How Buddhism Acquired a Soul on the Way to China by Jungnok Park (review)

Abstract

occasionally. It is, however, surprising that Vetter does not include important research tools such as Soothill’s Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms and Nakamura’s Bukky ogo Daijiten. As far as the arrangement of entries is concerned, in Vetter’s work each entry begins with one front character, while more complex terms consisting of more than one character are listed as subentries. Vetter arranges the entries based on numeric figures defining the front character. This is done in the style also seen in the glossary by Konrad and Marion Meisig (radical number placed at the beginning, number of strokes of the remaining part of the character placed after a comma). Subsequent to those figures, Vetter provides the romanization of the front character. It is first given in pinyin, and—if the character is covered by Unger—in Unger’s transcription system as well. If the Chinese terms Vetter discusses have Sanskrit or P ali equivalents, Vetter names them as well adding a superscript S for Sanskrit or a superscript P for P ali. In conclusion it can be said that, for scholars explicitly working with texts of the ASC, Vetter’s work will certainly be very useful. Those who rather work with Buddhist Chinese on a broader level might in many cases still profit from Vetter’s work as well, but would probably more frequently find relevant references in the glossary by Konrad and Marion Meisig. THOMAS JÜLCH Ghent University JUNGNOK PARK, How Buddhism Acquired a Soul on the Way to China. Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies Monographs. Sheffield: Equinox, 2012. x, 246 pp.£19.99 (pbk). ISBN 978-1-84553-997-9 Since the seminal studies of Chinese Buddhism produced by Kenneth Ch’en and Erik Zürcher some fifty years ago, it has become common knowledge among Western Buddhologists that early Chinese Buddhists upheld the idea of an eternal soul transmigrating through sam : s ara.12 This idea directly contradicts the traditional Indian Buddhist teaching of an atman, according to which sentient beings are aggregates of interdependent, evanescent elements, and this is one reason why modern scholars have often declared that Chinese Buddhists initially misunderstood the fundamental tenets of their religion. Jungnok Park’s How Buddhism Acquired a Soul on the Way to China makes a valuable contribution to the field of Buddhist studies in detailing precisely how and why early Buddhist translators interpolated the notion of an imperishable soul, and how subsequent Chinese traditions elaborated this notion. The thrust of Park’s argument is that Buddhist translation teams of the third and fourth centuries employed Chinese terms that had essentialist connotations, especially shen 神 and related 12 Ch’en, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 46–47; Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China (Leiden: Brill, 1959), 11–12. BOOK REVIEWS 73 compounds, which led Chinese readers to assume in Indian Buddhist thought a unitary agent of cognition that perdured through endless rounds of rebirth. Park amasses considerable textual evidence to back up this argument, and along the way he provides informative, in-depth accounts of Chinese and Indian Buddhist conceptions of the ‘‘self.’’ But in adopting the ‘‘Sinification’’ model of his Buddhological predecessors, according to which Chinese Buddhist traditions are deemed ‘‘distortions’’ of ‘‘original’’ Indian teachings, Park undermines his project of examining Chinese Buddhist teachings in the context of Chinese religion and culture. This book is divided into three parts, which focus on Chinese Buddhist translation methods, Indian Buddhist doctrines of ‘‘non-self,’’ and Chinese Buddhist notions of an imperishable soul. Chapter 1 details the constitution, procedures, and principles of early Chinese Buddhist translation teams, which on the whole ‘‘aimed to attract Chinese readers’ interest rather than to maintain literal accuracy to the Indian originals’’ (p. 14). For this reason, according to Park, ‘‘the personal opinions of the translators easily gained the authority of Buddhist truth,’’ as early Chinese versions of Buddhist scriptures like the Amb as :t :ha-s utra teemed with ‘‘extreme interpolations and distortions,’’ including the notion of an eternal soul, that contradicted Indian Buddhist teachings (p. 36). In chapter 2, Park discusses the traditional attribution of this...