The Florida State University Department of Religion



The Florida State University Department of Religion

12th Annual Tessa J. Bartholomeusz Lecture

"Esoteric Buddhism in a Time of Turbulence"

Dr. Robert Gimello

Research Professor of Theology and of East Asian Languages & Cultures

University of Notre Dame

Friday, March 1 2013, 4:30-6:00pm.

The Claude Pepper Center

It has commonly been assumed that in the later centuries of traditional Chinese history such Buddhism as continued to attract the interest of the elite classes was largely the loose amalgam of Chan 禪 (Zen) quietism and high-brow Pure Land devotionalism that literati were said to find especially congenial. Chinese Esoteric Buddhism (Mijiao 密教) was assumed to have been then either long defunct, or confined to the margins of society, or superseded by court sponsored Tibetan Tantrism. In fact, however, traditional Chinese Buddhist occultism, derived from the esoteric systems of thought and practice that had flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries, persisted into the late traditional era. It even enjoyed something of a resurgence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among southern Chinese intelligentsia and gentry struggling to cope with the calamity — spiritual as well as political — of the Ming dynasty’s decline and the Manchu conquest. This paper will examine one particular esoteric cult — that of the goddess or bodhisattva Zhunti 准提 — and the nature of its appeal among Chinese political and cultural leaders faithful to the Ming dynasty, the so-called “Ming loyalists” 明遺民, including some of the most eminent of those intellectuals, poets, and artists for whom the Manchu conquest was the occasion for formal entrance into the Buddhist monastic order.

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