French sinology has a long and illustrious history of contributions to the field that is increasingly overlooked in North America. Whereas a generation or two ago, almost any stateside sinologist worked with a toolkit of European languages and Japanese in addition to literary and modern Chinese, polyglot scholars of that order are in short supply nowadays. French and German sinologists—formerly the guard dogs of longtime bastions of linguistic protectionism—have laudably taken initiative in countering this balkanizing trend; in an effort to integrate globalized academia, they now routinely produce books and articles in English. But every once in a while, a small gem is published in a language other than English, thereby running the risk of being ignored by a large segment of its potential readership. Vincent Durand-Dastès's edited volume, Empreintes du Tantrisme en Chine et Asie Orientale (Traces of Tantrism in China and East Asia), is one such gem.

The twelve essays that make up the volume consider the impact of Tantrism on various aspects of Chinese or East Asian culture and history, excluding Buddhism strictu sensu. It is precisely because of its broader scope that the contested term “Tantrism,” albeit problematic as Durand-Dastès concedes in the introduction (pp. 4–5), is preferred over the more consensual “esoteric Buddhism.” Nevertheless, despite the phenomenon's diffuse nature and the broad spectrum of areas in which it manifests, the authors of the essays adhere to a network of core elements that enables them to identify certain data as “Tantric” (p. 3).

The individual essays are divided into three sections. The first one, titled “Imaginaries,” concentrates on painting and literature in late imperial China. Carolyn Gyss, a historian of religious art in China, provides an insightful analysis of Tantric iconography in “Purification of Water and Land” paintings. Durand-Dastès's chapter looks at esoteric themes in the novels of the Ming and Qing. His contribution stands out in that it adroitly and eloquently addresses a topic that is seldom studied; it opens a fascinating window onto vernacular readings of Tantric rituals and notions, where caricatural feats of magic, overstated martial imagery, and excessive passions are the norm. The last essay in the section is authored by Meir Shahar, with whom English readers may be more familiar from his recent monograph on Nezha.Footnote ¹ It traces the imbrication of the Indian mythology pertaining to Nalakūbara and Kṛṣṇa and elements from Chinese esoteric Buddhism in the creation of the popular child-god Nezha's myth.

The second section of the volume, dealing with rituals, opens with Liu Hong's examination of how the Tantric Dhāranī of Great Compassion spread to various nonsectarian strata of Song society, and how lay users employed it for therapeutic, apotropaic, or other ends.Footnote ² The subsequent chapter, by Esther Bianchi, is the only one that is written in English. It is also the only strictly buddhological study, consisting of a meticulous textual history of Song and Yuan dynasty Chinese translations of the Chanting of the Names of Mañjuśri, an Indian Tantra that has enjoyed newfound popularity in contemporary China. As an interesting counterweight to the positions of other scholars in the volume, Bianchi maintains that, for large parts of its history in China, Tantrism may have been less impactful than it is sometimes argued. Brigitte Baptandier's ethnographic exposition of mūdras in the contemporary practices of the Lüshan lineage of ritual masters (fashi) closes the section. The lineage, which traces its roots to Song dynasty Daoism, integrates a number of tantric elements in addition to mūdras—maṇḍalas for example, and perhaps most saliently, the understanding of the officiant's body as an animated altar together with the view of the rituals’ beneficiaries as living icons.

The third and final section of the volume, “Counterpoints,” focuses more squarely on esoteric Buddhism instead of its traces, but it does so beyond the boundaries of China, namely in Japan and Korea. François Macé’s chapter offers a broad thematic and chronological survey of Japanese esotericism in the space of a few rich pages, underlining the paradox of the purportedly secret tradition's ubiquity on the archipelago. Yannick Bruneton supplies a ninety-page, erudite analysis of esotericism during the Koryǒ period (918–1392). He argues for the existence of a noninstitutional group of ritual specialists serving the state that developed around the writings of Tosǒn, blending Buddhism and divinatory techniques and drawing inspiration from the Tang dynasty Chinese monk Yixing. This chapter sheds light on the understudied subject of esoteric Buddhism in medieval Korea. At the same time, it also challenges the convention of identifying esoteric Buddhism on the basis of institutional forms such as official “schools” (zong 宗) or “lineages” (pai 派), a model that is suited to the case of Japan alone.

Empreintes du Tantrisme en Chine et en Asie Orientale also has a robust references section with a handy bibliography of primary and secondary sources, a detailed index of technical terms and proper nouns, a copious (almost forty-page) collection of illustrations—many of them in color—and a succinct but very useful bibliographic essay by Durand-Dastès on the resurgence of the study of Chinese esoteric Buddhism between 1990 and 2010. The late Michel Strickmann is mentioned throughout the volume, which is dedicated to him, but the significance of his contributions (such as the seminal Mantras et Mandarins, yet to be translated into English) is deservingly underscored in this essay.

Some readers might take issue with the loose sense of cohesion among the chapters and the eclectic range of the materials under discussion, but others will surely see such breadth as one of the volume's strengths. With the exception of Bianchi, all contributors to the volume are non-buddhologists, joining together from such diverse sister fields as Chinese literature, art history, and Japanese religions around the common theme of Tantric imprints. Empreintes du Tantrisme en Chine et en Asie Orientale may not overturn paradigms in the study of esoteric Buddhism or fundamentally redefine it, but it certainly does contribute an indispensable panorama on how non-buddhologists view the topic. Moreover, it offers a crucial perspective on European scholarship at a time when bridge-building should be favored over entrenchment.