A Distant Mirror: Articulating Indic Ideas in Sixth and

Seventh Century Chinese Buddhism ed. by Chen-kuo Lin,

Michael Radich (review)

Stuart H. Young

Journal of Chinese Religions, Volume 44, Issue 2, November 2016, pp. 190-193
(Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/708677/summary

[ Access provided at 19 Jul 2020 06:09 GMT from Macquarie University ]

190 BOOK REVIEWS

to differing possibilities, and this open-endedness is appropriate given the lack of

inscriptional evidence from donors or worshippers at the site. The descriptions of
the caves and the texts that follow the essays in both volumes are highly technical,
with the initial overview descriptions and extensive annotated bibliographies
perhaps the most useful to the non-specialist. The transcriptions of the texts that
follow the archaeological documentation of each cave are color-coded allowing
the reader to assess extant characters and a work’s inscribed order; the tables of
characters displaying variant strokes or structures are small in terms of readability
but functional.
There is very limited discussion of the larger framework of the site or other non-
textual works found therein. Art historians will be disappointed in the lack of treat-
ment of the imagery at the site, but can benefit from linking the textual analysis here
to earlier art historical studies of the site.9 A particularly intriguing avenue of future
research from a visual standpoint would be to investigate those caves that were “first
to have been intended as sutra caves, but after a change in plan, sculptures were
carved instead of sutra texts” (vol. 1, p. 21). Ledderose looks to nearby rock-cut
tombs in a search for prototypes, presenting carving methods and linking the two
arenas with regard to the movement of the workers, but the numerous carved
“tomb pagodas” represent another research possibility.
The lavish quality of these books is remarkable, but at the same time somewhat
out of sync with the times, where 3D modeling could have easily accommodated
each of these caves and readers could have engaged with them in a more physically
realistic fashion for a fraction of the expense. A digital layout also would have made
aspects of the book such as the table of variant characters more readily searchable,
while allowing for more comparative work, with images more easily placed side by
side. But these are minor points that can be addressed in time, the majority of the
hard scholarly work already having been done in terms of collection, collation,
and analysis of the texts at Wofoyuan.

KARIL J. KUCERA
St. Olaf College

CHEN-KUO LIN and MICHAEL RADICH, eds., A Distant Mirror: Articulating Indic Ideas
in Sixth and Seventh Century Chinese Buddhism. Hamburg: Hamburg University
Press, 2014. 565 pp. €39.80 (hb). ISBN 978-3-943423-19-8

A Distant Mirror is a fine collection of meticulous textual scholarship in Buddhist

logic, epistemology, ontology, and soteriology, which examines medieval Chinese
doctrinal exegesis in conversation with Indian scriptural and commentarial litera-
ture. The book’s title registers its authors’ conviction that Chinese sources can accu-
rately reflect (if a mirror so does) “features common to Buddhism in India” (p. 16).
Several of its articles thus utilize Chinese translations and commentaries in order to
explicate Indian philosophical systems, while others emphasize Chinese Buddhist

9
Sonya S. Lee, “The Buddha’s Words at Cave Temples: Inscribed Scriptures in the Design of
Wofoyuan,” Ars Orientalis 36 (2009): 36–76.
 BOOK REVIEWS 191

