zen-like saying, but they also generally teach that gender, like anything else, is essentially empty and not to be clung to. That's fine and good, but how …
"Hair, teeth, fingernails, pieces of bone-bodily fragments supposedly from the Buddha himself have a complicated history. These relics have long served as objects of veneration for many Buddhists, and unsurprisingly, when Western colonial powers subjugated populations in South A…
"Chan Before Chan is a cultural history of the earliest traditions of Buddhist meditation (chan) in China during the era before the rise of the "Chan School" (better known as "Zen") of the eighth-century and beyond, with a particular focus on the semiotics of meditative and espe…
"Zen Buddhism is a form of Mahāyāna Buddhism that originated in China and is strongly focused on meditation. It is characteristically sceptical towards language and distrustful of conceptual thought, which explains why Zen Buddhist sayings are so enigmatic and succinct. But desp…
