John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar have brought together a fine collection of essays on the Chinese response to Indian culture and religion. The volume explores how Buddhist literature and myth percolated through Chinese culture, how Indian models of kingship and lineage were transformed on Chinese soil, and how Chinese Buddhist and Daoist traditions grappled with challenging Indian ideas.
In “Transformation as Imagination in Medieval Popular Buddhist Literature,” Victor Mair launches an ambitious argument about the influence of Indian Buddhism on Chinese literature. Mair argues that China's high esteem for historical writing rendered fiction “intellectually suspect” (p. 13). This led authors in genres like zhiguai 志怪 and xiaoshuo 小說 to frame their narratives as reports linked to particular figures. Fiction is thus intimately tied to storytelling; the narrator must transmit rather than invent the tale. Buddhism brought the idea of nirmāṇa, “transformations”: all illusory phenomena may be transformed at the whim of powerful Buddhas or bodhisattvas. This new “ontological” possibility, according to Mair, relieved the Chinese of their suspicion of fiction and allowed them “to revel in an unrestrained imagination premised upon an acceptance of transformation as a kind of manifestation” (p. 20). I have two questions for Mair. First, almost all Buddhist scriptures begin with the famous phrase evaṃ mayā śrutam ekasmin samaye … “Thus have I heard at one time …” Doesn't a great deal of even the most imaginative and cinematic Buddhist literature also appeal to the historicity of narrators and the authenticity of their memories? Second, what does Mair think of the Zhuangzi 莊子? Could it not be an example of wildly imaginative—dare I say fictional?—Chinese literature that didn't need Buddhist nirmāṇa to be thinkable?
In “Indian Mythology and the Chinese Imagination: Nezha, Nalakūbara, and Kṛṣṇa,” Meir Shahar introduces the reader to Nalakūbara, a.k.a. Nezha 哪吒, a mischievous child god popular in late imperial China. Shahar explores the cult of Nezha, demonstrating that this figure was first transmitted to China in the liturgical medium of dhāraṇī scriptures. Back in India, he turns up in Jātaka tales, in the Rāmāyaṇa, and even in a seventeenth-century Telugu novel. Shahar closes the article boldly, comparing Nalakūbara to Kṛṣṇa. He appeals to images of the two together at Quanzhou 泉州 and to a late Chinese Tantric text that may conflate these two divine manifestations of the enfant terrible. I am grateful to Shahar not just for illuminating the fascinating history of Nezha, but also for clearly demonstrating the importance of dhāraṇī scriptures and tantras for understanding Chinese religious history.
In “Indic Influences on Chinese Mythology: King Yama and His Acolytes as Gods of Destiny,” Bernard Faure shows how the figure of King Yama transformed as he moved from India to China and Japan. Faure argues that Yama was reduced from a multi-function deity—dharma king, ruler of the underworld, king of the South—to a sinicized judicial magistrate responsible for the underworld alone. The real value of Faure's contribution is in showing how the maṇḍalas of Yama served as “arenas of contention” (p. 59) in which Indian and Chinese deities competed for attention. Maṇḍalas thus become static frames in a much grander film, a moving picture revealing the transformations of the pantheon. Like Shahar, Faure vividly demonstrates how esoteric Buddhist materials illuminate the history of Chinese religion.
In “Indian Myth Transformed in a Chinese Apocryphal Text: Two Stories on the Buddha's Hidden Organ,” Nobuyoshi Yamabe builds on his studies of early Buddhist scriptures on meditation and visualization. Here Yamabe zooms in on the seventh chapter of the Ocean Sūtra (Guanfo sanmei hai jing 灌佛三昧海經) to examine two remarkable stories about the Buddha's invisible penis. In one story the Buddha converts prostitutes who question his manhood by revealing his penis to them—it gradually grows until it morphs into billions of Buddhas preaching on billions of lotus flowers. In another story the Buddha converts a lusty woman by creating a magically emanated lover with superhuman sexual endurance. Their sexual encounter doesn't end happily. Yamabe hunts for possible Indian parallels which might explain these odd stories in the Ocean Sūtra. His search takes him to myths of Śiva, to images of the erect Maheśvara, to the Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom (Da zhidu lun 大智度論), and to Buddhist avadāna literature. Yamabe's chapter is especially valuable for revealing how “Chinese” apocrypha could remix narratives from a vast range of myth and literature, including material usually considered “Indian.”
