Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face: Scripture, Ritual, and Iconographic Exchange in Medieval China by Christine Mollier (review)

Abstract

176 Journal of Chinese Religions Wu Yun poses a Daoist solution to a dilemma familiar to practitioners of all religious systems: how to be in the world but not of it. Whether overturning incorrect but cherished truisms or simply elucidating difficult texts, De Meyer makes his own scholarly arguments in the only terms that would convince philologists, archival historians, Daoist exegetes, or poetry lovers: painstaking interpretation of primary texts in historical and social context. In terms of current scholarly developments, De Meyer’s work is located at the forefront of two important trends: one in Tang studies, the other in the history of the Daoist religion. Wu Yun’s Way is part of a remarkable explosion of interest in Tang studies that is taking place now, both inside and outside of China. The Tang has always enjoyed a grand reputation in China as a historical era of great wealth, territorial expansion, and cultural accomplishments. Everyone in China knows and reveres the Tang. In the recent past, when China was viewed as the “sick man of Asia,” or simply as an overpopulated and underdeveloped nation, nostalgia for the Tang had an apologetic or shameful tone. Today, with China’s hyper-development and rise as a superpower in the world economy, Chinese people remember the Tang with pride as a period comparable to the present. The perceived parallel between the Tang and modern eras is stimulating a whole new group of Tang research projects. De Meyer’s work is, I hope, an early portent of more great results yet to come. De Meyer’s work is also the culmination of the phenomenal revival of Daoist studies that has taken place, beginning in Europe and Japan and then spreading to the United States and China, since the middle of the twentieth century. Once despised as peasant superstition or as debased misunderstandings of the venerated thought of Laozi, Daoism has finally come into its own as a major world religion, worthy of serious scholarly attention in its own right. This is the kind of book one returns to over and over again as a reference, for its bibliography, and for its scholarly insight into the thinking and oeuvre of a man who was unique in his creativity but also representative of the elite Daoist thought and culture of his time. It is also a model of how to conduct research into the biography and writings of great figures from the Chinese past. Let us hope that more figures as compelling as Wu Yun come to light as scholars follow de Meyer’s disciplined and ambitious example. SUZANNE CAHILL, University of California, San Diego Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face: Scripture, Ritual, and Iconographic Exchange in Medieval China CHRISTINE MOLLIER. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. xi, 241 pages. ISBN 978-0-8248-3169-1. US$55.00 hardcover. The study of medieval Chinese religious history, for all its truly great progress in recent decades, remains largely split along lines provided by the normative claims of the major Book Reviews 177 religious traditions. Especially, scholars tend to think of themselves, and tend to be thought of by others, as adherents of either “Daoist Studies” or “Buddhist Studies” (and the vagueness of the modifiers in both cases is often notable). Despite the examples of historians such as Michel Strickmann and Erik Zürcher, who did serious work in both traditions, and in the connections between them, it is the rare volume, or conference panel, that brings together these two “sides” in a synthetic exploration of the religious culture of the period, or takes full account of the most up to date scholarship of both camps (to say nothing of all the other “sides,” such as the Manichean and Zoroastrian traditions nearly invisible in Western studies of the period). Of course, there are some understandable reasons why this specialization has come to rule the day: for one, mastery of the textual canons of either tradition alone (to say nothing of their manuscripts, epigraphy, and visual and material remains) is extremely demanding. Nevertheless, it is clear that the near-ghettoization of the study of Chinese religious history too often gets in the way of further progress in...