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Art by the Book. Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China

Asv́aghosạ Bodhisattva” (App. 1, pp. 251–263), “The Canonical Tradition of [Ārya]Deva Bodhisattva” (App. 2, pp. 265–282), and “The Ritual Manuals of Asv́aghosạ Bodhisattva” (App. 3, pp. 283–290). Possible points of critique at this excellently written treatise is that it is sometimes so densely written – both regarding argumentative style as well as layout and font – that it can hurt the eye. The latter can, of course, not be held against the author, but it would have been fortunate for an uninitiated reader, who does not share Young’s immense learning in Indian and medieval Chinese Buddhism, to have a concise introduction into the lives and works of Asv́aghosạ, Nāgārjuna, and Āryadeva. Their “actual” biographies (even though, after reading this book, one may be convinced that such a thing does not exist) should have been introduced at the beginning. Young, however, decides to delay the discussion of their lives until he reaches the appendix. Each chapter also seems to have been conceived (no pun intended) as a separate article, which causes some repetitions, not only of aspects of the argument but also of Chinese characters after their first occurrence. Apostrophes are notoriously missing from the transcriptions of Chinese names (e.g., Daoan instead of Dao’an 道安). As the last point: Acknowledgments are a hugely difficult and underrated genre in academic publishing, and those by Young belong to the best this author has read in a long while. He does not just list names and thank them generically for their support, but relates a personal anecdote for each of them, which is sometimes cryptic, but humorous even to those who are not familiar with the circumstances. To summarize: Stuart H. Young’s Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China adds a new and hitherto unexplored chapter to the fascinating stories and histories of early Buddhism in China. It opens up new trajectories for the study of a wide range of topics regarding medieval China, not only of Buddhism and religion but also of matters of ethnicity and cultural identity, the Self and the Other. Young successfully breaks free from the one-hundred-year-old dispute about “Sinification of Buddhism” (Kenneth K.S. Ch’en, Peter N. Gregory) versus “Indianization of China” (Hu Shih). He shows the imagery and appropriation of India in early medieval China in religion, philosophy, art, and literature as a conscious and multifaceted process. That process created an entirely new and heightened sense of cultural self-awareness on the side of the Chinese out of the images that were transmitted to China from India over the course of a millennium.