New Books in Buddhist Studies

In Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), Stuart Young examines Chinese hagiographic representations of three Indian Buddhist patriarchs–Asvaghosa (Maming), Nagarjuna (Longshu), and Aryadeva (Sheng tipo)–from the early fifth to late tenth centuries, and explores the role that these representations played in the development of Chinese Buddhism’s self-awareness of its own position within Buddhist history and its growing confidence that Buddhism could flourish in China despite the distance between the middle kingdom and the land of the Buddha. On the one hand, this project traces these three legendary figures as they are portrayed first as exemplars of how to revive the Dharma in a world without a Buddha, then as representatives of a lineage stretching back to Shakyamuni, and finally as scholar types who transmitted the Dharma to China via their exegetical and doctrinal works. More broadly, however, Young uses this transformation as an index of changing views of medieval China’s relationship to Shakyamuni’s India, and of Chinese Buddhists’ confidence in their own ability to realize the Buddhist soteriological path and firmly establish the Indian tradition on Chinese soil. One theme running throughout the book is the way in which these three patriarchs bridged the Sino-Indian divide.This was particularly important for those Chinese Buddhists who were unsettled by the geographical and historical distance that separated them from the India of Shakyamuni’s times. The Chinese found Asvaghosa, Nagarjuna, and Aryadeva particularly attractive because while their Indian origins lent them authority, they were, like the Chinese who peered down the well of history at them, living in a time without a Buddha and thus faced a dilemma not so dissimilar from the predicament in which medieval Chinese found themselves. Unlike the arhats, who experienced Shakyamuni’s ministry first-hand, and unlike the celestial bodhisattvas, who were not bound by history, these three Indian patriarchs occupied a temporal position between Shakyamuni’s India and medieval China. In addition, as Young shows, the Chinese attributed qualities to and highlighted aspects of these Indian patriarchs that were in accord with the values of Chinese literati, Buddhist and otherwise. In so doing, the Chinese rendered the Indian patriarchs familiar and made them into models that Chinese literati could realistically and willingly emulate.This point is related to another theme linking the chapters together: the Chinese Buddhist appropriation of Indian Buddhist and Chinese religious elements so as to claim them as their own. Young notes, however, that even as the patriarchs developed into models to be emulated, they were also transformed into objects of veneration. Besides being scholarly-types who sat around writing doctrinal treatises, Nagarjuna came to be associated with Pure Land thought and practice (and even had his own pure land, according to some,) and was worshipped for his apotropaic powers and ability to provide this-worldly benefits, while Asvaghosa became a silkworm deity and served as the protagonist in myths that provided a Buddhist justification for the killing of silkworms, to give but a few examples. And in a final chapter, Young shows how Buddhists co-opted Chinese conceptions of sanctity and sainthood so as to show that these qualities that were in reality of Chinese provenance were in fact Indian and Buddhist through-and-though. Readers will thus learn not only the details of Asvaghosa, Nagarjuna, and Aryadeva’s Chinese careers over a five-and-a-half-century period, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Two new books have recently been published that will change the way we can study and teach Tibetan studies, and Gray Tuttle and Kurtis Schaeffer were kind enough to talk with me recently about them. The Tibetan History Reader (Columbia University Press, 2013), edited by Tuttle and Schaeffer, is a chronologically-organized set of essays that collectively introduce key topics and themes in Tibetan history from prehistory all the way through the twentieth century. It collects and in some cases excerpts key works in Tibetan political, social, and cultural history from the last three decades that were originally published elsewhere, making them accessible in a new way. Sources of Tibetan Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2013), edited by Tuttle, Schaeffer, and Matthew T. Kapstein, collects translations of key works in Tibetan literature, including more than 180 selections from a wide range of genres and forms from medieval Tibetan empire through modernity. Both texts will be on my bookshelf for many years to come: they are exceptionally useful not only for research, but also for teaching a wide range of courses in East Asian history, religious history, diaspora history, and literary studies, to name just a few fields that these texts contribute to. Historians of medicine and science, take note! The Sources volume especially contains some great work that’s assignable in global science/medicine courses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

