In his 2008 work “Enlightenment in Dispute”, Jiang Wu presented a thought-provoking discussion of the renaissance, or as he himself aptly describes it, the reinvention of Chan Buddhism at the hands of monks such as Miyun Yuanwu (1566–1642) and Feiyin Tongrong (1593–1662) in the late Ming (1368–1644). At the heart of this revival was a quest for recovering the “authentic” Chan of the past by establishing orthodox lineages of succession through a reform of Dharma transmission practices. In the work here under review, Wu returns to this problem of authenticity and positions it in the wider context of the geopolitical and intellectual transformation of East Asia after the fall of the Ming, as exemplified by the life of Chinese Chan master Yinyuan Longqi (1592–1673), perhaps better known under the Japanese reading of his name, Ingen Ryūki, as the founder of the Japanese Ōbaku school of Zen.

Yinyuan studied under Miyun and inherited the Dharma from Feiyin. He shared his teachers' concern with genuine enlightenment properly certified through succession to a correct lineage. As Wu shows, Yinyuan's claim to be representing the “Authentic Transmission of the Linji” line of Chan Buddhism and the ways in which this claim was understood and manipulated by others, especially in Japan, are pivotal in understanding Yinyuan's career and his crowning achievement of establishing the Ōbaku tradition at Manpukuji near Kyōto. Wu opens his account with a brief sketch of Yinyuan's life before coming to Japan in 1654 in the context of the late Ming revival of Chan (Chapter 1) and continues with a close examination of the fortunes of the monastery of Mount Huangbo, over which Yinyuan presided as abbot from 1637 until his departure (Chapter 2). Wu pays close attention to the reform of Dharma transmission and its institutionalization in the form of “Dharma transmission monasteries”, the abbotships of which were restricted to members of a single lineage. As Wu notes, this newly stringent approach to transmission served not only as the model upon which Manpukuji would be established, but also inspired Japanese Zen monks to question and revitalize their own transmission practices, most notably in the Sōtō school. Finally, Wu offers an account of the wider background of Yinyuan's journey to Japan (Chapter 3), emphasizing the master's sympathies towards Ming dynasty loyalists and critically examining his relationship with the anti-Qing general Zheng Chengong (1624–1662). Some of the material presented in these opening discussions, especially regarding the Buddhist revival and the reform of Dharma transmission, feels familiar from Wu's earlier work, but it forms the indispensable background to the argument he is about to make.

Wu's main argument opens once he turns to Yinyuan's career in Japan, and it is in this context that the book offers some of its most important insights. The stage for Wu's presentation is set by the downfall of the Ming, the last dynasty to be ruled by Han Chinese, and its replacement by the “barbarian” Qing. This transition prompted a civilizational upheaval, which Wu dubs the “authenticity crisis” (p. 243). Until then, China had been the uncontested East Asian cultural and political hegemon by virtue of representing “civilization” as such. The barbarian defeat of the Ming raised the question where, after the fall of the “Central kingdom”, “authentic civilization” was to be found. In this “decentralized” world, nations such as Japan began to envision new world orders in which they themselves occupied the “central” position. It was in this time of newly fluid identities in search of legitimacy that Yinyuan set sail to Japan.

Wu discusses Japanese perceptions and uses of Yinyuan as a symbol of authenticity in two contexts, firstly the military dictatorship's (J. bakufu) attempt at constructing a (largely imaginary) geopolitical order (Chapter 4) and secondly the renegotiation of “Japanese identity” in Tokugawa discourse (Chapter 6). Among these, Wu's treatment of the diplomatic significance of Yinyuan and Manpukuji is outstanding. Wu argues that Yinyuan's significance must be understood in the context of the bakufu's attempts to create a tributary system. Previous research on the geopolitical strategy of the bakufu has mainly ignored the issue of Chinese monks, and Wu makes a strong case that this is a serious oversight. His treatment of Yinyuan's political role sees the bakufu as exploiting Yinyuan's “authenticity value” and loyalist connections by framing his presence in Japan as a symbolical tribute mission from China. Wu adduces a wealth of arguments to support his case, including Yinyuan's arrival in Ōsaka coinciding with that of an actual Korean tribute mission; the ritual protocol of Yinyuan's audience with the shōgun casting the monk in the role of a representative of a foreign nation paying obedience; and finally the bakufu's demand that only Chinese monks become abbots of Manpukuji and be present, as was expected of other tributaries, at the ascension of a new shōgun, which institutionalized their function as imaginary and domesticated Chinese tributaries. Each of these observations is deserving of future research, yet as Wu himself occasionally admits (pp. 117, 124), some of his evidence is open to interpretation and I, for one, have found his discussion persuasive but not conclusive.

The bakufu's use of Yinyuan depended on his being accepted as a legitimate symbol of the Chan and, through his accomplishment in arts such as poetry and calligraphy, the Chinese cultural ideal. Wu complements his account of Yinyuan's diplomatic role with a discussion of how the master, or rather the form of “authenticity” he represented, was received in Tokugawa intellectual circles (Chapter 6). Wu sketches the thought of Mukai Genshō (1609–1677) and Yamaga Sokō (1622–1685), who both criticized Yinyuan, as well as that of the Sōtō priest Dokuan Genkō (1630–1698) and the scholar Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), who regarded the Chinese monk in a positive light. While each sketch is worthy of notice, it remains unclear exactly how, if at all, the intellectual reception of Yinyuan affected the use he was made of by the bakufu, and consequently how this discussion fits with the preceding analysis.

This is also true of a section in which Wu discusses Yinyuan as an eclectic teacher of Buddhism, as a literary man and as a thaumaturge, especially a diviner. While particularly the last aspect of the Chinese master has hitherto not received enough attention, it is not always apparent what each portrait contributes to the overall discussion. For example, Wu makes much of pitching Yinyuan's eclectic and “syncretic” (p. 141) practice against his “rhetorical stance” (p. 151) of purity. Yet recent scholarship on Chan and Zen, including Wu's own, has made clear that these traditions have been eclectic and syncretic since their inception. It would have been interesting to see an analysis of the tension between Yinyuan's practical eclecticism and his role as symbol of authenticity, yet unfortunately Wu does not attempt one. Finally, the Conclusion provides a useful overview of the “authenticity crisis” which frames Wu's argument, contextualizing it in both Korean and Japanese developments, but Yinyuan hardly features, and a discussion positioning him in this broader context would have been welcome earlier on. Overall, the second part of the book, which also sees an increase in typos, misses the careful integration of arguments which makes the first such a compelling account.

This monograph is a worthy successor to Wu's previous work and sheds much new light on the career of the important seventeenth-century master Yinyuan. It goes significantly beyond accounts such as Helen Baroni's, which treats the rising Ōbaku tradition in an almost exclusively Japanese context, and instead offers a nuanced discussion of Yinyuan against the backdrop of a pan-Asian crisis.