Miracles of Book and Body

Download or read book Miracles of Book and Body written by Charlotte Eubanks and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Eubanks argues that the medieval genre of "explanatory tales" illuminates the link between human body (devotee) and sacred text (sutra). She focuses on the sensual aspects of religious experience and on the act of reading, understood as the literal incorporation of sutra texts into the body and thus a bridge between text and flesh. Eubanks's highly original approach to understanding Buddhist textuality also looks beyond Japan to explore pre-modern book history, practices of preaching, miracles of reading, and the Mah y na Buddhist "cult of the book."