Saichō 最澄, one of the most prominent of Japanese Buddhist innovators, is the renowned ninth-century founder of the Tendai School, the first Japanese Buddhist sect with its own system of temples and monasteries, ordinations, practices and philosophy. It was in the goal of founding and maintaining an authentic Buddhist monastic institution that, for better or worse, influenced his thinking, and structured his philosophy. Although Saichō’s identity as founder is beyond dispute, this accomplishment was initially made possible through what we might (...) call modes of self-displacement, essentially establishing his legitimacy as founder by tracing the origins of Tendai beyond himself to founders even more prominent in the minds of his contemporaries. It is through our participation in this initial displacement of Saichō that the meaning of his contributions to Japanese Buddhism will begin to unfold. (shrink)

Steven Heine’s latest book on the history of kōans, Like Cats and Dogs: Contesting the Mu Kōan in Zen Buddhism, is his second monograph dedicated to a single kōan case record. The author’s first such offering, Shifting Shape, Shaping Text: Philosophy and Folklore in the Fox Kōan, focused on the second case record of the thirteenth-century Gateless Gate collection. Published at the end of the 1990s the text was a response, in many ways, to the two authors who dominated the (...) field of Zen studies during that decade, Bernard Faure and William Bodiford, particularly in regard to the historical relation between monastic Chan/Zen and popular forms of supernatural belief and practice... (shrink)