complete neglect of the most comprehensive and sophisti-cated study to date of Chinese autobiographical literature,W. Bauer’s massive and erudite Das Antlitz Chinas (1990).The absence of any engagement with Bauer’s analysis ofthe notions of autobiography, self-representation, andperson in the Chinese tradition represents a missed oppor-tunity to integrate this solid specialized study into thelarger world of scholarly inquiry.

Philip ClartUniversity of Leipzig

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IN CONTEMPORARYCHINA. By Xinzhong Yao and Paul Badham. Religion, Edu-cation and Culture. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007.Pp. xxii + 275; plates, figures, tables. $85.00.

This book is the result of a four-year collaborative projectinvolving the University of Wales, Oxford University, andBeijing Renmin University, and funded by the TempletonFoundation, to study the prevalence and nature of “religiousexperience” in contemporary mainland China. The study isbased on an unprecedented survey of 3,196 Han Chinese(drawn evenly from ten provinces or municipalities, exclud-ing Xinjiang and Tibet) consisting of structured interviews(fifty-one pages in the appendix) averaging 47.3 minutes,conducted by 110 Chinese assistants in 2005. Three types ofinformation were collected: personal and demographic data,reports on religious experience and religious conceptions,and beliefs and practices. The researchers found surprisinglyhigh rates of reported religious experience in China(56.7 percent) and very low rates of individuals claiming to bereligious (8.7 percent). Another central finding of the surveywas the highly syncretic nature of religious beliefs and prac-tices. Individual chapters examine the survey data in relationto Confucian culture, Christianity, Buddhism in Beijing, folkreligion in Fujian, gender, and the nonreligious, and compareit with statistical data on religion and religious experience inBritain. Although the book contains valuable insights intoreligious identity, experience, conceptions, and syncretismin China as well as many tantalizing statistics, several con-clusions seem hastily drawn (e.g., “urban Buddhism hasbecome an essentially personalized religion”), and the datacollected await more compelling analyses and presentation.Nevertheless, anyone studying contemporary China or inter-ested in religious experience as a cross-cultural phenomenonwill wish to be familiar with its general findings.

Brian J. NicholsCentral Michigan University

BuddhismTORT, CUSTOM, AND KARMA: GLOBALIZATIONAND LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THAILAND. ByDavid M. Engel and Jaruwan S. Engel. Palo Alto, CA: StanfordLaw Books, 2010. $21.95.

The Engels explore the effects of globalization on thelegal consciousness and concepts of justice of northern Thaisthrough interviews with injured persons in Chiangmaiduring the 1960s and 1970s and then in the 1990s. They offera historical background of the religious beliefs and culturalnorms and practices in the area as they relate to injuries andredress. They review personal injury filings in the ChiangmaiProvincial Court and interview government officials, locallawyers, and insurance agents. In analyzing the shifts in legalconsciousness, the Engels use the data they collected toassess shifts in five elements of legal culture: space; conceptsof the self; community social networks and relationships;justice norms and procedures; and cosmology and religiousbeliefs. Based on these data and their analysis, the Engelsassert a decline in litigation rates and emphasize as a cause ofthis decline a shift in perceived causation from explanationsfocusing on themes important in villagers’ Buddhism—forexample, sacred centers, malevolent ghosts, fate, and nega-tive karma—to more “modern” but not necessarily legallyliberal themes like negligence. They suggest and dismissother possible causes for the decline, and then utilize thenarratives gathered from injured Thais to demonstrate theirperceptions of causation, redress, justice, and their legalconsciousness, and how those perceptions and understand-ings changed over a generation. They use this framework toevaluate how globalization and modernization have affectedconceptions of injury, causation, remedies, and justice andprovide suggestions as to how this research may be extendedto broaden our sociolegal understanding.

Shad KiddAlbuquerque, NM

THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF DEATH IN MEDI-EVAL JAPAN. By Karen M. Gerhart. Honolulu: Universityof Hawaii Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 258; plates. $39.00.