In “From Bodily Relic to Dharma Relic Stūpa: Chinese Materialization of the Aśoka Legend in the Wuyue Period,” Shi Zhiru explores the use of Buddhist stūpas in the political legitimation of the rulers of the tenth-century kingdom of Wuyue 吳越. The Wuyue kings “materialized” the Aśoka legend through the use of stūpas, both transferring a body-relic stūpa to the capital and using woodblock printing to disseminate dharma-relic stūpas on a large scale. Zhiru's analysis teases out how Wuyue's adoption of the Aśokan model of legitimacy also drew from a deep well of East Asian precedents.
In “‘Ancestral Transmission’ in Chinese Buddhist Monasteries: the Example of the Shaolin Temple,” Ye Derong examines the epigraphy of Shaolin monastery to explore the ancestral structures of Chinese Buddhist monasteries. The epigraphy at Shaolin contains detailed registers of the names of monks and their lineages, using identical vocabulary and kinship structures as the secular world of clan (zu 族) and family (jia 家). In Ye's reading, the use of Chinese kinship structures to govern monastic lineage is a particularly strong instance of “the Chinese transformation of Buddhism.”
In “The Hagiography of Bodhidharma: Reconstructing the Point of Origin of Chinese Chan Buddhism,” the late John McRae focuses on Bodhidharma as “the earliest possible nexus of interaction between Chinese Chan and Buddhism in the rest of first-millennium Asia” (p. 127). McRae offers a spirited critique of Bernard Faure, who argued that there was nothing useful to be found in Bodhidharma hagiographies. Faure's argument was essentially theoretical; McRae countered here with an appeal to basic historical and philological method. McRae reevaluates the earliest story of Bodhidharma in the Record of the Monasteries of Luoyang (Luoyang qielan ji 洛陽伽藍記), showing how Bodhidharma's advanced age and his simple piety reflect the sixth-century Chinese valorization of meditation and scripture recitation. The chapter is a poignant reminder of how much we in Buddhist studies will miss John and his work.
Robert Sharf's “Is Nirvāṇa the Same as Insentience? Chinese Struggles with an Indian Buddhist Ideal” explores difficult conceptual problems like nirodhasamāpatti (a meditative state of complete mental cessation) and “beings without conception” (asaṃjñikasattva). Sharf reads these not as the idle musings of scholastics, but rather as useful tools for exploring philosophical problems, analogous to the “intuition pumps” used by philosophers today. Sharf convincingly hypothesizes that both nirodhasamāpatti and the asaṃjñika gods helped Buddhists probe a key problem: “once the continuum of consciousness has been severed, how does it get going again?” (pp. 150–51). For Sharf, these questions honed the Buddhist understanding of nirvāṇa as something more than mere nihilism. Sharf then turns to China, where problems of translation led the Chinese to generate their own philosophical experiments. For Sharf, debates about the Buddha nature of insentient objects explores similar conceptual terrain using Chinese terminology.
In “Karma and the Bonds of Kinship in Medieval Daoism: Reconciling the Irreconcilable,” Christine Mollier investigates how Daoists attempted to reconcile the increasingly popular Buddhist idea of karma with the native Chinese system of “intergenerational responsibility.” Mollier shows how the Celestial Master tradition chose to reject Buddhist karma theory outright—embracing the narrative of a celestial bureaucracy calculating the life-span of the practitioner—while the Lingbao tradition fully assimilated Buddhist karma into its thought.
In the final chapter, “This Foreign Religion of Ours: Lingbao Views of Buddhist Translation,” Stephen Bokenkamp moves beyond the simple thesis that Lingbao Daoism shamelessly copied its Buddhist competition. Bokenkamp focuses on the esoteric “hidden language” from which the Lingbao scriptures were translated. This was not a straightforward attempt to “copy” the Buddhist tradition. Bokenkamp recognizes here the general problem of translation: all Chinese Buddhist scriptures were merely imperfect transmissions of profound Indic originals. This fact gave the Lingbao the opportunity to appeal to its own esoteric language, to highlight their own texts and interpretations, and to root them in an equally ambiguous and productive foundation. For both Buddhists and Daoists, the impossibility of perfect translation only serves to reinforce the profound truth of the source material.
Kieschnick and Shahar are to be congratulated for their editorship of this fine volume. The contributions are thematically coherent and of uniformly high quality. This reviewer appreciated in particular how many of the papers have moved beyond a simplistic idea of “sinification”—a concept rooted in the rise of the nation state and the politics of the Cold War—and into much richer engagement with the complex dynamics of exchange, translation, appropriation, and transformation.
