Reviewed by: The Zhenzheng lun by Xuanyi: A Buddhist Apologetic Scripture of Tang China by Thomas Jülch Nicholas Morrow Williams The Zhenzheng lun by Xuanyi: A Buddhist Apologetic Scripture of Tang China. By Thomas Jülch. Monumenta Serica Monograph Series LXX. London: Routledge, 2019. ISBN 9780367182854. Hardback £120.00; paperback £36.00. Over the past decade Thomas Jülch has illuminated the interrelations of religious traditions in medieval China through a steady stream of exceptionally helpful publications. Apart from his numerous articles and book chapters, his magnum opus is the three-volume study Bodhisattva der Apologetik: Die Mission des buddhistischen Tang-Mönchs Falin.1 This work contains a long critical introduction followed by extensive annotated translations, encompassing a large fraction of the extant works of the monk Falin 法琳 (572–640), as well as important biographical materials setting his writings in context. The writings of Falin, in particular the twelve-chapter Bianzheng lun 辯正論, are valuable for their early-Tang perspective on the key tenets of Buddhism and their relation to Confucianism and Daoism. Jülch's scrupulous translation of these writings provides an unparalleled survey of the religious configuration of the times and is essential scholarship. A hallmark of all Jülch's work is the annotated translation of writings previously untranslated into any Western language. In the book under review, he sets out to translate another difficult work of Buddhist apologetic from the Tang, in this case the Zhenzheng lun 甄正論 (T 2112). Jülch translates the title, "Treatise on Revealing the Correct," which seems unobjectionable but may not capture the precise connotation intended, a point to which I return below. The treatise in three juan is attributed to the monk Xuanyi 玄嶷, the clerical name adopted by one Du Yi 杜義, and seems to have been composed right after Empress Wu's founding of the Zhou in the years 690 to 694, as has been demonstrated previously in an excellent study by Antonello Palumbo.2 Substantively, the work is a polemic directed against Lingbao Daoism, and as such is singularly interesting as a document of interreligious conflict at a pivotal moment in Chinese history. Jülch's introduction to the translation is briefer than the reader might wish. While it does cover the essential background regarding the Zhenzheng lun itself, a large part of it recapitulates the content of Palumbo's study while accepting his [End Page 184] conclusions. It would have been worth reprinting Palumbo's article in its entirety if that were possible, since his more detailed study of the lively context of Empress Wu's rise to power is well worth reading in tandem with this monograph. Nor does the introduction go into much depth on the relation between this and other medieval apologetic works. This is regrettable particularly since the author is a leading expert on the genre, though it is true that he has already surveyed the earlier development of the genre in the introduction to Bodhisattva der Apologetik (see especially pp. 77–97, identifying eleven core arguments of Buddhist apologetics). In general, the work under review must be seen as a pendant to that more ambitious achievement. Even in its regrettably brief confines of the introduction, Jülch does make several important points. He notes the documentary value of the Zhenzheng lun for the history of Daoism, since in the course of critique it quotes from numerous Daoist scriptures and even identifies the otherwise-unknown authors of some works. He also discusses the parallel between Falin and Xuanyi, both of whom were apostate Daoists whose knowledge of Daoism came from personal experience. Finally, Jülch offers a tantalizing comparison between the Zhenzheng lun and anti-Jewish polemics of medieval Europe, which shared some propagandistic techniques. One point that the comparison helps to clarify is how Buddhist apologetics rarely denounced Daoism wholesale: the emphasis in the Zhenzheng lun, for instance, is on the false nature of the Lingbao scriptures in particular, leaving earlier Daoist doctrines aside. Buddhist apologetics often sought to assimilate Laozi, in particular, into the Daoist tradition, reversing the legend of "Laozi converting the barbarians" 老子化胡 to portray Laozi as a disciple of the Buddha who had taught a simplified version of Buddhism in...