Thriving in Crisis

Albert Welter, author of Religion, Culture, and the Public Sphere in China and Japan:
Thriving in Crisis is a groundbreaking monograph that will provide a template for future studies in the Ming period, which is still little studied and deserving of much more attention. While previous studies have tended to focus on single figures or texts, this book offers a broad reach that will inspire further work.

T. H. Barrett, author of The Woman Who Discovered Printing:
The vibrant religious environment of late Ming Buddhism has up until now mainly been approached through the words and deeds of its most famous personalities. Dewei Zhang takes us one step further with his painstaking research into the social, political, and economic situation within which Buddhism flourished. No reader will come away from this book without a much better informed and better balanced sense of this important epoch in Chinese history.

Chün-fang Yü, author of The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Zhuhong and the Late Ming Synthesis:
This book examines the interlocked relationships between Buddhism and social-political forces. Focusing on a delimited time span of one hundred years (1522-1620), the author uses case studies and quantitative analysis to show the roles emperors and empresses, inner court women and eunuchs, eminent monks, and scholar-officials played in the different trajectories Beijing and Jiangnan underwent in the revival of Buddhism. Zhang offers a sophisticated explanation about what late Ming Buddhist revival means, as well as how and why it happened. The book makes a major contribution to our understanding of late Ming Buddhism.

Timothy Brook, author of Great State: China and the World:
In this absorbing and beautifully crafted study, Dewei Zhang analyzes Buddhism's entanglement with elite politics during the volatile later reigns of the Ming dynasty. By treating local variations with careful precision while keeping his eye on the larger picture of Buddhism's rise and decline, he shows how the Buddhist renewal of the late Ming depended on where and who you were. It has been a decade since Ming Buddhism has been the subject of such a penetrating and original analysis.