The Landscape of Words: Stone Inscriptions from Early and Medieval China by Robert E. Harrist, Jr (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 141 have other objects that signified flight and escape, such as a dragon-head staff that has a protruding tongue. Shao Tuo also possessed carved animal ornaments and wore clothes decorated with phoenixes. Interestingly, within the tomb there is also a sculpture that has a man standing on a bird’s head, as well as pieces of four chariots. The three appendices are particularly valuable since they contain carefully annotated translations of the divination and grave goods inventory texts that were buried in Baoshan tombs numbers 1 and 2. Without a doubt, this is a well-crafted and conceived study that furnishes us with a vivid example of how Warring States period nobles envisioned death and the tomb’s function. However, the author does not clinch her argument that the tomb was merely a way-station to the heavens. Since tombs were structured to be microcosms of the cosmos, it could well be that the grave goods ear-marked for travel were meant for journeys that would be solely conducted within the tomb and that the heavens themselves existed near the crypt’s ceiling. Despite this lingering doubt, the book offers a dizzying array of insights into early Chinese views of illness, death, and the afterlife; as a result, it is an invaluable resource for all students of Chinese religion. KEITH N. KNAPP, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina The Landscape of Words: Stone Inscriptions from Early and Medieval China ROBERT E. HARRIST, JR. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008. xi, 397 pages. ISBN 978-0-295-98728-6. US$60.00, £34.00, hardcover. First-time visitors to any of China’s so-called famous mountains (mingshan 名山) are always surprised at the ubiquitous presence of writing on almost every flat, rocky surface in sight, especially at lower, more accessible locations. These inscriptions, called moya 摩崖 or moya shike 摩崖石刻 in Chinese, are not only a distinguishing characteristic of China’s betterknown mountains, but also—as amply demonstrated by Robert E. Harrist, Jr., in The Landscape of Words: Stone Inscriptions from Early and Medieval China—an essential feature of Chinese civilization itself. Composed by everyone from emperors and officials to pilgrims and tourists, moya writings are essential elements in defining the cultural geography of China. This is because many visitors to China’s mingshan do not ascend these heights “simply because they are there.” Rather, the more serious and conscientious (and, of course, literate) climber would actually read his way up the mountain. That is to say, during his ascent the climber would 142 Journal of Chinese Religions stop to inspect various inscriptions cut into rocks and walls, and thereby gather information on previous visitors, when and why his predecessors came to the mountain, and what they had to say in their inscriptions (when appropriate, connoisseur-climbers would also admire an inscription’s calligraphic beauty). Of course, in traditional China humans interacted with mountains in many different ways: some wrote poems or travel accounts, others sometimes took up residence in monasteries, and some even lived in caves. So, composing and then inscribing words on the mountain’s physical face was just one way of interacting with its environment. However, as Harrist convincingly demonstrates throughout his new book, it is an important one because the dynamic nature of this interactive process of new visitors “interacting” in situ with former ones in many ways affected how mountains were understood in traditional China and how the people who visited and wrote about them understood themselves. The Landscape of Words covers the history of moya inscriptions from the first through the eighth centuries (that is, late Han through High Tang), and it is the first study in English devoted exclusively to this form of writing. Harrist’s main focus is how inscriptions cut in stone relate to the landscape environments and historical contexts in which they were produced. With this goal in mind, the author concentrates on a select group of key moya sites in Shaanxi and Shandong and, drawing on materials from social, religious, political, and literary history, presents his description and analysis through a series of “journeys to the locations of four very different types of texts from different...