doctrinal developments on the basis of translated Indian sources. The primary inter-
pretive foil in these efforts is the well-worn scholarly model of “Sinification,” accord-
ing to which Indian doctrines are transformed in distinctively Chinese ways. But here
this model is deemed problematic in execution rather than theory. Underlying
notions of monolithic cultural systems influencing one another are not in question;
instead, the problem with the Sinification perspective is that it typically construes
Chinese traditions as merely derivative (or misrepresentative) of India; it discounts
instances in which native Chinese concepts were reframed in Indian terms; and it
fails to recognize how Chinese-looking ideals were sometimes very Indian as well.
In thus “overlook[ing] ways that Chinese evidence might reflect … important fea-
tures of Buddhism that also held beyond Chinese borders” (p. 17), this model is
said to illustrate a “parochializing tendency to relegate the study of Chinese
materials to the study of questions pertaining to China alone” (p. 10).
This is the framework within which the editors of A Distant Mirror articulate the
contributions of its individual authors, with each article illustrating in painstaking
detail how Chinese Buddhist writings and translations can be profitably mined for
insights into the varying relationships between Buddhist philosophical traditions—
across the Sino-Indian divide. However, the articles themselves do not always
advance this interpretive framework; some have little to do with it expressly and
some would even seem to belie it. This is a book of fine-grained primary source analy-
sis—philological, text critical, and concerned with explicating complex philosophical
systems; its articles offer little sustained engagement with the broader methodological
innovations that the editors claim. Instead, here one finds excellent examples of a
fairly traditional Buddhist Studies approach—comparing Chinese, Sanskrit, and
Tibetan texts in order to articulate Buddhist ideals apart from local sociocultural con-
texts—as applied with salutary effect to otherwise understudied troves of Chinese
Buddhist philosophical writings, and properly calibrated to counter the aforemen-
tioned shortcomings of the Sinification model.
The first five contributions to A Distant Mirror are classified under the heading of
Buddhist logic and epistemology. Funayama Toru begins with a characteristically
insightful account of how Chinese uses of the term xianliang 現量 (pratyakṣa;
“direct perception”) do illustrate Sinification, but he maintains that these usages
made perfect sense in Chinese and so should not be dismissed as faulty Sanskrit.
Chen-kuo Lin next discusses “Epistemology and Cultivation in Jingying Huiyuan’s
[淨影慧遠 (523–592)] Essay on the Three Means of Valid Cognition [San liang zhi yi
三量智義].” He traces the contours of Huiyuan’s relativist epistemology, as opposed
to the universalist pramāṇ avāda (“standard of knowledge”) of Dignāga (ca. 480–
540), and argues that the former is “the result of a dialectical interplay between Sini-
fication and Indianization” (p. 82). In the following article, Shoryu Katsura outlines
Dignāga’s linguistic theory of anyāpoha (“exclusion of others”) and shows that Kuiji
窺基 (632–682) must have learned of it by word of mouth. Shinya Moriyama then
focuses on Kuiji’s understanding of the logical fallacy of viruddhāvyabhicārin (“anti-
nomic reason”), arguing that it differs from and misconstrues Indian expositions of
the same. And lastly, “The Problem of Self-Refuting Statements in Chinese Buddhist
Logic” is examined by Jakub Zamorski, who contends that Chinese discourses on
this topic were conceptually “superior to their antecedents in Indian literature” (p.
176).
192 BOOK REVIEWS

“Yogācāra ideas and authors” is the heading under which the next four articles are
placed, beginning with Ching Keng’s study of “defiled phenomena” in the Awaken-
ing of Faith (Qixin lun 起信論) and in the writings of Dilun 地論 master Huiyuan.
On the basis of discrepancies emerging from this comparison, Keng complicates
scholarly consensus in maintaining that the Awakening of Faith was not a direct out-
growth of Dilun thought. Next, Charles Muller offers a study and translation of
Huiyuan’s System of Two Hindrances (Erzhang yi 二障義), through which, in
Muller’s estimation, “Tathāgatagarbhic entrenchments” became incorporated into
East Asian Yogācāra thought (p. 232). Junjie Chu follows by demonstrating that
the proper Sanskrit reconstruction of the epistemological category kaidaoyi 開導
依 is *avakāsá dānāsŕ aya, “basis that gives way to [the subsequent awareness]” (p.
286). And Zhihua Yao critiques Madhyamaka notions of “two truths” on the
basis of Yogācāra “three natures” theory, claiming to have decided the age-old ques-
tion of whether Madhyamaka “emptiness” amounts to nihilism.
The remaining articles concern “other Indian elements in Chinese Buddhist
systems” (p. 21), leading off with Hans-Rudolf Kantor’s informative exposition
on the “inseparability of truth and falsehood” in Chinese commentaries on Indian
Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, and Tathāgatagarbha sources (p. 340). In Kantor’s analy-
sis, these commentaries are guided first and foremost by a soteriological concern to
deconstruct all ultimate metaphysical positions. The next essay by Chien-hsing Ho
examines Jizang’s 吉藏 (549−623) ontology of indeterminacy, according to which
the “middle [way] … is only revealed in fully nonconceptual experience” of “nonac-
quisition [wude 無得],” which is a state of freedom from attachment to views
(p. 415). Yoke Meei Choong follows with an in-depth study of Indian and
Chinese interpretations of dharma versus adharma in the Vajracchedikā “parable
of the raft,” concluding that discourses on this issue split along sectarian lines—
Yogācāra versus Madhyamaka—which were often more important to Buddhist exe-
getes than the canonical sources they expounded. Chinese Buddhist debates about
the transmigration of “consciousness” (vijñāna; shi 識, shenming 神明, etc.) are
the topic of the next article, by Michael Radich, who argues convincingly that
Chinese doctrines about survival of death do not evidence Sinification since they
can “legitimately trace their provenance and pedigree back to India” (p. 505).
Michael Zimmermann concludes the volume by examining “development” versus
“disclosure” theories of Buddha-nature in India.
These brief content summaries do little justice to the depth of analysis achieved in
A Distant Mirror. The strengths of this book certainly lie in its meticulous attention
to detail and insightful connections drawn between technical terms, passages, texts,
and elaborate streams of thought across Buddhist traditions in India and China. This
volume thus offers valuable contributions to the study of medieval Buddhist philos-
ophy. But the overarching framework in which these contributions are placed—con-
cerning Sinification and the study of Sino-Indian Buddhism—begs important
questions that the book does not address. It purports to study “the Chinese reception
of Indian Buddhist ideas” (p. 10), but makes no effort to examine how these key cul-
tural categories were understood. What makes an idea “Indic” or “Sinitic,” and, most
importantly, according to whom? Is this rather a study of the modern scholarly
reception of Indian Buddhist ideas in medieval Chinese writings? Could medieval
Buddhist authors have possibly shared the kinds of pan-Asian perspectives elabo-
rated by the authors of this volume? Does it matter that they often could not
 BOOK REVIEWS 193

