Alan Cole

This essay details the high level of authorial control in scripting the first chapter of the Lotus Sūtra in order to argue that the Lotus Sūtra began as a written text and not an oral tradition.  The essay also explores how the Lotus Sūtra seeks to involve the reader in proto-tantric rituals and some well developed forms of cosplay, with important consequences for how we think about the birth and growth of the Mahayana.

This chapter highlights several important elements at work in the process of writing history. The first thing to see is that writing history represents a doubling of reality: in addition to the everyday world that one lives in, where one's senses are engaged in a fluid and continuous manner, the writer of history works to evoke scenes and events that, though invisible, can be made to appear to the reader as integral parts of reality, albeit in the past. Put this way, one can appreciate how the skills needed to write history reflect the growing human ability to artify the world. Why this matters for understanding Chan literature is that one wouldn';t be far wrong in describing Chan as a gradually solidifying set of literary gestures designed to enhance—and organize—the present, by carefully designing and curating images of an imaginary past.

This essay reconsiders the narrative logic of the (shorter) _Land of Bliss Sutra_ (_Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra_), to argue that the sutra is best seen as a rather late experiment in the staging of the cult-of-the-text, a project that was so important in early Mahayana sutra-writing.  The details of this argument would suggest that much needs to be reconsidered in past accounts of the formation of the text.  (Though the essay is part of a larger project dedicated to clarifying the "fetishization of tradition" in various religious situations, it can be easily enough read on its own, without that larger context.)

This essay carefully considers the narrative details of the _Platform Sutra_ to argue that there are many interesting (and largely overlooked) agendas at play in the work's presentation of truth and tradition.  And, as the title suggests, these agendas are rather distant from the simplicity and straightforwardness that many think are the hallmarks of Chan/Zen.

This essay attempts to tell a different story regarding how Buddhist funerals developed in China.  (Earlier narratives in Japanese and Western scholarship seem upside down as they claimed that it wasn't until the Song dynasty that fully developed Buddhist funeral rites appeared.)  In a more specific way, this essay reconsiders the nature of Chan Buddhism by reflecting on how Chan monastic texts (qing gui) define two styles of funerary rites: one for the common monk that looks thoroughly Buddhist, the other for the abbot that, oddly enough, is much more Confucian in form and content.  Clearly this evidence suggests that Buddhist authors, as architects of tradition, Confucianized Chan leadership roles in rather obvious and intentional ways, a fact that requires us to rethink how we define Chan Buddhism and its origins.

This paper is an attempt to treat the first half of the Diamond Sutra as an integrated whole -- a whole in which all the parts matter in assessing its "work" as an art-product.  In particular, I try to make sense of the way the text seems, with language, to invite the reader to move in and out of the sphere of language and meaning.  Obviously to reckon the text in this manner requires a healthy dose of irony, one which, arguably, was also elemental in the text's composition.  (These arguments regarding the logic and irony of the text's composition are presented in a somewhat different manner in a more recent essay: "Mastering Tradition: Desire and Overcoming in the Diamond Sutra and the Gospel of Mark"  [2018] -- see below.)

This paper develops close readings of the Diamond Sutra and the Gospel of Mark in order to detail how both works present "theaters of conversion" for the reader.  The first three pages of the paper develop a theoretical perspective on what I dub the "anthropology of desire" that both authors seem to have relied on as they sculpted these narratives-of-conversion.

While no one can deny that Prof. McRae made many significant contributions to Chan Studies, it is also true that there were several forms of romanticism shaping his research and publications. 
This essay attempts to document several strains of McRae's brand of romanticism, while also offering an alternative paradigm for writing about the emergence and development of Chan Buddhism.