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Reviewed by:
  • Pilgrims, Patrons, and Place: Localizing Sanctity in Asian Religions
  • Frances Garrett (bio)
Phyllis Granoff and Koichi Shinohara, editors. Pilgrims, Patrons, and Place: Localizing Sanctity in Asian Religions University of British Columbia Press. viii, 380. $85.00, 29.95

Pilgrims, Patrons, and Place: Localizing Sanctity in Asian Religions is an important marker of the growing awareness in Asian Studies of the significance of 'place' as a productive analytical category. Deriving from a weekend conference entitled 'Sacred Space and Sacred Biography in Asian Religious Traditions,' held jointly by University of Toronto and McMaster University in 1998, the volume directly addresses this fruitful approach to the study of Asian religious literature and culture. The collection of twelve essays in Pilgrims, Patrons, and Place covers a wide swath of Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and Taoist practice and scholarship, representing various regions of South Asia (India and Nepal), Southeast Asia (Thailand and Indonesia), and East Asia (represented only by China here). Several authors discuss traditions little known to North American readers: Phyllis Granoff analyses the visionary spaces of Vaisnava writers in Assam, Veronique Bouillier's essay investigates the travel of a Nath Yogi in Nepal and its implication for notions of 'foreign' and 'local,' and Françoise Mallison's contribution explores the origins and boundaries of groups such as the Jakhs, a little-studied community in Saurashtra.

The essays in this volume vary widely in methodology as well, with textual scholarship complemented by ethnographic and art historical studies. Koichi Shinohara's essay, for instance, examines how places sacred to Buddhists were located with reference to stories of the Buddha's life, commenting on how these stories needed to change as Buddhism travelled far from where the Buddha actually lived. Jack Laughlin analyses the difficult relationship between a sacred site and its mundane counterpart, suggesting the politics of patronage as an essential factor in establishing the sanctity of a place. K.I. Koppedrayer's essay unravels layers of meaning surrounding the holiness of Mount Kailash by investigating contemporary Hindu ritual practices. Art historian Robert Brown questions our understanding of 'sacred space' with an examination of the impressive and still mysterious Buddhist monument of Borobudur, on the island of Java. The joining of a traditional text-historical approach with those of the ethnographer and art historian, providing the breadth and variety of a multidisciplinary approach to the study of Asian religious cultures, is what makes this volume especially valuable. [End Page 328]

In many bodies of Asian religious literature, biographical and historical accounts are so focused on travel that the tracking of an individual or an object across the soils of Asia provides the structural basis for the narrative itself. The analysis in Pilgrims, Patrons, and Place goes beyond a study of known geographic places, however, and over the course of this volume our understanding of the significance of the concepts 'space' and 'place' is considerably broadened. Sacred places are interlinked in multiple and fascinating ways with aspects of the universe, the human body, time, socio-political hierarchies, the identity of persons and communities, and methods of salvation. Although too specialized for use in an undergraduate course, this volume will play a useful role in the scholar's library.

Frances Garrett

Frances Garrett, Department of Religion, University of Toronto

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