Numen 63 (2016) 607–629

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Book Reviews

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Stuart Young
Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China. (Kuroda Institute Studies in
East Asian Buddhism Series). Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. 2014. viii +
338 pp. isbn 9780824841201.

In just the last few years, a string of studies have been published that explore
how medieval Chinese Buddhists understood, imagined, and constructed
India as the source of Buddhist knowledge, authority, and authenticity.1 Stuart
Young’s contribution to this growing area of scholarship focuses on one aspect
of the overall question, specifically examining the medieval Chinese represen-
tations of the Indian patriarchs Nāgārjuna, Aśvaghoṣa, and Āryadeva. Exploring
how writings about the patriarchs can be read as evidence of contestation and
negotiation between particular social groups, Young’s work helps us to develop
more nuanced understandings of the changes over time in the reception and
adaptation of Buddhist ideas, language, imagery, narratives, and practices, and
the strategic value such changes had for medieval Chinese authors.
The book contains an introduction that positions Young’s scholarship
in current historiographic trends, followed by six chapters. The first three
of these trace chronological shifts in how the patriarchs were “conceived”
(by which Young means both received and recreated) in China over the course
of the medieval period. Between the fourth and seventh centuries, these patri-
archs were transformed in succession into paragons of Buddhist practice and
scholarship, model Chinese scholar-officials, crucial links in genealogies of
Dharmic transmission, and, ultimately, imminent deities that revealed them-
selves to devotees. The fourth and fifth chapters turn to examine in more detail
representations of Nāgārjuna as an alchemist, thaumaturge, and divinity, as
well as Aśvaghoṣa’s career as patron saint of the silkworm industry. The sixth
and final chapter compares the three patriarchs with various other classes of

1 Recent publications include Kieschnick and Shahar 2013, Lin and Radich 2014, and my own
2014 contribution.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/15685276-12341440

608 Book Reviews

Buddhist deities and heroes and identifies their unique features as exemplars
and objects of devotion. The book finishes with a short summarizing conclu-
sion, three appendices containing translations of texts related to Aśvaghoṣa
and Āryadeva, as well as references and an index.
Broadly speaking, I found Young’s book to fit well with the currently prevalent
approach to the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism. Perhaps argued most
explicitly in Robert Sharf’s Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), it is now the mainstream opinion among
scholars that Chinese sources should be used predominantly for the analysis
of domestic Chinese forms of Buddhism rather than as “looking-glasses” onto
a normative Indian tradition. Young acknowledges that we are not always sure
if particular Chinese texts about the patriarchs are translations, apocrypha, or
some combination of the two, but, in all cases, he is less interested in treating
these as materials to mine in the service of reconstructing Indian Buddhist
intellectual and doctrinal history (as previous scholars have usually done) than
in taking them on their own terms as windows onto domestic Chinese social,
cultural, and discursive contexts.
Underpinning Young’s analysis in this book is a particular model of
culture — and, consequently, of cross-cultural exchange — that is worth high-
lighting here. Although he does not cite her directly, Young uses the language
of “repertoires” and “toolkits” developed by the sociologist Anne Swidler in
her landmark 1986 article “Culture in Action” and popularized in subsequent
publications.2 This model has been increasingly influential of late in the study
of Chinese religion, largely due to Robert Ford Campany’s use of it in his work
on hagiography and narrative.3 In this particular conceptualization, “Indian
culture” and “Chinese culture” are seen not as discrete entities that influence
or impact one another, but instead as enacted repertoires of strategies that
are actively mobilized and performed by historical actors in specific histori-
cal contexts. Thus, rather than paint a picture of cross-cultural exchange as
an encounter between or as the hybridization of Indian and Chinese cultures
per se, Young instead speaks of repertoires of Indianness forming “part of the
‘toolkit’ of cultural resources upon which Chinese authors could draw as they
worked to define the patriarchs and themselves, particularly as juxtaposed
with competing religious traditions” (p. 13).
This approach to culture has a number of appealing factors, not least of
all that it encourages the historian to notice the individual agency of his-
torical actors as they actively fashion and refashion themselves and situate

2  Swidler 1986. See also Swidler 2001.

3  See, especially, Campany 2009, 2012.

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themselves within their cultural worlds. Young’s book goes into many specific
examples of the creative uses of repertoires of Indianness for the purposes of
social contestation that I cannot adequately summarize here. I will mention
just two examples. First, as he argues in chapter 1, by highlighting the Indian
patriarchs’ involvement in scholarship, meditation, and treatise-writing,
medieval Chinese authors were able to paint those pursuits as foreign and, by
extension, exert a claim of Buddhist ownership over them — at the expense,
of course, of Daoist and Confucian claims to the same. Second, he identifies a
similar rhetorical strategy in chapter 5, showing how Chinese authors recon-
ceived silk-making as an ancient technology invented in India and protected
by Aśvaghoṣa.
These are two examples of the strategic use of repertoires of Indianness to
forward specific discursive positions, and Young uses Swidler’s toolkit model
productively here to highlight the creativity, ingenuity, and local social rele-
vance of these acts of appropriation. However, to my mind, what is equally
interesting in any story of cross-cultural exchange are the limits to the agency
of the receivers and repackagers. Young rightly points out that medieval
Chinese Buddhist authors were not simply free to recreate the patriarchs willy-
nilly however they wished. Cultural repertoires, he tells us, were “forged over
time within a given community” and often came with a “predetermined range
of meanings and relations, as defined over many generations” (p. 14). In the
case of the patriarchs, he tells us, limits on their representation were estab-
lished via complex connections between hagiography, scripture, commen-
taries, ritual practices, and sacred spaces. Perhaps one of the clearest cases
of limits is where economic factors curtailed the agency of Buddhist authors
and obligated them to bring the Buddhist commitment to nonviolence into
some sort of compromise with the all-important Chinese sericulture industry.
The solution by which a mutual symbiosis was reached — reframing the mass
killing of silkworms as a compassionate act that facilitated the completion of
bodhisattva vows — is an ingenious solution that creatively avoided the poten-
tially catastrophic economic consequences for Buddhist institutions of finding
themselves opposed to the economic engine of the empire. This is perhaps
the most compelling example in the book about how “conception” involves a
dialectic between the agency of authors and the impinging structures of the
social worlds they inhabit.
Young’s observations about the limitations of conception left this particular
reader curious about how far we might press the question. In my view, advo-
cates of Swidler’s conception of culture sometimes have a tendency to flatten
out somewhat the larger power structures and geopolitical realities that can
play major roles in local instantiations of cultural production and exchange.

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(Swidler herself in her seminal article spends much time discussing how such
forces — she mentions churches, large corporations, market forces, and the
bureaucratic state specifically — impinge upon individual strategies and
repertoires.) For example, while Young successfully outlines major shifts in
Chinese representations of the patriarchs in the medieval period and shows
in detail how these relate to the domestic Chinese social context, he does not
explore as thoroughly what connection those developments might have with
the concomitant realignment of regional economic and political power struc-
tures over the same period. It is probably significant that Chinese exegetes were
representing China as a “soteriological hinterland far removed from [India]” in
the fifth and sixth centuries during the peak of India’s dominance of the Indian
Ocean commercial networks and the fragmentation of the Chinese empire
(p. 150), whereas in the expansionist and economically resurgent Sui-Tang
period, India was being “localized in China, which was increasingly repre-
sented as a new center of Buddhist civilization” (p. 151).4 It seems to me that, in
the former period, China perhaps fits Swidler’s pattern of “unsettled periods,”
which she argues are marked by social transformation and the rise of powerful
new ideologies, while the latter represents a “settled period” of greater socio-
economic stability and increasing individual agency in selecting from available
cultural repertoires. I wonder if Young would agree with this analysis and, if so,
how pursuing these lines of inquiry might add a transregional or even global
context to the domestic Chinese story he tells in the book.
Of course, what I have just mentioned is a huge topic that most likely
deserves a separate study unto itself, and my raising these issues is in no
way meant to detract from the value of Young’s work closely examining the
domestic side of the reception question. Because of its careful attention to
the local Chinese detail, this book will find a ready audience among scholars
of Chinese Buddhist Studies and Chinese Religions more generally. However,
I also think it deserves to be read more widely by scholars across the field of
religious studies. I have it on good authority that Young’s next major project will
be a detailed study of the relationship between Buddhism and silk in China,
so I am sure he will have plenty to say on the interface between cultural rep-
resentations, sociopolitical power, and macroeconomics in the near future.5
For now, I congratulate Young on having done a masterful job of exploring the

4  On these larger geopolitical shifts, see, for example, Sen 2003.

5  As heard in Young’s interview with the “New Books in Buddhist Studies” podcast. “Stuart
Young: Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China.” New Books Network. 2015.
http://newbooksnetwork.com/stuart-young-conceiving-the-indian-buddhist-patriarchs-in-
china-u-of-hawaii-press-2014/ (accessed 7 January 2016).

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representations of the three patriarchs in the domestic Chinese context, and I

look forward to reading more of his insightful scholarship in the future.

C. Pierce Salguero
Penn State University
salguero@psu.edu

References

Campany, Robert F. 2009. Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early
Medieval China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i.
―――. 2012. Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval
China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Kieschnick, John, and Meir Shahar (eds.). 2013. India in the Chinese Imagination. Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lin, Chen-kuo, and Michael Radich (eds.). 2014. A Distant Mirror: Articulating
Indic Ideas in Sixth and Seventh Century Chinese Buddhism. Hamburg: Hamburg
University Press.
Salguero, C. Pierce. 2014. Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China. Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Sen, Tansen. 2003. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian
Relations, 600–1400. Honolulu: Association for Asian Studies and University of
Hawai‘i Press.
“Stuart Young: Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China.” New Books Net-
work. 2015. URL: http://newbooksnetwork.com/stuart-young-conceiving-the-indian-
buddhist-patriarchs-in-china-u-of-hawaii-press-2014/ (accessed 7 January 2016).
Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological
Review 51(2): 273–286.
―――. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Numen 63 (2016) 607–629

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