This study examines funeral manuals, courtier diaries,and illustrated handscroll biographies of noted Buddhistmonks to investigate funeral and memorial ritual amongJapanese elites in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.Drawing insights from art history, material culture, andritual studies, Gerhart adopts an innovative focus on ritualimplements, which—not being classified as “art”—havelargely escaped scholarly notice. Such implements, sheargues, were not mere visual enhancements to ritual butintegral to its structure and performance. She considersobjects for sequestering the dead, such as screens, shrouds,coffins, and burial and crematory enclosures; Buddhist ritualimplements such as canopies, censers, banners, and offeringvessels; and portraits of the deceased hung at funerals andmemorial services. This volume adds substantially to recentscholarship on the gradual adoption in medieval and earlymodern Japan of Chan (Zen)-style monastic funerals intro-duced from China. Gerhart illuminates key aspects of thisprocess, showing, for example, how Zen monks displacedyinyang masters in determining the schedule of funeraryevents for Kyoto elites and how the deceased’s portrait and

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memorial tablet, as supports for the dead person’s spirit,assumed an increasingly central place in mortuary rites.This study raises important questions about pollution con-cerns, changing concepts of the afterlife, and family religion,and a brief conclusion summarizing some of these broaderimplications would have underscored the significance ofGerhart’s findings. Her study otherwise provides rich mate-rial for readers interested in medieval Japanese religiousculture and Buddhist death practices.

Jacqueline StonePrinceton University

GANDHARAN AVADANAS: BRITISH LIBRARYKHAROSTHI

� �¯ FRAGMENTS 1-3 AND 21 AND

SUPPLEMENTARY FRAGMENTS A-C. By TimothyLenz. Gandharan Buddhist Texts, Vol. 6. Seattle: Universityof Washington Press, 2010. Pp. 192 + 58, illustrations.$85.00.

The Gandharan Buddhist Texts series offers editions,translations, and studies of the British Library’s collection ofBuddhist manuscripts written in the Gandharı language andin the Kharosthı script, which date from the first centuryCE. This volume examines four or five fragmentary scrollscontaining avadana-s, or stories, all written in the samehand—by the same monk, it seems, who wrote the series ofprevious-life stories that Lenz discussed in Gandharan Bud-dhist Texts, volume 3. The manuscript fragments comprisetwenty-one avadana-s, all tantalizingly brief. Most containlittle more than a title, a main character, and a skeletal plot,with instructions that the text should be expanded “accord-ing to the model.” These stories address a wide variety ofissues, from the disappearance of the Dharma to the historyof the first Buddhist Council after the Buddha’s nirvana, and(unlike later avadana-s) are less concerned with karma andits rewards. In a clear and concise fashion, Lenz explains thepaleography, phonology, and morphology of these storiesand then presents the reconstructed texts with a translationand commentary. Lenz also explores important questionsabout the early practice of Buddhism in India, puzzling overthe purpose of these writing exercises and the role ofavadanists, specialists in writing and reciting edifyingstories for Buddhist or would-be Buddhist audiences. Theseschematic stories are fascinating puzzles, rough drafts forBuddhist literature to come, and Lenz is an excellent guidefor making sense of them.

Andy RotmanSmith College

AN EARLY TIBETAN SURVEY OF BUDDHIST LIT-ERATURE: THE BSTAN PA RGYAS PA RGYAN GYINYI ’OD OF BCOM LDAN RAL GRI. By Kurtis Schaefferand Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp. Harvard Oriental Series,64. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.Pp. xi + 277. $45.00.

