Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (Buddhisms)

by Charlotte Eubanks

Miracles of Book and Body is the first book to explore the intersection of two key genres of sacred literature in medieval Japan: sutras, or sacred Buddhist texts, and setsuwa, or “explanatory tales,” used in sermons and collected in written compilations. For most of East Asia, Buddhist sutras were written in classical Chinese and inaccessible to many devotees. How, then, did such devotees access these texts? Charlotte D. Eubanks argues that the medieval genre of “explanatory tales” illuminates the link between human body (devotee) and sacred text (sutra). Her highly original approach to understanding Buddhist textuality focuses on the sensual aspects of religious experience and also looks beyond Japan to explore pre-modern book history, practices of preaching, miracles of reading, and the Mahayana Buddhist “cult of the book.”

288 pages, Hardcover

First published December 5, 2010

Reviews

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a totally fun reading. I read it out of curiosity because I grew up in a Buddhist family, sutra-readings used to be a big part of my life and I always wonder whether I'm the only freak out there to read sutras the way I read them. As it turned out, if I trust the scholarship in this book (which I do), I'm only one of the many who read sutras as if they were alive and demanding/negotiating with me on cost and benefits. Well, that's actually how I lost my faith: the anxiety of the sutras just piss me off. If they were really the source of all Buddhas' heart and mind, why would they even bother to ask us for shelter and protection? Their very existence and very claim that they were the same as the Buddha's full presence (actually they all claim better than the real Buddha), such a claim only reveal the sheer absence of the Buddha. Bogus claims are always based on the sense of deficiency.

In any case, this book is a rare co-existence of solid scholarship and entertainment. It is particularly fun for me because I can still recite half of the sutras used in this book and many of the Japanese setsuwa stories come from a Chinese source that I have read.