In this pathbreaking book, Toni Huber focuses on India as seen through Tibetan eyes, charting the changing ways in which Tibetans have conceptualized the geography of the Subcontinent over the past millennium. As he shows, Tibetan sources on India do not speak with a single voice; accounts of India's sacred geography are multiple, overlapping, and contested, producing what Huber terms “the shifting terrain of the Buddha” (p. 15). Huber masterfully maps this terrain—hitherto largely terra incognita—and in doing so, reveals that considerable work remains to be done. It is to be hoped that future scholars will endeavor to follow his lead.
In the process of assimilating Buddhism during the late first millennium ce, Tibetan culture adopted discourses that effectively marginalized Tibet not only culturally, but also cosmologically: the center of the world shifted from the Tibetan plateau to the Vajrāsana in India. Over time, Tibetans compensated for this displacement by extending networks of Indian Buddhist sacred sites across the Himalayas and creating replica holy lands in locations readily accessible by pilgrims. Huber treats these phenomena—each of which is internally complex—with great sensitivity.
The book is structured in three sections. The first (“Locating and Dislocating the Land of the Buddha,” chapters 1–4) draws from ancient sources to detail how nascent Tibetan Buddhist attitudes toward India were shaped by two influences often at odds with one another: Indian Buddhist texts and the reports of pilgrims. In the book's second section (“Reinventing the Holy Land in India,” chapters 5–8), Huber offers a series of fascinating case studies of sites in the Punjab, Assam, Bengal, Bihar, and the Middle Ganges, where Tibetans were active from the thirteenth through the nineteenth century. The final section (“Modern Rebirths of the Holy Land,” chapters 9–11) surveys the impact of modernity on Tibetan attitudes to, and practices in, India, and reflects on how these attitudes and practices have themselves contributed to the constitution of what has come to be called “modern Buddhism.”
Throughout the book, Huber avoids the temptations of reductionism. In chapter 4, for example, he notes that in the thirteenth century, and initially in connection with the political ascendancy of the Drigung (’bri gung pa) branch of the Kagyü (bka’ brgyud) school, the location of tantric pīṭha sites was for the first time transferred to Tibet. In the centuries to follow, the precise location of these sites would be contested. While Huber does not deny that these successive attempts to remap Tibetan territories were likely motivated (at least in part) by a desire to legitimate or maximize the authority of interested parties, he also notes several questions that are left unanswered by such explanations. How were these sites understood by those who accepted their pīṭha status? Was there a presupposition of ontological continuity between Tibetan and Indian territories? Were the Tibetan sites presumed to be “replicas” of Indian “originals”? And did such presuppositions change over time? Huber is admirably cautious about any attempt to answer such questions definitively on the basis of evidence provided by one or two pīṭha sites, and his book accordingly charts an agenda for further research.
Huber's approach in this book is informed by his acknowledgment that the scholarly study of Buddhism serves to shape that which it studies. Just as attention to Buddhist persons, doctrines, practices, attitudes, and material culture has transformed the materials and methods of Buddhist studies scholarship, so, too, has scholarship impacted Buddhism, as new generations of Buddhists have appropriated the fruits of academic study to reinvent their tradition. This feedback loop presents new ethical quandaries for the academic study of Buddhism—a point that Huber raises forcefully in his virtuosic treatment of the history of the so-called eight sites of the Buddha in chapter 1, and one that he returns to throughout the book.
In sum, The Holy Land Reborn is remarkable in many respects: in its historical scope; in the breadth of sources from which it draws; in its balance of critical rigor, theoretical acumen, and attention to historical and ethnographic particularity; and in the clarity and accessibility of its exposition. It is, moreover, very well edited, and contains very few typographical errors (p. 24: for sarca, read sacra). Though the book has been published in Chicago's Buddhism and Modernity imprint, its historical reach extends well beyond what this series title suggests. It will likely appeal to Tibetologists and Indologists regardless of the specific historical period(s) in which they specialize, and it will also benefit comparativists seeking a better understanding of the processes by which religious traditions have historically determined, defined, and defended sacred space.