In Archaeology of Tibetan Books (Brill, 2014), Agnieszka Helman-Wazny explores the varieties of artistic expression, materials, and tools that have shaped Tibetan books over the millennia. Digging into the history of the bookmaking craft, the author approaches these ancient texts primarily through the lens of their artistry, while simultaneously showing them as physical objects embedded in pragmatic, economic, and social frameworks. She provides analyses of several significant Tibetan books which usually carry Buddhist teachings including a selection of manuscripts from Dunhuang from the 1st millennium C.E., examples of illuminated manuscripts from Western and Central Tibet dating from the 15th century, and fragments of printed Tibetan Kanjurs from as early as 1410. This detailed study of bookmaking sheds new light on the books’ philosophical meanings.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Tanya Storch‘s recent book, The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka (Cambria, 2014), focuses on the development of Chinese Buddhist catalogs from their first appearance in the third century to the eighth century, when printed editions of the canon took over the catalog’s role of identifying and delimiting the Chinese Buddhist canon. Storch has written this work with two goals in mind, which correspond to two different audiences she is targeting. On the one hand, she aims to present the first-ever English-language overview of Chinese Buddhist bibliography, a feat she accomplishes through an examination of catalogs in their chronological order of appearance (chapters 2-5). Along the way she highlights a number of important points and developments: the way in which Sengyou (445-518) was indebted to earlier catalogs other than Daoan’s, Buddhist appropriation of the organizing principles used in catalogs of Confucian texts, the unprecedented production of catalogs of Buddhist texts during the short-lived Sui dynasty (581-618), the growth of the sutra section of the canon and simultaneous shrinking of the Vinaya section, and the reasons for the eventual decline of the catalog’s authority, to name but a few to name but a few of the issues that Storch addresses. The extraordinary number of names of people and texts appearing in these chapters would be overwhelming for readers not prepared for such detail were it not for the tables that Storch has thoughtfully included at the end of each of these four chapters, in which she lays out the contents and structure of the various catalogs discussed therein. This is in addition to a very helpful seventeen-page table appended to the end of the book that provides in table format an overview of the first five centuries of Chinese Buddhist bibliography. Storch’s second goal is to make Chinese Buddhist bibliography accessible to non-specialists. Because discussions of the Chinese Buddhist canon are written in Japanese or Chinese, or, if in a Western language, they are written for other Sinologists or scholars of Chinese Buddhism, the Chinese Buddhist canon has been consistently absent from academic treatments of canon formation and sacred scripture in comparative perspective. (Incidentally, scholarship on the corpus of Confucian classics has been more accessible, and thus this body of texts has not suffered the same fate.) Lamenting this fact, Storch hopes to make the Chinese tripikakaa “household name.” To this end, she devotes chapter 7 to a comparison of the Chinese canon and Chinese Buddhist canonical authority to the development of the New Testament and Hellenistic catalogs of texts. She considers, for example, the way in which both Chinese catalogers and those attempting to delimit the boundaries of the New Testament both attempted to verify the authenticity of a given text by verifying the authenticity of the transmitter of that text, the transmitter being the translator in the case of Chinese Buddhism and the apostle in the case of the New Testament. In this way, Storch’s book will be of great value not only to those attempting to understand the notions of canon, orthodoxy, and religious authority in the context of Chinese Buddhism (and Chinese textual culture more generally) but also to those examining these concepts in cross cultural perspective, particularly with regard to the past evaluations of sacred scripture and corpora of such texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

In Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (University of Hawaii Press, 2014), Alicia Turner tells the story of how Burmese Buddhists reimagined their lives, their religious practice and politics in the period of 1890 to 1920, following the fall of Mandalay to the British. Whereas many histories narrate the modern anti-colonial struggle in Burma from the 1920s onwards, Turner shows how in the preceding decades Buddhists were working to navigate, explain and respond to rapidly changing conditions through familiar tropes of Buddhist decline and revival, often for new and innovative purposes, and with unfamiliar consequences. By juxtaposing the dynamic Buddhist concept of sasana with the bureaucratic colonial category of “religion” she explains how projects to bring Buddhist practice into alignment with colonial government failed and how new types of conflict emerged, and with them, new identity politics and interest groups. “Turner’s book not only contributes to the study of religious transformations in mainland Southeast Asia but makes substantial contributions to larger scholarly conversations on Buddhist modernities and comparative colonialism,” Anne Hansen writes. “It will be required reading for everyone in the growing field of Theravada Studies.” Saving Buddhism also recommends itself to anyone following what is going on in Burma, or Myanmar, today, since the “modes of mobilization and collective belonging” it describes help us to understand how people continue to act in defence of sasana there, and why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

