Mario Poceski's new work is a helpful overview of literature pertaining to the famous Chan/Zen Master Mazu Daoyi (709–88), in two main parts. Part one is comprised of six chapters on Chan literature, and part two provides annotated translations of seven key texts featuring Mazu. The transcriptions and translations of texts in part two are likely to be useful for both specialists and beginning students of Chan/Zen Buddhism. For the specialist this is a convenient assembly of Mazu-related materials, and for the beginner this a chance to review the styles and features of a range of Chan-related genres.

The texts in part two are: Mazu's stele inscription of 791 by Quan Deyu; a “Stone Case” reliquary inscription associated with the dedication of a pagoda for Mazu in 791; Mazu's biographical entry in the Zutang ji (952); excerpts from the Zongjing lu (961); Mazu's biographical entry in the Song gaoseng zhuan (988); Mazu's biographical entry in the Jingde chuandeng lu (1004); and a sermon attributed to Mazu in the same work.

The chapters in part one are shaped by various interrelated themes, particularly the layering of Chan genres, contrasting images of Mazu, and textual productions as a function of the “community of memory.” Chapter 1 introduces Mazu and his records within the context of academic studies of Chan history. Chapters 2 and 3 explore various hagiographic portrayals of the master. Chapters 4 and 5 provide an overview and discussion of the principal Chan genres. Chapter 6 focuses on the record of Mazu's sayings, the Mazu yulu, discussing its contested provenance in relation to the disparate styles of its constituent parts and the “historical personas” that emerge therefrom. This provides a basis for Poceski's reflections on the effects of various means, including contemporary academics, through which the best-known Chan masters have been construed.

Poceski surveys the development of four major interrelated Chan genres: transmission of the lamp chronicles (chuandeng lu), records of sayings (yulu), monastic codes (qinggui), and encounter dialogues or “public cases” (gongan). He traces an evolutionary trend, from prototypes that are similar to non-Chan counterparts, toward the pithy, cryptic performances of classic gongan literature. Correspondingly, Mazu's literary image is shown to morph from a standard hagiographic type, the thaumaturge or wonder-working monk, to the wise dharma teacher, before becoming the iconic Chan master dispensing shouts and odd behavior.

These broad themes are spiced by critiques of the approaches of certain predecessors in the field. Following a particular thread in the work may illustrate some of the academic issues that have shaped it. In arguing for approaching the Chan school in terms of Robert Bellah's “community of memory” (p. 25), Poceski highlights “retellings” as part of the process of communal continuity. Yet he also argues for the person, an individual, as a source or reference “behind the text” (p. 34). This is meant to offer an approach that contrasts with others in the field. In due course he critiques Albert Welter's reconstructions of Linji for being overly cynical, reading all works as no more than sectarian stratagems (p. 32ff.). In several places he challenges Griffith Foulk's influential articles, wherein various aspects of Tang dynasty (618–907) Chan were claimed to be mere byproducts of Song (960–1279) myth-making. He critiques Bernard Faure for vanishing historical persons in a “haze of uncertainty” (p. 33). However, Poceski sometimes leaves the impression that a relatively uniform “hermeneutics of suspicion” has shaped the field. Instead, I would argue that each of these scholars has challenged the tradition in different ways. For example, in highlighting the structuralist dynamics of hagiographical construction or the performative dynamics of “Chan” rhetoric, Faure engaged in exercises designed to undercut the biases of positivist historiography, not the historicity of persons per se. In the manner of Madhyamaka analyses, such critiques are concerned with the means of construction of claims both for and against the “existence” of historical persons or events. Poceski himself owes an unacknowledged debt to these methods when he dissects layers of hagiographic development, protests against the rhetorical flummery of Song Chan, and traces Mazu's literary metamorphoses from wonder-worker to sermonizer to master of Chan ceremonies of immediacy. However, Poceski makes his own “public case” with conviction and sincerity when he defends the superior soteriological sophistication and complexity of the traces of an authentic Tang Mazu over the superficiality of his Song remake.

In his reprise of scholarship trends of the last twenty years, Poceski claims engagement with the critical, soteriological, institutional, and political dimensions of his material, and navigates between hermeneutics of retrieval and suspicion in his retelling of Mazu. In effect, his work traces a hermeneutic spiral. Idealization of Tang Chan in the style of D. T. Suzuki was part of Zen's introduction to the West. This was followed by a wave of debunking carried out by Foulk and others, who argued that literary iconization of unconventional behavior developed hand-in-hand with Chan institutionalization during the Song. In a more constructive mode, working with Dunhuang materials, the heterogeneity of the landscape of Tang proto-Chan was opened up by Yanagida Seizan, Bernard Faure, John McRae, Jeffrey Broughton, and others. Now, more of us have returned to the view that the formation of Chan as a distinctive soteriological approach did indeed begin in the Tang, while recognizing that the picture of Tang Chan presented in Song texts was romanticized and reflects Song Buddhist sectarianism and literati culture. A recurrent challenge is presented by the relatively late dates of many of the extant texts on Tang figures. While one may not always be fully convinced by Poceski's means of reanchoring portions of the Mazu material in the Tang, one may support his conviction that Mazu cannot be contained by the procrustean Song-style “case” that made him into the paradigmatic Chan iconoclast.