This long-awaited volume of the Harvard OrientalSeries, the first ever devoted to a Tibetan subject, makes a

very valuable contribution to the study of the formation ofthe Tibetan Buddhist canonical collections. The centerpieceof the book is an edition of an important survey of Buddhistliterature in Tibetan composed by Bcom ldan Rig pa’i ral gri(1227-1305), a learned Bka’ gdams pa master. The text pre-sented is a diplomatic edition of one of the two extant copies,with variants from the other provided in the apparatus. Each“entry” is supplemented by cross-references to the late-imperial Lhan/Ldan dkar catalog, the entries in the so-called“Catalog Section” of Bu ston’s History of Buddhism (Chos’byung), and the Tohoku catalog of the Sde dge xylographicBka’/Bstan ’gyur. The work is notable in that its fundamentalordering principle is the chronology of the translationsthemselves, in contrast with many of the other indigenousTibetan catalogs; and it provides a fascinating glimpse intoearly thirteenth-century Tibetan bibliography. The text isintroduced by a learned and well-documented essay thatconsiders the historical context of the work, similarexamples of the genre, and the role of Mongol patronage inTibetan efforts at canonical production. It is a signal contri-bution to a vital area of study and should be a readingrequired of anyone whose work involves the study of TibetanBuddhist literature.

Christian K. WedemeyerUniversity of Chicago

KLEINE SCHRIFTEN. By Oskar von Hinüber; edited byHarry Falk and Walter Slaje. Veroffentlichungen derGlasenapp-Stiftung, 47. 2 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,2009. Pp. liv + 1165. $267.00.

Neither the hefty price tag nor the appearance of beingin German (in fact, more than half the articles and a numberof the book reviews are in English) should obscure the factthat the publication of this two-volume collection of vonHinüber’s work is a major event in Buddhist Studies for theAnglophone scholarly community. No college or universitylibrary with a serious interest in Buddhism should bewithout these books. Some of the articles, to be sure, discussdetailed philological issues of Pali, Sanskrit, and variousdialects of Middle Indic, which will be accessible only tospecialists; but many also raise important wider issues, forexample, the nature of Buddhist Law, the nature and historyof Pali (“Pali as an Artificial Language,” “On the Tradition ofPali Texts in India, Ceylon and Burma”), “Origins andVariety of Buddhist Sanskrit,” “Old Age and Old Monks inPali Buddhism,” the date of the Buddha, and “Buddhism inGilgit Between India and Central Asia.” Von Hinüber’swriting is lucid and accessible. The volume features exten-sive indices.

Steven CollinsUniversity of Chicago

NAGARJUNA’S MADHYAMAKA: A PHILOSOPHI-CAL INTRODUCTION. By Jan Westerhoff. New York:Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 242. Cloth, $99.00;paper, $24.95.

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Westerhoff’s lucid overview considers Nagarjuna’sthought “from a systematic perspective,” taking the varioustexts attributed to Madhyamaka’s founder as “part of acoherent philosophical argument and [as] express[ing] aunified philosophical position.” Among other things, Wester-hoff illuminatingly attends to the varying senses ofsvabhava. The chief target of all of Nagarjuna’s arguments,svabhava, alternately picks out such arguably distinct ideasas “substance” and “essence.” Westerhoff notes a relatedconflation of distinct kinds of dependence relations (viz.,causal and notional), a conflation that can be seen, in Wester-hoff’s treatment of Nagarjuna on causation, as revealingwhat may be Madhyamaka’s principal concern. Thus, if themerely notional interdependence of cause and effect fails tocapture the asymmetry that characterizes causation (i.e., if it

is hard to see how one could think causes depend for theirexistence on their effects), the point looks different in light ofineliminable reference to someone’s perspective on theinstances of causation that can be in view. The very exist-ence of causes, then, may after all be at stake even givenmerely “notional” relations, as it is “our cognitive act ofcutting up the world of phenomena in the first place” thatnecessarily individuates the events that can be thought torequire causal explanation. While some may complain thatattributing a “systematic” project to Nagarjuna gives shortshrift to possible readings of him as an anti-systematicthinker, Westerhoff’s is a clear and cogent case for a philo-sophically sophisticated reading of Madhyamaka.

Dan ArnoldUniversity of Chicago

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