BOOK REVIEWS

Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China. By STUART H. YOUNG. Kuroda

Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism Series. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i
Press, 2015. Pp. x1342. $60.00.
The various canonical collections of Sinitic Buddhist texts, which contain hundreds
of Indic Buddhist texts in Chinese translation as well as recorded accounts of oral tra-
ditions brought to China by South and Central Asian missionary monks, are extremely
valuable resources for studying the history of Indian Buddhism. Yet often in traditional
Buddhological scholarship these texts have been treated primarily as windows into the
world of Indian Buddhism, with the circumstances through which they were translated,
recorded, or composed by Chinese authors to address the concerns of a Chinese audi-
ence given only superficial consideration. Fortunately, as the engagement between Bud-
dhologists and scholars of Chinese religion has increased in recent decades, new studies
have emerged to correct such earlier methodological oversights, examining more closely
the processes through which these texts came to be rendered in Chinese and placing
them within their proper historical and social contexts. Conceiving the Indian Buddhist
Patriarchs in China represents an important addition to this growing body of scholar-
ship.
In this work, Stuart Young traces the development of the closely related Chinese
hagiographical traditions of three Indian patriarchs—Aśvaghoṣa, Nāgārjuna, and Ārya-
deva—across a broad range of medieval Chinese sources, including hagiographical writ-
ings, indigenous scriptures and treatises, ritual manuals, and material objects such as steles
and wall paintings. Rather than focusing on questions of historicity or querying these
sources for information about developments in Indian Buddhism, Young instead seeks
to understand what these portrayals of Indian patriarchs can tell us about Chinese Bud-
dhists’ changing understanding of their own tradition during the formative years of the first
millennium CE. Two important themes emerge from this analysis: first, the close interrela-
tionship between Chinese Buddhists’ self-perception and their portrayal of their Indian

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History of Religions 307

others; and second, the unique mutability of the category of “Indian Buddhist patriarchs”
within the Chinese religious imagination.
As Young demonstrates, Chinese sources often depicted these patriarchs in ways that
mirrored contemporary concerns. His analysis of the development of their hagiographies
centers around three different periods in the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism. In
chapter 1, Young examines the earliest accounts of these patriarchs found in works con-
nected to the prolific Central Asian translator Kumārajīva (344 – 413 CE) and his circle
of Chinese disciples. Chapter 2 focuses on fifth- and sixth-century sources that contain
the earliest instances of Chinese Buddhist discourse on the concept of an Indian Buddhist
patriarchal lineage (within which Aśvaghoṣa, Nāgārjuna, and Āryadeva were incorpo-
rated). In chapter 3, Young turns to the sixth through eighth centuries, examining new
accounts of these patriarchs that were produced in the context of the reunification of
China under the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–944) empires.
At each of these moments, Young argues that the portrayals of these three figures—
particularly the historical contexts within which they were framed and the repertoires of
practices with which they were associated—reflect the circumstances and agendas of their
authors. Thus, in fourth- and fifth-century sources, written by elite scholar-monks with strong
interests in meditation and scriptural exegesis during a time when Chinese Buddhists were
highly preoccupied with the notion of the cyclical decline of the Buddhist dharma,
these patriarchs were depicted as experts in meditation and exegesis, who through such
practices helped to preserve and propagate the dharma during dark times. Sources from
the fifth and sixth centuries, a time during which Chinese Buddhists witnessed several sig-
nificant persecutions of their religion at the hands of anti-Buddhist rulers, emphasized
the role that these patriarchs played as valuable advisers to Indian monarchs. During the
Sui and Tang, when Buddhist institutions enjoyed increased state support and native
forms of Chinese Buddhism flourished, hagiographical sources emphasized the continu-
ity and vibrancy of the Indian patriarchal lineage that was transmitted to China, and con-
tinued the portrayal of eminent Buddhist monks as valuable assets to the state.
After this chronological survey of the development of hagiographical portrayals of
Aśvaghoṣa, Nāgārjuna, and Āryadeva, Young turns in subsequent chapters to individual
discussions of the multiple representations of Aśvaghoṣa and Nāgārjuna within other types
of sources, such as ritual manuals and indigenous scriptures, that build upon themes intro-
duced in the hagiographical materials discussed in the earlier chapters. Chapter 4 exam-
ines Nāgārjuna’s multiple roles as thaumaturge, alchemist, Pure Land patriarch, and bo-
dhisattva; chapter 5 focuses on Aśvaghoṣa’s role as a kind of Buddhist patron deity of
sericulture, as well as—like Nāgārjuna—a powerful bodhisattva whose powers could
be accessed through worship and ritual invocation. In chapter 6, Young synthesizes the
material presented in these two chapters to consider the unique role that Indian patriar-
chal figures have played in the Chinese religious imagination.
Chinese Buddhists saw Aśvaghoṣa, Nāgārjuna, and Āryadeva as historical figures who
maintained and advanced the Buddhist teachings in the centuries after the death of the
Buddha Śākyamuni through their activities and their authorship of commentaries and
treatises that were highly influential in the development of Chinese Buddhist doctrines.
In this role, they served as exemplars for elite Chinese scholar-monks and as symbols for
the continuity of Indian Buddhism and the prehistory of Buddhism in China. At the same
time, due in part to the very same hagiographical depictions that portrayed them as hav-
308 Book Reviews

