Book: Living Karma: The Religious Practices of Ouyi Zhixu

My body, mind, and the outer world suddenly disappeared. I then knew that my body came from beginningless time and perishes in the very spot it is born. It is only a shadow manifested by entrenched delusion.

This stunning revelation from his Autobiography (included as an appendix) was recorded by the 23-year-old Ouyi Zhixu (1599-1655), a Chinese Buddhist monk whose belief in the possibility that one could change one's karma is here explained in full for the first time in English by Beverley McGuire, an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina, who developed this book from her 2009 Harvard dissertation on Ouyi.