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In an attempt to reconstruct an elusive aspect of the medieval Chinese imagination, The Eminent Monk examines biographies of Chinese Buddhist monks, from the uncompromising ascetic to the unfathomable wonder-worker. While analyzing images of the monk in medieval China, the author addresses some questions encountered along the way: What are we to make of accounts in “eminent monk” collections of deviant monks who violate monastic precepts? Who wrote biographies of monks and who read them? How did different segments of Chinese society contend for the image of the monk and which image prevailed? By placing biographies of monks in the context of Chinese political and religious rhetoric, The Eminent Monk explores both the role of Buddhist literature in Chinese history and the monastic imagination that inspired this literature.

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9780824818418

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This book is not just one more volume on the ethics of nature and the environment but is a profound philosophical and theological mining of selected classical and contemporary thinkers' relevance for a truly transdisciplinary discourse about the entanglement of our images of nature and morality. Aristotle, Luther, Hegel, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud and Murdoch meet each other and the reader in a demanding, rich, and thought-provoking dialogue on naturalism, artificiality, virtue, evolution and the painfully gripping question of how to cope with the atmosfear in times of anthropogenic climate and weather change. -- Sigurd Bergmann, , Norwegian University of Science and Technology

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