have? Nevertheless, the book’s individual articles should not be expected to tackle
these broad methodological questions; their scopes are clearly set on decidedly nar-
rower targets, which they regularly strike with fine precision.

STUART H. YOUNG
Bucknell University

D. E. MUNGELLO, The Catholic Invasion of China: Remaking Chinese Christianity.

Lanham, MD, Boulder, New York, and London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
xviii, 175 pp. US$40 (hb). ISBN 978-1-4422-5048-2

The title of D. E. Mungello’s book on the history of the Roman Catholic Church in
China is arresting. Official policies and attitudes towards Christianity in China have
substantially liberalized over the last thirty-five years, but representatives of author-
ized churches and government organs still regularly associate it with “foreign inva-
sion” or “foreign aggression” (waiguo qinlüe 外國侵略). Curiously, the author never
explicitly addresses the resonance (and dissonance) of his arguments with this line.
In exploring the relationship between the Catholic missions and Western imperial-
ism, Mungello argues that the (mostly French) Jesuits who proselytized in China
between 1842 and the early 1950s adopted culturally insensitive and even down-
right racist attitudes and practices. This was in contrast to their late Ming and
early to mid-Qing predecessors (1580–1787), and reflected shifts in international
power relations; during the mid-nineteenth century, the “unequal treaties” following
the Opium Wars humbled China and endowed the foreigners with greater power.
The later Jesuits’ presumptuousness was a source of tension with Christians in the
Jiangnan 江南 region, to the extent that the missionaries in fact impeded the
growth of the Catholic Church in China (p. 37)—only in 1926 were the first
Chinese bishops consecrated!
A turning point came in the 1950s, as Communist policies demanded indigenous
control of Christian churches. The formation of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic
Association in 1957 came at great cost, however. Even Catholic orphanages came
under attack during this decade, as nuns and priests were accused of murdering
or neglecting children in their care. The book shows how the schisms that
emerged during the 1950s have persisted to the present era, as epitomized by the
divergent paths of Cardinal Ignatius Gong Pinmei 龔品梅 (1901–2000), who
resisted the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Church and was secretly made a cardinal
by Pope John Paul II in 1979, and Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian 金魯賢 (1916–
2013), who became bishop of Shanghai in the early 1980s without Vatican approval
(pp. 64–69).
The book’s treatment of allegations of sexual seduction and assault that have been
made against foreign priests is less satisfying. The author acknowledges that some
priests in China had sexual relations with their parishioners (pp. 93–94). This
admission, however, is tempered by the suggestion in relation to one case study
that because “the specific accusations [of rape] lack credible evidence” they belong
“more to the realm of sexual titillation than reality” (p. 108). Rather, Mungello
suggests that an equally plausible explanation for the accusations is that “[t]he