The Chan (Zen in Japanese) school began when, in seventh-century China, a small religious community gathered around a Buddhist monk named Hongren. Over the centuries, Chan Buddhism grew from an obscure movement to an officially recognized and eventually dominant form of Buddhism in China and throughout East Asia. It has reached international popularity, its teachings disseminated across cultures far and wide.
In Monks, Rulers, and Literati, Albert Welter presents, for the first time in a comprehensive fashion in a Western work, the story of the rise of Chan, a story which has...

Yongming Yanshou ranks among the great thinkers of the Chinese and East Asian Buddhist traditions, one whose legacy has endured for more than a thousand years. Albert Welter offers new insight into the significance of Yanshou and his major work, the Zongjing lu, by showing their critical role in the contested Buddhist and intellectual territories of the Five Dynasties and early Song dynasty China.

Welter gives a comprehensive study of Yanshou's life, showing how Yanshou's Buddhist identity has been and continues to be disputed. He also provides an in-depth examination of the...

This collection examines the impact of East Asian religion and culture on the public sphere, defined as an idealized discursive arena that mediates the official and private spheres.