In India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), eleven scholars (including editors John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar) examine the Chinese reception of Indian ideas and myth, and address Chinese attempts to recreate India within the central kingdom. Beginning with Victor Mair’s argument that it was Buddhist theories about reality that allowed fiction to flourish in China, and ending with Stephen R. Bokenkamp’s study of celestial scripts that Daoists created in response to the appearance of Sanskrit script in China, the volume focuses primarily on the fourth to tenth centuries but addresses dynamics that were at play both before and after this six-century period. While many previous studies that address the impact of India on China do so by focusing on the Chinese transformation of Buddhism and on the degree to which Chinese Buddhism retained this or that Indian feature, this volume differs in that it looks at the influence of Indian thought (particularly religious thought and myths) beyond the confines of Buddhism proper. Meir Shahar and Bernard Faure’s respective contributions are good examples of this, as they demonstrate that some of the Indian deities and demons who came to China with Tantric Buddhism exchanged their Buddhist robes for Daoist ones, or escaped into the wider world of Chinese religious thought and practice.  Another central theme of the book is the way in which Chinese turned to Indian models for religious and political ends, or, in other cases, attempted to recreate India within China. In addition to the aforementioned scholars, the volume contains chapters by Yamabe Nobuyoshi, Ye Derong, the late John R. McRae, Robert H. Sharf, and Christine Mollier.  This book will be of particular interest to those wanting to learn more about Indian myth in East Asia, the Chinese reception of Indian ideas and symbols, the interaction between Daoism and Buddhism, the adapting of Buddhist monasticism to Chinese familial organization, Bodhidharma, the influence of Buddhism on Chinese literature, and the Chinese response to Buddhist doctrinal dilemmas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

In Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011), Charlotte Eubanks examines the relationship between Mahāyāna Buddhist sÅ«tras and the human body, using Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) as a lens through which to understand this particular aspect of Buddhist textual culture and the way in which text and body are not as separate as we usually assume.  Two of the questions she wants to answer are “What do sÅ«tras want?” and “What do sÅ«tras get?”  She examines Buddhist scriptures of continental origin to answer the former, while she turns to Japanese tale literature (setsuwa) to answer the latter. Two ideas central to the book are that bodies can become texts, and that texts can become bodies.  Concerning the first, through reciting, reproducing, and in some sense embodying a sutra, an individual can in effect turn his or her body into the text itself (a result that the sÅ«tras themselves encourage through various admonishments, a move that can be seen as their own quest for survival). As for the second–the idea that texts can become bodies–Eubanks shows that in the Japanese context sÅ«tras literary materialize, becoming independent actors in their own right. While it was largely through setsuwa and other such filters that medieval Japanese understood Buddhist scripture, the ease with which sÅ«tras and bodies moved back and forth along what Eubanks terms “the text-flesh continuum” was dependent upon Mahāyāna sÅ«tras’ concealment of their authorship.  Indeed, certain sÅ«tras went so far as to suggest that their origins are to be found prior to the Buddha himself, the figure who in traditional Buddhism would have been considered the author of these texts.  This move allowed Mahāyāna sÅ«tras to claim agency for themselves, and thus for Japanese setsuwa to later depict sÅ«tras as willful, motivated actors rather than mere containers for the teachings of the Buddha. Besides using setsuwa as a source for understanding the Japanese reception of Buddhist sÅ«tras, Eubanks examines the prefaces and colophons of setsuwa collections in order to understand how the compilers or authors of these tales intended this didactic literature to interact with human bodies (e.g., as food or medicine), showing that in the ideal relationship between setsuwa and reader/listener, the latter not only received ideas and ethical norms but also came to embody (both literally and figuratively) those very ideas and norms. Beside being rewarded with a stimulating reinterpretation of the way in which sÅ«tras and setsuwa make their messages heard and felt, the reader will be treated to a plethora of fascinating accounts from nine medieval setsuwa collections.  In addition, Eubanks addresses gender at various points throughout the work, showing how Japanese and non-Japanese scholars alike have treated this genre as an erotic object, and the way in which setsuwa were conceived by their own authors and compilers as elderly female matchmakers (to give but two examples).  And in the final chapter Eubanks discusses the relationship between material form and the practice of reading, seeking to understand the development of the revolving sÅ«tra library and the persistence of the scroll in East Asian Buddhism long after the codex has come into use. This book will be of particular interest to those researching medieval Japanese Buddhism, Mahāyāna sÅ«tras as a genre, setsuwa, Buddhist textual culture, gender symbolism in Japanese Buddhism, medieval traditions of preaching and proselytization, and the body in religious thought and practice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