ing attained great power through their practice of meditation and deep understanding of
Buddhist doctrine, they were represented in other sources as immanent bodhisattvas who
served as objects of veneration and whose powers could be invoked through ritual meth-
ods, much in the same way as local Chinese deities. Thus, Young argues, multiple models
of “Buddhist sainthood” existed simultaneously in medieval China, each corresponding
to slightly different (but often overlapping) repertoires of religious practice, and invoked in
different contexts in service of differing goals. Patriarchs occupied a unique position within
the Chinese Buddhist imagination: their humanity made them close enough to be relat-
able, yet their high status and great accomplishments made them distant enough to be
venerable.
This consideration of how factors of space and time played into Chinese Buddhists’
understanding of these Indian figures is one of the more interesting aspects of Young’s
analysis. For Chinese Buddhists of the third and fourth centuries, these patriarchs’ tem-
poral distance from the historical Buddha, understood within the framework of the cy-
clical rise and decline of the Buddhist dharma, allowed them to serve as models for Chi-
nese Buddhists who felt similarly distanced from the Buddha and who saw their own
struggles reflected in the patriarchs’ efforts to preserve and revivify the dharma. On the
other hand, for Buddhists of the Sui and Tang period this same temporal distance, con-
ceived now according to the paradigm of a linear patriarchal transmission of the dharma,
provided reassurance that the Buddha’s teachings retained their vibrancy well after the
Buddha had departed, and consequently that the dharma transmitted to China was just
as strong—if not stronger—than it was during Śākyamuni’s lifetime.
Similarly, the spatial distance of these patriarchs—their “Indianness”—figured into
the different roles in which different Chinese sources cast them. Viewed as exemplary
scholar-monks, their status as representatives of the Indian tradition lent authority to
their writings and sanctified their activities as worthy models for their latter-day Chinese
counterparts to emulate. When understood as immanent divinities and sources of ritual
power, their Indianness gave these patriarchs a competitive edge over native deities in
the eyes of Chinese Buddhists. Writing in the conclusion that “members of the Bud-
dhist sangha were the only medieval Chinese religionists to instantiate repertoires of In-
dianness” (243), Young analyzes the various depictions of these Indian patriarchs as a
means of understanding how and why Chinese Buddhists constructed “Indianness” as
something that was at once both foreign and yet at the same time essential to their
own identities, and how this construction shaped and was shaped by developments
in Chinese Buddhist theory and practice, as well as changing social and historical cir-
cumstances during the medieval period.
Young’s survey of the various permutations of these Indian patriarchs’ identities
throughout medieval Chinese sources is thorough and philologically sound, with an
exhaustive attention to detail that will appeal to specialists in Buddhism and Chinese
religion. Yet there is also much in Young’s work to recommend to scholars of the his-
tory of religions in general, particularly his larger inquiry into the means by which Chi-
nese Buddhists negotiated their own identities through the practices of historiography
and biography, and his elucidation of the different models of Buddhist sainthood in
medieval China. Young also deserves praise for his demonstration of the methodolog-
ical importance of engaging Chinese Buddhist sources on their own terms, and of rec-
History of Religions 309

ognizing that, in addition to their potential usefulness as historical materials for the
study of Buddhism in India, the importance of Chinese writings on Indian Buddhism
as evidence of the Chinese religious imagination should not be overlooked.

JOSHUA CAPITANIO
Stanford University

The Ethnographic State: France and the Invention of Moroccan Islam. By EDMUND
BURKE III. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Pp. 288. $49.95 (cloth).
Edmund Burke’s The Ethnographic State: France and the Invention of Moroccan
Islam examines the intertwined process of the creation of a French colonial archive and
the establishment of Moroccan Islam. Burke’s work traces the genealogy of the nation-
ally determined form of this universal religion through an analysis of the French co-
lonial archive in the preprotectorate and early protectorate eras that, he argues, was
responsible for the creation and consolidation of Moroccan Islam. According to Burke,
this unique form of Islam developed not with the spread of the religion to the region
but rather it emerged from French discourse on the country, which was heavily influ-
enced by British colonial archive of India and French experiences and academic stud-
ies of Algeria, Tunisia, and West Africa. French works on Morocco were also affected
by events in France itself, such as the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, the Drey-
fus affair, and increasing anticlericalism. By framing Moroccan Islam as a practice with
a history, one that emerged within the particular context of French colonial knowledge
and practices, Burke demonstrates that the perceived continuity in Moroccan religious
practices and political systems from the precolonial through the postcolonial eras are in
reality a product of the French colonial archive.
Central to the specific practice of Islam within Morocco are the multiple titles and
roles played by the monarch, who acts as sultan (political ruler), khalifa (religious ruler),
and imam (religious leader and leader of Friday prayers). Moroccan Islam is also char-
acterized by what Burke refers to as the “magico-religious powers” held by the sultan
and select holy individuals of bakara (blessings from God) and sukhta (the ability to
curse enemies) (2). Religious and political power, then, are embodied in the position of
the monarch, which Burke points to as a central reason why Morocco has successfully
maintained a monarchy while other monarchs in the Muslim world have dissipated.
The first section of Burke’s study, “Ethnographic Morocco,” provides an overview
of the formation of a French sociology of Islam from the conquest of Egypt through the
establishment of the Moroccan Protectorate and details the power struggles over the
creation and control of the Moroccan archive. Unlike the scholarly writings, or “colonial
archives,” produced in Algeria and India, which were designed to produce a breadth of
knowledge about these countries, those of Morocco were produced alongside an ex-
panding military presence and were designed for the sole purpose of facilitating colonial
rule. Prior to 1900 there was a relative absence of information on Morocco produced
by the French, with most foreign writings on the nation coming from British authors.
This was followed by a period of proliferation of French writing on the country. It is