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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Living Karma: The Religious Practices of Ouyi Zhixu

Living Karma: The Religious Practices of Ouyi Zhixu

McGuire, Beverley

Paperback

Series: The Sheng Yen Chinese Buddhist Studies

BuddhismChinese History

ISBN10: 0231168039
ISBN13: 9780231168038
Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
Published: Dec 17 2019
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.70
Language: English

Ouyi Zhixu (1599-1655) was an eminent Chinese Buddhist monk who, contrary to his contemporaries, believed karma could be changed. Through vows, divination, repentance rituals, and ascetic acts such as burning and blood writing, he sought to alter what others understood as inevitable and inescapable. Drawing attention to Ouyi's unique reshaping of religious practice, Living Karma reasserts the significance of an overlooked individual in the modern development of Chinese Buddhism.

While Buddhist studies scholarship tends to privilege textual analysis, Living Karma promotes a balanced study of ritual practice and writing, treating Ouyi's texts as ritual objects and his reading and writing as religious acts. Each chapter addresses a specific religious practice--writing, divination, repentance, vows, and bodily rituals--offering first a diachronic overview of each practice within the history of Chinese Buddhism and then a synchronic analysis of each phenomenon through close readings of Ouyi's work. This book sheds much-needed light on a little-known figure and his representation of karma, which proved to be a seminal innovation in the religious thought of late imperial China.

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