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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 7.1 (2024): 336–341; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.07.01.11
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Buddhism and Science, Transmission of Buddhism: Locality and Globality)
Jimmy Yu. Reimagining Chan Buddhism: Sheng Yen and the Creation of the Dharma Drum Lineage of Chan. New York: Routledge, 2022. 226 pp.
Caiyang XU 徐采揚
Stanford University
A progressive Buddhist educator, reformer, and historian, Sheng Yen (1931–2009) is one of the most influential Chinese Buddhists in modern China. He not only inherits the lineage of Caodong and Linji schools of Chan, but also creates his own Dharma Drum Lineage. Jimmy Yu’s pioneering new monograph Reimagining Chan Buddhism: Sheng Yen and the Creation of the Dharma Drum Lineage of Chan is the first scholarship in any language of Sheng Yen’s life under the historical contexts of modern China. Adroitly interweaving Sheng Yen’s personal life and the social-historical backgrounds, Reimagining Chan paints a refined picture of the formation of Master Sheng Yen’s person and doctrinal formulations at the juncture of critical historical events
What distinguishes this book is that it is more than a biography—Yu’s personal connection as Sheng Yen’s former attendant and student, while offering an intimate glimpse of Sheng Yen’s lived life as a person, does not prevent Yu from historicizing Sheng Yen’s life in the contingent historical, political, and religious contexts of his time. Combining etic and emic perspectives, Reimagining Chan employs a wide range of sources, including Sheng Yen’s autobiographies, the data collected during fieldwork and interview of Sheng Yen’s students, as well as the author’s personal recollections and notes of his interactions with Sheng Yen through three decades. Instead of narrating a teleological account of Sheng Yen as a Buddhist sage destined to fulfill his mission in history, this book highlights the historical contingencies that shaped Sheng Yen’s development of new doctrines. It paints a vivid picture of how Sheng Yen reconstructed Chan Buddhism by establishing the new Dharma Drum Lineage, which asserted a ‘will to orthodoxy’ to define the authentic parameter of Chinese Buddhism, clearly differentiated from esoteric Buddhism.
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About the Author: Caiyang Xu is a Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University. Her research explores the cultural history of Chinese Buddhism, with a focus on topics ranging from the intersections of modern Chinese Buddhism and politics to the esoteric rituals of food bestowal in late imperial China.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
