Cultural Intersections in Later Chinese Buddhism

This collection of essays on "later" Chinese Buddhism takes us beyond the bedrock subjects of traditional Buddhist historiography - scriptures and commentaries, sectarian developments, lives of notable monks - to examine a wide range of extracanonical materials that illuminate cultural manifestations of Buddhism from the Song dynasty (960-1279) through the modern period.

Straying from well-trodden paths, the authors often transgress the boundaries of their own disciplines: historians address architecture; art historians look to politics; a specialist in literature treats poetry that offers gendered insights into Buddhist lives.

The broad-based cultural orientation of this volume is predicated on the recognition that art and religion are not closed systems requiring only minimal cross-indexing with other social or aesthetic phenomena but constituent elements in interlocking networks of practice and belief.