Carefully researched and appropriately cautious, especially when confronted with limited historical data, the essays in this collection offer a superb contribution to the field of premodern and early modern Southeast Asian Buddhist studies. As editor D. Christian Lammerts points out in his introduction (chap. 1), this field is seeing increased attention to notions of religious plurality and Buddhisms, regional exchange and transculturation of such Buddhisms, re-envisioned theories and methods of comparison and microhistory, interdisciplinarity, the study of both local vernacular languages and cosmopolitan transregional languages, and scrutiny and reappraisal in particular areas of interpretation such as the category of Theravāda (pp. 2–3). As expected in a work of this nature, there is no central argument. There is, however, a very usefully employed central organizing concept, namely the dynamics of historical, intellectual, artistic, ritual, spatial, political, institutional, and material change. This concept of dynamics guides the collection by drawing attention to the changing, plural characteristics of Buddhisms during the times under consideration, and it “suggest[s] … the constant interplay between … local and global forces in history as well as the variable angles of analytical view available to scholarship” (p. 3). Each of the thirteen essays in the collection, then, analyzes examples of such dynamics.

Here I sketch the general parameters of each essay, to provide a sense of the volume's substantive methodological and interpretive terrain. The essays are arranged in a basically chronological order. Peter Skilling (chap. 2) traces the travels of an important Sanskrit Buddhist verse evidenced in north peninsular Malaysia, the island of Borneo, and Java, detailing instances, distribution, status, and possible school affiliations. Stephen A. Murphy (chap. 3) uses quantitative and demographic archaeological methods to help “reconstruct the possible extent of monastic Buddhism in the Khorat Plateau during the Dvāravatī period” (p. 80). Sema stones (ritual boundary markers)—their distribution and their narrative art—provide an important focus of analysis. Titi Surti Nastiti (chap. 4) explores objects from a site in East Java, with attention to paleographic matters and the “evidence of the earliest phase of the Buddhist religion” there (p. 133). E. Edwards McKinnon (chap. 5) discusses the regional setting and significance of Eastern Kalimantan and then offers a descriptive inventory of a bronze hoard reportedly discovered there. Nicolas Revire (chap. 6) studies a khakkhara (staff) finial and other ritual deposits at a site in Nakhon Pathom, Thailand. Dating to the eighth to ninth centuries, their analysis raises questions about ritual and iconographic geographies stretching from Burma to Java and beyond. With attention to caityas, icons, sūtras, inscriptions, and tantras, Hiram Woodward (chap. 7) examines Buddhism in tenth-century Cambodia in comparison to the situation 200 years later when Buddhism was widely established. Andrea Acri (chap. 8) mounts a sophisticated critique of claims about “a syncretistic, and unitary, Śiva-Buddha religion” (p. 273) in Java and Bali, emphasizing the need for a historicist and multidisciplinary approach. John K. Whitmore (chap. 9) examines the role of Buddhist monarchies in transforming and absorbing political and spiritual powers of the localities, focusing on Ðại Việt and Lý Nhân-tông (r. 1072–1127). Stemming from a research project concerning “Lān Nā’s Buddhist history during the late second millennium” (p. 308), Anne M. Blackburn (chap. 10) emphasizes that we need to read references to Laṇkā and related terms “in monastic lineage texts and histories composed outside Laṇkā” with attention to the argumentative or performative work of such references (p. 318). Alexey Kirichenko (chap. 11) discusses regional, “non-central” monastic networks in Upper Burma, which “at least since the early eighteenth century functioned as a viable and thriving alternative to court monasticism” (p. 334). Jacques P. Leider (chap. 12) reveals how Buddhist concepts were instrumentalized as diplomatic rhetoric in the letters exchanged between a Burmese king and a Mon king as they waged war against each other in the 1750s. Santi Pakdeekham (chap. 13) investigates Thai-Khmer connections during the reign of Rama IV in Siam and Ang Duong in Cambodia, with emphasis on the Dhammayutika Nikāya sect, literatures, ceremonies, and political relations, and the impact of these connections on Cambodian Buddhism.

High levels of methodological, interpretive, and geographic sophistication characterize Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia. From the handling of a diverse range of sources (e.g., inscriptions, ritual boundaries, manuscripts, ritual deposits, artistic narratives, etc.) to interpreting the contexts that produced such sources, and also the work that such sources themselves do, this collection is extremely useful for researchers of historical Buddhisms in Southeast Asia. The volume is also valuable to anyone interested in the dynamic history of religions in Southeast Asia. That said, as Lammerts himself notes, even in a volume of this kind there are significant lacunas, related to other religious dynamics (Buddhist or otherwise), concerning such topics as “medicine, alchemy, poetics, law, astrology, [and] husbandry” (p. 4), which are generally not addressed in the volume. And a composite map of places highlighted in the volume would be helpful, especially to aid those outside Southeast Asian studies.