Description
Book SynopsisElegantly combines the study of premodern manuscripts and woodblock prints with ethnographic fieldwork to illuminate the historical development of the highly musical koshiki rituals performed by Soto Zen clerics.
Trade ReviewMemory, Music, Manuscripts makes highly original contributions to Zen studies, Buddhist studies, and Japanese religious studies. The author, a musicologist and religion scholar, possesses skills that ably demonstrate the benefits of paying attention to liturgy and music—areas that have not received as much attention as texts and institutional history. This is a truly innovative and significant book." - Barbara Ambros, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"Mross has assembled an exciting and richly contributive work that will alter future approaches to the study of Japanese Buddhist ritual in several ways. While some recent Japanese scholarship has focused on the integration of visual and aural experiences in devotional ritual or on the social, material, and institutional aspects of ritualized practice in Japanese Buddhism, Mross provides a glimpse of these issues and more as they relate to kōshiki, a ritual genre that has begun to draw substantive scholarly attention only in the last decade or more. . . . Through this approach, she delivers an effective study that privileges the complementarity between ritual and performance, the text and the body, and real and imagined histories." - Matthew Hayes, Duke University, H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews (January 2023)
