Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China (review)

ioo China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996 the educated elite/entourage is mentioned in passing but not analyzed—an omission that is more serious when we note that the educated elite, rather than the emperor, were the direct instigators of culture and cultural change. Jennifer W. Jay University ofAlberta, Edmonton Jennifer W. Jay is an associateprofessor ofhistory and classics specializing in Tang, Song, and Yuan social and intellectual history. Timothy Brook. Prayingfor Power: Buddhism and the Formation ofGentry Society in Late-Ming China. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series , no. 38. Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London: Council on Asian Studies, Harvard University, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute; distributed by Harvard University Press, 1993. xvii, 403 pp. Hardcover $35.00, isbn 0-674-69775-8. When I decided to write my dissertation on Ming Buddhism about thirty years ago and began to look for secondary sources in Western languages, the search was short and disappointing. The few scholarly studies that existed reflected a prevailing view that Buddhism reached its full development during the Tang (618-907) and went into a steady decline afterwards. The usual reasons put forward in reaching this evaluation were: no new sutras were being translated, no new doctrines were being formulated, and the sangha as a whole was of a qualitatively low caliber. Post-Tang Buddhism was therefore not a field that deserved the investment of research energy. In my dissertation and later book on the late Ming monk Zhuhong (1535-1615), I questioned whether these were the only criteria for examining and evaluating post-Tang Buddhism. I argued that "Ming Buddhism ought to be studied not because it was better or worse than its predecessors, but because it differed from them" (Yu 1981, p. 4). Zhuhong's contemporaries, the other three Ming masters Zebo Zhenko (1544-1604), Hanshan Deqing (1546-1623), and Ouyi Zhixu (1599-1655), have© 1996 by University since also received separate scholarly studies (Cleary 1989; Hsu 1979; Chang 1975). ofHawai'i PressConsiderable progress has also been made in the study ofSong Buddhism. For instance , to cite just a few examples, Miriam Levering wrote her dissertation on the famous Southern Song Chan Master Tahui (1089-1163) ("Ch'an Enlightenment Reviews ??? for Laymen: Ta-hui and the New Religious Culture ofthe Sung" [Harvard University , 1978]; Levering 1987), and Huang Chi-chiang wrote his dissertation on the Northern Song Chan Master Qisong ("Experiment in Syncretism: Ch'i-sung (1007-1072) and the 11th Century Chinese Buddhism" [University ofArizona, 1986]). Both discuss extensively the influence ofthese Buddhist masters on their literati audience. In recent years, Robert Gimello has also been examining closely the relationship between Buddhism and literati culture (1992). T. Griffith Foulk, on the other hand, has challenged the traditional view about the Chan tradition in the Song ( "The 'Chan School' and Its Place in the Buddhist Monastic Tradition " [Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1987]). He argued persuasively that the historical record did not support the conventional wisdom about the "golden age" of Chan in the Tang. Nor was Song Chan in decline. Such evaluations were reached earlier by taking the Song Chan discourse records (yulu) and "flame histories" (dengshi) at their face value without realizing, as he put it, that they "constituted what was essentially a body ofreligious mythology—a sacred history that served polemical, ritual, and didactic functions in the world ofSung Ch'an" (1993, p. 149). As a result, we now know that Buddhist masters in the Song and Ming had extensive connections with the Confucian literati from whose milieu they themselves had usually come. We know the range of activities these masters engaged in, from giving sutra lectures, organizing lay associations, and building or renovating monasteries to making efforts to revive monastic discipline and reformulate Buddhist practices. However, because the previous scholarship on Ming Buddhism has been primarily case studies on individual monks, it shares the advantages as well as the disadvantages ofall case studies. Thus, although we have come to know well the lives and careers of some individual monks, we have yet to benefit from some thick-layered studies that will enable us to learn the concrete economic and social conditions of Buddhism at that time. Indeed, as...