The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature

John Whalen-Bridge is Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore. He is the coeditor (with Sor-hoon Tan) of Democracy as Culture: Deweyan Pragmatism in a Globalizing World, also published by SUNY Press, and the author of Political Fiction and the American Self. Gary Storhoff is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford and the author of Understanding Charles Johnson.

Foreword by Maxine Hong Kingston

Acknowledgments

Introduction
John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff

PART I. Literature as Vehicle: Transmission and Transformation

1. The Emptiness of Patterned Flux: Ernest Fenollosa’s Buddhist Essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry”
Jonathan Stalling

2. Gary Snyder’s Selective Way to Cold Mountain: Domesticating Han Shan
Yuemin He

3. John Giorno: Buddhism, Poetry, and Transgression
Marcus Boon

4. Buddhadharma and Poetry without Credentials
Michael Heller

PART II. Zen, Vajrayana, and the Avant-Garde: A Pluralistic Poetics

5. Finger Pointing at the Moon: Zen and the Poetry of Philip Whalen
Jane Falk

6. Keeping the Vision Alive: The Buddhist Stillpoint in the Work of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
Erik Mortenson

7. Illumination through the Cracks: The Melting Down of Conventional Socio-Religious Thought and Practice in the Work of Gary Snyder
Tom Lavazzi

8. The American Poetic Diamond Vehicle: Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman Re-Work Vajrayana Buddhism
Jane Augustine

PART III. Widening the Circle: Buddhism and American Writers of Color

9. Buddhism, the Chinese Religion, and the Ceremony of Writing: An Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston
John Whalen-Bridge

10. A Bridge between Two Worlds: Crossing to America in Monkey Bridge
Hanh Nguyen and R. C. Lutz

11 ‘Opening the Hand of Thought’: The Meditative Mind in Charles Johnson’s Dr. King’s Refrigerator
Gary Storhoff

Afterword
Charles Johnson

List of Contributers
Index