Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s From Stone to Flesh is a simultaneously fascinating and frustrating book that aims to describe “the Western encounter with the Buddha, beginning in antiquity a mere two thousand years ago and ending in the nineteenth century” (p. 2). The book offers an engaging history of the figure of the Buddha that manages to be at once learned and accessible. It could profitably be read alongside Lopez's recently published Terry Lectures on the “scientific Buddha”Footnote ⁹ and recent work by Urs App, including The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and The Cult of Emptiness (Rorschach, Switzerland: UniversityMedia, 2012).

The erudition on display in From Stone to Flesh is nothing short of remarkable, though the way in which it is displayed is somewhat disappointing. Much of the book consists of lengthy quotations—some running as long as five pages—that provide an opportunity to directly encounter “the heavily accented voices of the distant past and . . . to hear them somehow as our own” (p. 6). Lopez is to be thanked for undertaking the painstaking work of collecting these quotations, but the presentation invites confusion. The book's editors (and/or Lopez himself) have opted to forego quotation marks or any easily discernible shift in margin, font style, or font size to set off quotations from the main text. Perhaps this is meant as a way of underlining the point that we cannot neatly distinguish the voices of contemporary Buddhist studies scholars from their—our—forebears. Unfortunately, the layout choice virtually ensures that inattentive readers will misidentify the author of a quoted passage as Lopez himself, and speaks against adoption of the book in the undergraduate classroom. So, too, does Lopez's decision to occasionally adopt a tone of winking disingenuousness. The book's opening sentences read:

As Lopez knows, each of these sentences is problematic. While specialists are likely to read them as they were presumably intended—that is, as expressing commonly shared assumptions regarding the referent of the term “Buddhism”—it is all too easy to imagine today's undergraduate students adducing them as support for their own unexamined views.

Beyond such pedagogical concerns, the book also intermittently manifests some surprisingly doctrinaire tendencies. So, for example, having noted various points of “inaccuracy” (p. 95) in the “mixed-up” (p. 92) and “garbled” (p. 95) accounts of the Buddha's life penned by French Jesuits who visited Thailand during the seventeenth century, Lopez goes on to surmise that such inaccuracies “may result from an inadequate grasp of Pali” (p. 95) and suggests that “the information that the French possessed appears to have been gleaned from conversation” with Thai informants (p. 95). It is easy to pass over such remarks without noticing how many contestable presuppositions appear to inform them. Whose grasp of Pali is here being branded as “inadequate”? Lopez does not say. What does the point about Pali have to do with the point about conversation? Does Lopez wish to claim that in order to understand what really happens, or happened, in the lives of a Buddha, we should eschew conversation with real-world Buddhists in favor of reading canonical texts? Why else choose to frame deviations from canon as inaccuracies, rather than as potentially valuable attestations of story variants? One of Lopez's main claims in this book appears to be that previous generations of scholars (and perhaps also Buddhists?) have at times been wrong about the Buddha. If this is right, Lopez owes it to the reader to say more about his own stance regarding the relation between the canonical and the true. Too often here, the two are conflated—a decidedly odd thing to find in a book so concerned to emphasize the vicissitudes of history.

Lopez writes well—and he is enviably, even astonishingly, prolific. In the final analysis, however, From Stone to Flesh would have benefited from a stronger editorial hand. As Lopez often eschews analysis for extended citation, his authorial voice is at times very difficult to hear over the cacophony of other voices he strives to present. Despite its problems, the book is successful in collating and presenting a rich archive of sources about which contemporary scholars of Buddhism know very little. I, for one, learned a lot in reading it.