Though nineteenth-century conceptions of comparative religion are now viewed somewhat askance for their often no more than lightly disguised Eurocentric bias, scholars are still working through some of the consequences of this false start. All too often, the world’s religious traditions are presented to students at all levels as if they were suitors in a Shakespeare play, dressed to impress so that we can make a personal choice between them. Those who study and teach European history may know better, for religion and power have been all too patently intertwined over the centuries. But less well-known traditions, like those of East Asia, have been accorded by contrast a surprising degree of innocence, as if there were some theological (or in this instance Buddhological) reason for supposing their complete divorce from secular affairs. There is none, even if there may be reasons for patterns of interaction to differ. The work under review now represents a major step towards an equal treatment of East Asian Buddhism and its relations with the powers of the past that cannot but be timely, given the rising economic forces that are thrusting believers from the region into ever increasing prominence, not least in the academic institutions of what we may loosely call the Western world. In my experience even well-educated diplomats may sometimes come across as never having considered that current policies there might owe anything to any earlier political heritage, as if the appearance of Westerners in the area reset political and legal systems de novo without the least reference to anything that may have happened before.

Slowly, however, some more useful scholarship does seem to be finding its way into print. One such example is Buddhist Statecraft in East Asia. The volume’s editors, Stephanie Balkwill and James A. Benn, do not survey the emerging field in which they work, but in their introduction to the book, they do much more than simply provide an account of what is to follow, expediently taking up the hagiography of the supposed first Buddhist monk in East Asia to illustrate the way in which a concern for statecraft has been embedded in the self-image of Buddhists in the area since the earliest times. Balkwill and Benn see the area itself, centred on China, as an important node in the wider network of Buddhist contacts across Asia, a creative hub that provided intellectual resources for many not under Chinese political control. Notions of Buddhist kingship imported from South and Inner Asia were taken up and applied to polities on the territory of former Chinese dynasties, introducing the conceptions of a Buddha who acted as supernatural guardian of the state and the establishment of a Buddhist monastic community who served his cult. This ideally entailed royal patronage of the community, but from the early days of East Asian Buddhism it was also recognised that hostile royal reactions to the community were possible, and these were allowed to have had South Asian antecedents. Furthermore, in a region influenced by earlier Chinese political thought and practice there were certainly elements that were not easily reconciled with Buddhist norms.

These general considerations are then considerably illumined by six case studies. The first, by Balkwill, looks at an early sixth-century Chinese empress dowager, her use of Buddhism, and how it was contested. Balkwill’s research here and in other publications is now indispensable for any understanding of the precedents for the much more successful regime of Wu Zetian in the late seventh century. Richard D. McBride II then shifts the focus to the Korean peninsula, where the kingdom of Silla deployed the public display and recitation of Buddhist scriptures to demonstrate the engagement of the ruler with the ideology of Buddhist guardianship of the state. Again, this analysis helps explain later events: as early as 1935, a posthumously published monograph of Marinus Willem de Visser described at length the scriptures used in public recitations in Japan in the eighth and ninth centuries with some reference to Chinese antecedents, but these continental anticipations of the practice closer to home now make the background to the Japanese rituals much clearer.Footnote ¹ With Geoffrey C. Goble, the reader is back in China, but in the second half of the eighth century, where state-appointed officials known as commissioners for merit acted as imperial agents for the promotion of Buddhist undertakings. The fact that most of these men were senior military commanders suggests strong links between the perceived ability of eminent monks to call down supernatural forces on the enemy and guarantee the security of the dynasty. The ability to utilize magic in this way was not the sole prerogative of Buddhists; rather, the title commissioner for merit is found already in the mid-eighth century Tang dynasty with reference to agents used by the emperor to undertake Daoist projects, though in this context the title seems to have referred to ad hoc commissions rather than to permanent offices.

The scene then switches to what is now Yunnan province in the southwest of China, which in the early second millennium CE was still home to a culturally and linguistically distinct polity that nevertheless had inherited some Chinese-language elements, including state-protecting Buddhism from earlier times. Through a deft use of surviving visual materials and some recently retrieved texts, Megan Bryson makes a case for seeing the royal Buddhism of this kingdom, Dali, as vying with the contemporary Chinese power for control of the Tang heritage. It may well be that other enemies of the Chinese to the north were doing likewise with their Buddhist institutions, and indeed that such tensions in part promoted the emergence in the centre of the Chinese world of new ideological forces inimical to Buddhism.

Certainly, turning again to Korea under the Yi dynasty from the late fourteenth century onward, the reader finds in the narrative of Gregory N. Evon a very different relationship between the state and the Buddhist community: the monastic community acting as agents of a non-Buddhist regime by providing military services. In the 1950s, General Gaston Renondeau published on the monk warriors of medieval Japan, and more recently Nikolas Broy has explored the existence of warrior monks in China, including the period covered by Evon.Footnote ² The Japanese case, however, relates to the protection of monastic interests, while Broy’s examination of the Chinese case, although making it clear that monastic troops were involved in government anti-piracy operations, does not uncover, as far as I can see, any direct link between monk soldiers and central government strategy. Not so Korea, where the subjugation of the Buddhist community to the state’s interests seems to have been taken yet one step further.

Maybe so, but this picture become decidedly more complex in the final contribution to this volume, that by Jacqueline L. Stone. Her focus is on Buddhists of the Japanese Nichiren tradition, who in the seventeenth century resisted state regulation imposed by the Tokugawa shogunate on the whole monastic system; to these believers only a government dedicated to the Lotus Sutra held any validity, so rather than submit some at least within this tradition were prepared to kill themselves by self-starvation or else to go underground, as the Japanese Christians were obliged to do, only to emerge again after the fall of the regime in the late nineteenth century. This singular attitude of stubborn resistance to the state, one might add, occurred again in the mid-twentieth century, when the Nichiren social reformer Seno’o Girō found himself opposed by the might of the reinvigorated Japanese imperial regime and was forced to recant after imprisonment and five months of relentless interrogation. Here, however, the long-term historical background to such acts of resistance is explored in some detail, citing examples from both China and Japan. The concept of expedient means in East Asian Buddhism did allow for plenty of accommodation between Buddhists and non-Buddhist authority, but reading through the arguments of the Nichiren adherents one finds a consciousness that their world conception was not that of government as embodying the will of Heaven, some natural order mandated by cosmic forces; rather, it was the laws of karma that ruled all beings in the cosmos, kings and even gods included, and it was only Buddhas that stood beyond this. In China, monks addressing emperors were invariably too polite to point this out under normal circumstances, but the doctrinal underpinnings to this belief were always there—the secular world might work on its own principles, but they were not the ultimate ones.

On expedient grounds, then, the ruler and his laws might not be challenged, for Buddhism could always be better propagated where good order prevailed; statecraft was indeed as the editors suggest a Buddhist concern. But Gautama Siddhārtha, the Buddha himself, destined in his youth for kingship, had fled in the night, seeking a different goal, and his followers, it seems, for all the compromises these case studies reveal, never appear to have forgotten that. The research marshalled in this volume cannot of course explore every aspect of almost two millennia of complex cultural interaction spread across several quite distinct polities, but it does introduce in the most effective way possible the broader dimensions of the question. This leaves plenty to be done in terms of filling out the chronological and spatial picture delineated in Buddhist Statecraft in East Asia. Surely, however, there is a further and onerous task still at hand: that of bringing the results of high-quality scholarship in this field, still all too often perceived as obscure and remote, to a broad general readership that increasingly needs to absorb an awareness of the issues described. For if the state in East Asia shows no signs of withering away, neither, too, does the Buddhist tradition.