In their introduction to India in the Chinese Imagination, the editors point out that the book attempts to underscore three aspects of the “Indo-China encounter.” First, it seeks to examine the “impact of Indian religion and literature on the Chinese creative imagination.” Second, it offers a detailed analysis of the “Chinese imagination of India.” And third, it explores the ways in which the Chinese recreated India within China's own borders (p. 2). The ten skillfully written chapters that follow, each penned by a well-known scholar in the field, address these aspects from different perspectives. But Buddhism and Buddhist paraphernalia, including texts and images, are the main units of analysis for every contributor.

The first chapter, by Victor H. Mair, outlines the influences of Buddhism in the creation of literary narratives and other imaginative genres in China. Mair argues that the idea of “transformational manifestation,” used in Buddhist texts as a “trope” for the Buddha to display his transcendental powers (p. 16), enabled the narrators of stories “to imagine the change of anything into anything else” (p. 20). According to Mair, this idea from the Six Dynasties period onwards started having tremendous impact on Chinese fiction writing and storytelling.

The next three chapters focus on the spread of Brahmanical elements to China. Meir Shahar examines the emergence of the popular fiendish divinity called Nezha in the Chinese religious tradition. Nezha, he argues, developed as a result of the mixing of lore and ideas transmitted from India and those existing locally. Noteworthy in Shahar's study is the discussion of the possible influence of the child Kṛṣṇa on the origin of Nezha, whose images appear on columns that belonged to a Brahmanical temple in Quanzhou, Fujian Province. Tamil traders who settled in this flourishing Chinese port during the eleventh and twelfth centuries are known to have built this temple. Bernard Faure's chapter studies the spread of the Yama cult in China, which he attributes to the intention of Buddhist practitioners to induce fear among the Chinese populace about karmic retribution and to “strengthen their hold on Chinese society” (p. 60). Focusing on the deity Maheśvara (commonly known as Śiva), Nobuyoshi Yamabe examines the depiction of phallic symbolism, referred to as the “Buddha's hidden male organ,” in the Chinese Buddhist text called Guanfo sanmei hai jing (Sūtra on the ocean-like samādhi of the visualization of the Buddha). Yamabe argues that Saivite phallicism might have reached China in modified and Buddhicized form.

The chapters by Shi Zhiru, Ye Derong, and John R. McRae deal with three other important elements of ancient India-China interactions. Shi examines the veneration of relics and the “re-materialization” of the Aśoka myth of constructing 84,000 stūpas during the reign of Qian Chu (r. 947–78) of the Wu Yue Kingdom (907–78). The main aim of the essay is to demonstrate how new wealth, trade, and technology in southeast China during the tenth century shaped the Chinese imagination of Indian kingship. Ye's chapter focuses on the issue of Chinese monasticism, examining in particular the case of Shaolin Temple, as a way to explore the Chinese transformation of Buddhism. McRae's insightful contribution analyzes the earliest accounts of the monk Bodhidharma in order to explain the formation of Chan ideology in China.

The rejection of certain aspects of Indic practices and beliefs and the struggle to reconcile other elements with concepts and ideas that were not easily compatible within the Chinese setting are the themes of the final three chapters of the book. While Robert H. Sharf illustrates the lack of interest among the Chinese Buddhists in the vigorous debates on existential issues taking place in India, Christine Mollier examines the Chinese (especially Daoist) dilemma over the idea of karmic causality, and Stephen R. Bokenkamp explores the ways in which the Chinese tried to deal with unfamiliar Indian scripts. The three chapters are important contributions for understanding the complexities of the ancient encounters between these two very distinct cultural zones. They clearly demonstrate that it was through a process of picking and choosing that one cultural zone created a unique and imagined perception of the other.

Although the chapters do not focus on the broader topics of historical interactions between ancient India and China, some of these are aptly highlighted in the introduction. One aspect of these is that direct contacts between the two regions were actually very limited. While the introduction also notes the predicaments of employing the terms “India” and “China” for the pre-twentieth-century period, the issue might have been explored in further detail both there and in some of the chapters. The problem lies not only in terms of territorial demarcations, as the current geopolitical contours of India and China did not exist prior to the twentieth century, but also in the cultural spheres, as members of several ethnic groups that are now divided between these two regions had their own distinctive contributions to the story. Nonetheless, this book is a major contribution to the study of intra-Asian connections, specifically on the role that transmission and transformation of ideas as well as the imagination of foreign lands played in shaping such linkages.