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Divining Karma in Chinese Buddhism
Author(s) -
McGuire Beverley Foulks
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
religion compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.113
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 1749-8171
DOI - 10.1111/rec3.12068
Subject(s) - divination , karma , buddhism , indigenous , traditional medicine , history , hinduism , psychology , philosophy , religious studies , medicine , theology , ecology , biology
Divination has been a pervasive phenomenon throughout Chinese history, but scholars have tended to focus on indigenous divination practices and overlook Chinese Buddhist ones. Scholars that have attended to Chinese Buddhist divination have largely debated the extent to which it derived from indigenous Chinese or Indian sources. This article advocates a different approach for future studies – one that focuses on the way in which practitioners of divination viewed themselves, their divinatory practices, and their reasons for practicing divination. It illustrates this method with a case study of an eminent Chinese Buddhist monk named Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655), who viewed divination as a diagnostic tool to determine his karma and prescribed repentance rituals for redressing such karma.