In his recent book, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (Columbia University Press, 2013), R. Keller Kimbrough provides us with eight beautifully translated sekkyō and ko-jōruri. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Erik Braun‘s recent book, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013), examines the spread of Burmese Buddhist meditation practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the social, political, and intellectual historical contexts that gave rise to this development. Braun accomplishes this by focusing on the role that the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923) played in this movement, drawing primarily on Ledi Sayadaw’s own writings, three biographies, polemical responses to Ledi Sayadaw’s writings, and contemporaneous periodicals. Central to the book is the importance of the Abhidhamma (Buddhist metaphysics or psychology) in Burmese Buddhist monasticism and, more specifically, the way in which Ledi Sayadaw spread the study of the Abhidhamma among the laity and used it as the foundation for insight meditation. In contrast to many recent proponents of insight meditation (both Asian and not), who emphasize technique at the expense of study and theory, Ledi Sayadaw saw insight meditation and study of the Abhidhamma as an inseparable pair, with the latter serving as a basis for the former. Braun places Ledi Sayadaw’s approach in the larger context of Buddhist and Burmese theories about meditation, exploring the different views on the relationships among samatha (concentration meditation), the jhanas (stages of meditative absorption), insight meditation as direct awareness of sensory and mental experience, and insight meditation as discursive thinking informed by Abhidhammic categories. Exploring the cultural milieu of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Burma, Braun demonstrates that Ledi Sayadaw exhibits characteristics that we would regard as traditional (e.g., the importance he grants to literary competence, his belief in Buddhist cosmology) as well as those we might think of as modern (e.g., his charismatic style of preaching, his focus on the laity). In addition, as opposed to Buddhist reformers who argued that Buddhism was in fact applicable to and accorded with modernity (being synonymous with the West, in most such cases), Ledi Sayadaw flipped this relationship on its head by asserting that modernity (e.g., Western science) was in agreement with Buddhism. In so doing he avoided the usual contradictions between Buddhism and modernity but without apparently compromising the Buddhist worldview in the process. Braun places Ledi Sayadaw’s thoughts on these matters in the larger historical context of colonialism: Burma was annexed by the British (in three stages: 1826, 1852, 1886) and many Burmese believed that Buddhism’s final days were nigh. Ledi Sayadaw’s theories, then, were in part a response to a new environment in which Buddhist monks were losing their traditional position as educators, and in which the age-old relationship between the sa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

Jacob Dalton‘s recent book, The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (Yale University Press, 2011), examines violence (both symbolic and otherwise) in Tibetan Buddhism. Dalton focuses in particular on the age of fragmentation (here 842-986 CE), and draws on previously unexamined Dunhuang manuscripts to show that this period was one of great creativity and innovation, and a time when violent myths and rituals were instrumental in adapting Buddhism to local interests, thereby allowing Buddhism to firmly establish itself in Tibet. While much twentieth-century scholarship faithfully followed Tibetan historiography’s assertion that the age of fragmentation was a dark time during which the light of Buddhism faded completely, Dalton not only confirms that Buddhism continued throughout this period, but also looks to the Dunhuang materials to show that it was in fact the age-of-fragmentation narratives of demon taming that laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new, pan-Tibetan Buddhist identity beginning in the eleventh century. Central to Dalton’s project are a myth and a ritual. The myth is that of the subjugation of the demoness Rudra, in which a compassionate but wrathful Buddhist deity violently defeats the wild Rudra, using a means that Buddhism condemns (violence) and yet is used as a force for good in this case. This narrative encapsulates a theme that runs throughout the book: the Buddhist ambivalence towards violence, an ambivalence present in the tradition from its earliest days but which found its fullest expression in Tantric Buddhism. The ritual, on the other hand, is the so-called liberation ritual, in which a victim–usually an effigy is prescribed–is ritually murdered and then purified. Dalton focuses in particular on a Dunhaung ritual manual, which, incidentally, makes no mention of an effigy, thus leaving some doubt as whether or not the manual intends an actual human victim. This rite and the story of Rudra constitute a pair of sorts, and together served as a theoretical, historical, mythic, and practical model whereby the native, evil demons of Tibet could be tamed (i.e., ritually murdered and purified) and employed in the service of Buddhism. Dalton also demonstrates how the themes of violence and demon taming continued beyond the age of fragmentation. For example, a composite work called the Pillar Testament (late-eleventh to mid-twelfth c.) contains a legend in which the seventh-century king Songtsen Gampo had to subjugate the land of Tibet–envisioned as (and thus identified as none other than) a huge rāká¹£asÄ« demoness lying on her back–by pinning this demoness down with thirteen temples. In this way the legend carries the model of demon subjugation that was used at the local level during the age of fragmentation to a national level during the second imperial period. Later on, as Tibetans ceased to think of their own evil nature and autochthonous demons as the greatest threat to Buddhism and instead shifted their attention to peoples and powers at the periphery of their realm, the same model of demon subjugation was applied, with Tibet’s perceived enemies (particularly the Mongols) taking the role of sacrificial victim. The book’s content is wide ranging yet skillfully woven together through the dual themes of violence and liberation (i.e., demon subjugation).  Along the way we hear about the differences between Chinese and Tibetan receptions of Buddhist scriptural attitudes toward violence, Padmasambhava as a demon tamer, the Indian Kālikā Purāṇa, King Yeshe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies