Reviewed by: Chinese and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism ed. by Yael Bentor and Meir Shahar Geoffrey C. Goble Yael Bentor and Meir Shahar, eds., Chinese and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. xii, 450 pp. €125 (HB). ISBN 978-90-04-34049-7 Chinese and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism is an ambitious and promising volume that is exciting for several reasons. In addition to its stated purpose of considering the vast sweep of ritual technologies, soteriologies, and ontologies that fall under the rubric of Esoteric Buddhism, the volume also implicitly promises to reorient the commonplace association of Chinese and Japanese articulations of Esoteric Buddhism by instead considering Tibetan and Chinese Esoteric Buddhist traditions side by side. Consisting of seventeen individual essays grouped into seven parts, the book contains material that ranges temporally from the eighth century to the present day, and geographically from the Chinese Tang Dynasty, to the Dali Kingdom of presentday Yunnan, to Tibet, and the Western Xia. Part 1 of the volume consists of three essays concerning the origins of Esoteric Buddhism as read through Chinese materials. Charles Orzech reads eighth-century tantric ritual as performances that shape individual subjectivities through scripted liturgical actions of purification and confession in addition to visualizations, mudra performances, and mantra recitations. Heinrich Sørensen traces the development of Esoteric Buddhism “prior to the comprehensive structural and institutional formations reflected in the tradition associated with” Śubhākarasiṃha 善無畏, Vajrabodhi 金剛智, and Amoghavajra 不空 (p. 43). Lü Jianfu’s contribution similarly seeks to trace the emergence of “Esoteric” or “Tantric Buddhism” by tracking the shifting semantic meanings of the terms “esoteric teaching” (mijiao 密教) and “Tantra” (variously transliterated) in Chinese scriptural sources. Part 2 of the book, with contributions by Robert Sharf, Lin Pei-ying, and Meir Shahar, addresses Esoteric Buddhism in relation to other Chinese religious traditions. Sharf studiedly eschews the label “esoteric Buddhism” in favor of “Buddhist Veda”, a term he adopts in order to signal his interpretation of Chinese Esoteric Buddhism as a Brahmanicized ritual technology rather than a “tradition set apart by its distinctive teachings” (p. 86). This ritual technology, he argues, was characterized in part by the use of mantra and spell incantations, master-disciple transmissions, the trope of the luminous mind, precept altars (or mandalas), and a large pantheon of deities that informed the subsequent development of the indigenous Chan tradition. Lin Pei-ying identifies a number of elements in the Śubhākarasiṃha’s Essentials of Meditation (Wuwei sanzang chanyao 無畏三藏禪要; T 917) that are continuous with “Northern” Chan ideas and concludes that there was a “doctrinal affiliation between the Chan school and Esoteric Buddhism” (p. 144). Meir Shahar demonstrates the influence of Tantric Buddhism on Daoism and popular Chinese literature through a case study of Hayagrīva Avalokiteśvara, the Horse-headed Avalokiteśvara. [End Page 71] Part 3 contains essays addressing Tantric Buddhist scriptures in the Tibetan context by Dan Martin, Eran Laish, and Yael Bentor. Martin’s contribution is a consideration of the gya-log teachings of Padampa Sangye, teachings that generally involve stating the opposite of the intended meaning, or, as Martin presents it, teachings predicated on presumed unexpected causal relationships between internal practices and external results and vice versa; for example, “the basis of disease gets turned into one of the [seven] elements of the healthy body” (p. 203). Eran Laish takes the assertion of a non-dual, primordially pure (ka-dag) reality in Tantric texts as a fundamental challenge to the “prevailing Buddhist view” that sees consciousness as a state of delusion requiring purification and Yael Bentor’s essay is a study of how the practice of body maṇḍalas (the divinization or realization of the divinization of the body through tantric saddhana, emplacing or realizing deities within the body) was variously understood through their representation in polemical writings from the Sakya and Geluk traditions of the eleventh through the fifteenth century. Part 4 of the volume consists of essays by Shen Weirong and Ester Bianchi, whose contributions concern Tibetan Buddhism in China during the Ming Dynasty and the eighteenth to nineteenth century, respectively. Shen’s essay, a study of Chinese Ming Dynasty texts demonstrated to be translations from Tibetan...
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Dec 27, 2023
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