James M. Hargett's work adds rich layers to our understanding of one of China's most important sacred sites. Mount Emei, located south of Chengdu in Sichuan, is one of the Four Great Famous Buddhist Mountains in China (四大名山). It is associated with the bodhisattva Puxian (Samantabhadra). While other Buddhist peaks, particularly Mount Wutai and Mount Putuo, have been the subject of recent studies in English, Emei has been relatively neglected. Hargett's analysis centers on literary accounts of Emei from the Tang and especially the Song. Several chapters follow the travels of the Southern Song scholar and official Fan Chengda (范成大, 1126–93) up the mountain's slopes, drawing from Fan's poetry and his famous travelogue Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (吳船錄).
Hargett acknowledges debts to two key works on Chinese mountains: Edouard Chavannes's Le Tai chan (Paris: E. Leroux, 1910) and Edward Schafer's Mao Shan in T'ang Times (Boulder, Colo.: Society for the Study of Chinese Religions, 1989). Hargett, like these earlier scholars, uses a variety of sources to examine multiple layers of meanings on Emei. One of Hargett's overall conclusions about Emei is that “the development or evolution of the mountain and its relation with humans over time [is] a dynamic rather than a static process” (p. 6). Although Chavannes and Schafer came to essentially the same conclusion, Hargett adds to our understanding by demonstrating how this concept applies specifically to Emei.
Hargett's many translations of key sources about the mountain, particularly from the Tang, Song, and Ming, are an important contribution of the book. Based on these sources, as well as works on other Buddhist peaks (particularly Raoul Birnbaum on Mount Wutai and Chün-fang Yü on Mount Putuo), Hargett outlines how these mountains became important sites for Chinese Buddhism (pp. 160–61). Hargett demonstrates that Wutai was almost certainly the first mountain to follow this pattern. He argues that Emei was next, and that some of the authors who moved this process along consciously used Wutai as a model. Putuo followed. Eventually, Jiuhua became the fourth of the Four Great Famous Buddhist Mountains in the seventeenth century.
The author's strengths as a translator and his ability to unpack meanings in Fan's travelogue and poetry come to the fore in chapters 5–7. Particularly impressive is Hargett's analysis of Fan's long poem about his religious epiphany on the mountain's summit (pp. 126–32). Hargett demonstrates that the poem can be seen as a Chan gong'an (Japanese, kōan). The analysis of this poem, however, also highlights a shortcoming of this book. Hargett's presentation would have been stronger overall with more direct interaction with the secondary literature. For example, he notes two other translations of this poem into English but does not provide sustained analysis of how and why his translation differs. While he does include the translations of the final couplet from the other two translations, it is only as a footnote. In addition, Hargett does not engage the Chinese secondary literature on Fan. Greater discussion and critique of secondary literature in various genres would have enriched the analysis and highlighted more clearly Hargett's contributions to a variety of fields. For example, while he quotes from Mark Halperin's book, Out of the Cloister: Literati Perspectives on Buddhism in Sung China, 960–1279 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006) in a section heading (p. 92), he does not engage this work to provide wider context for Fan's faith.
Hargett's important contributions to studies of Song literature, elite involvement in Buddhism, and Chinese sacred sites would have been clearer and more forceful with a different organizational structure. The heart of this work lies in its analysis of Fan's writings. Yet Fan's actual ascent up Emei begins on page 104. Much prior material could have been streamlined or cut. For example, pages 48–60 follow Fan's travels before his arrival at Emei. A section on the history of Buddhism in Sichuan (pp. 78–85) could have been greatly condensed, yet an in-depth discussion of the history and significance of Chinese worship of Puxian, the primary deity worshipped at Emei, is lacking. Hargett attempts to continue the history of Emei after the Song until the present in a single chapter. The section on the Ming is fairly detailed. Because Hargett uses a number of key Ming sources, it makes sense to include this in the book, but more depth would have been constructive. While I sympathize with the desire to bring the history of the mountain up to the present, the section from the Qing to the present is so terse (15 pages) as to make its inclusion of questionable merit.
