Bernard Faure, Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, is the author of Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition (Princeton).

"Readers will be rewarded by truly insightful vistas of bottomless chasms and distant peaks, flowering puns and mutant etymologies, stunning flights of free association, and encounters with many species of exotic facts, not to mention the tracks and droppings of latter-day giants of social-historical theory." --- "Not since D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966) has any responsible scholar attempted in English to synthesize such a broad stretch of the history of Zen Buddhism as has Bernard Faure.... [The book] offers the best narration in English of the role that magicians, healers, jesters, relics, mummies, dreams, funerals, deities, and mundane rituals play in a tradition that lays claim to emptiness."---Stephen F. Teiser, Journal of Religion --- "One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1992"