Divine transactions : the transformation of Buddhist communal liturgies at Dunhuang (8th--10th centuries)
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The current dissertation centers on a host of communal liturgies at Dūnhuáng from the eighth through the tenth centuries. In this period, Buddhist ritual flourished by localizing the existing Chinese ritual elements and absorbing ritual techniques from Tibetan sources. The Dūnhuáng corpus discovered around 1900 CE contains a wealth of ritual documents written in Chinese, Tibetan, and occasionally in a combination of the two. These texts provide a rare window into the practice of premodern Chinese Buddhism and Buddhism on the ground. The dissertation can be divided into two parts. The first three chapters discuss how to classify Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan communal liturgies from a structural perspective; the next six chapters study six distinct genres of liturgies by analyzing relevant liturgical scripts in the Dūnhuáng corpus. Chapter 1 focuses on the so-called "lay ritual events" in Indian Mainstream Buddhism, which constitute Mainstream communal liturgies. Based on how they are discussed in the vinayas, these liturgies can be classified into eight distinct categories. Chapter 2 examines a host of communal liturgies termed zhāi in the Tang and at Dūnhuáng. Chapter 3 evaluates the structural issues in Tibetan Buddhist ritual and how it changed over time. Chapters 4 to 8, relying on relevant liturgical texts, explore four different categories of zhāi-liturgies: prayer feasts, sūtra-rotation liturgies, the afterlife-related liturgies, the dedicatory rites, and holiday liturgies. Chapter 9 analyzes the early Tibetan adaptation of the Indic tantric feast and how tantric concepts and ritual technology transformed the communal feast. The Conclusion focuses on seven themes: a comparison between the thanksgiving prayer and the zhāi-script, the dissolution of the zhāi-liturgical system, Sino-Tibetan zhāi-liturgies, the classification of Buddhist rituals, the kammatic and nibbanic dimensions of communal liturgies, the existence of two different kinds of merit, and cultural embeddedness
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Ding, Yi |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Kieschnick, John, 1964- |
| Thesis advisor | Kieschnick, John, 1964- |
| Thesis advisor | Dalton, Jacob Paul |
| Thesis advisor | Gentry, James Duncan |
| Thesis advisor | Harrison, Paul M. (Paul Maxwell), 1950- |
| Degree committee member | Dalton, Jacob Paul |
| Degree committee member | Gentry, James Duncan |
| Degree committee member | Harrison, Paul M. (Paul Maxwell), 1950- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Religious Studies. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Yi Ding |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Religious Studies |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Yi Ding
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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