Toward a Spatial History of Chan: Lineages, Networks, and the Lamp Records = $Lchi禪宗空間歷史初探 : 宋燈錄記載之宗派
This paper lays a foundation for spatial religious histories of Chan Buddhism in the Northern and Southern Song dynasties (960–1279). The Lamp Records (denglu 燈錄) texts are genealogically organized hagiographic records of members of the Chan lineages. Scholarly consensus holds that these records are...
| Published in: | Review of Religion and Chinese Society |
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| Subtitles: | $Lchi禪宗空間歷史初探 |
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Brill
2016
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| In: |
Review of Religion and Chinese Society
Year: 2016, Volume: 3, Issue: 2, Pages: 164-188 |
| Further subjects: | B
distant reading
B 禪宗 B 宋代 B 遙距閲讀 B Song Dynasty B Chan Buddhism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) |
| Summary: | This paper lays a foundation for spatial religious histories of Chan Buddhism in the Northern and Southern Song dynasties (960–1279). The Lamp Records (denglu 燈錄) texts are genealogically organized hagiographic records of members of the Chan lineages. Scholarly consensus holds that these records are primarily religious texts and of questionable historicity, but with a critical methodology it is possible to discover patterns in these documents which can be amplified and visualized using digital techniques. This paper blends gis geospatial analysis and traditional close reading of sectarian Buddhist sources and nonsectarian historical sources (such as “gazetteers” 地方誌). The author assembled a gis dataset to study the Chan abbots named in the Song-era Lamp Records texts, including each abbot’s lineage identity, temple location, and the number of full-fledged disciples recorded in a Lamp Records text. The results suggest that Chan lineages during the Northern Song as presented in the Lamp Records correspond to regional networks and were not necessarily doctrinal opponents. This paper concludes with a series of critiques regarding the power and limits of computational methods like gis. The author proposes that the task of the digital humanist is to go beyond building infrastructure and to engage in critical interpretation. |
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| ISSN: | 2214-3955 |
| Contains: | In: Review of Religion and Chinese Society
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/22143955-00302003 |