"Cole offers an original, innovative, and compelling history of Tang-Song Chan literature that challenges and corrects many of the more long-standing misrepresentations of the tradition. Patriarchs on Paper's great strength and originality is in taking Chan literature seriously as literature and allowing readers to access this process with all of the excitement of a literary detective story. With an extremely high degree of analytic sophistication, Cole has rendered this large and often contentious body of secondary scholarship into a coherent narrative of literary and institutional history intelligible and meaningful to the nonspecialist. The manuscript is exemplary in presenting a critical history of deeply complex material that is at once rigorous and engaging."--D. Max Moerman, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard and Columbia University "Using lively, provocative, and accessible prose, Alan Cole provides his readers with a compelling behind-the-scenes look at the emergence of Chan as a literary tradition. In Patriarchs on Paper, Cole retraces the steps of some of Chan's most celebrated authors to show how they tried to secure legitimacy, patronage, recognition, and much more through their creative use of new models of authority, brand consciousness, conspiracy theories, and playful dialectics. This book is a must-read for anyone looking to take a brisk and refreshing stroll through the forest of conceptual thickets known as Chan or Zen.

"--Juhn Y. Ahn, University of Michigan.