Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise (review)

Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism is a welcome addition to the growing number of studies in the field that readdress long-held assumptions about the "essential" nature of Buddhism, and its relation to Chinese culture. The book's contents are divided into an introduction and two parts. The introduction, "Prolegomenon to the Study of Medieval Chinese Buddhist Literature" (pp. 1-27), addresses problems associated with the modern study of Chinese Buddhism in an attempt to avoid faulty assumptions and place the discipline on a sounder theoretical footing. Part 1, "The Historical and Cosmological Background," is divided into two chapters, "The Date and Provenance of the Treasure Store Treatise" (pp. 31-76) and "Chinese Buddhism and the Cosmology of Sympathetic Resonance" (pp. 77-133). Part 2, "Annotated Translation of the Treasure Store Treatise," is divided into an "Introduction to the Translation" (pp. 137-142) and the three chapters of the Treasure Store Treatise text: "Chapter One: The Broad Illumination of Emptiness and Being" (pp. 143-192), "Chapter Two: The Essential Purity of Transcendence and Subtlety" (pp. 193-227), and "Chapter Three: The Empty Mystery of the Point of Genesis" (pp. 228-261). In addition, there are two appendixes: "On Esoteric Buddhism in China" (pp. 263-278) and "Scriptural Quotations in the Treasure Store Treatise" (pp. 279-286). Other sections are devoted to "Notes" (pp. 287-344), "Works Cited" (pp. 345-378), and an "Index" (pp. 379-400). "Acknowledgments" (pp. ix-x), "Abbreviations" (p. x), and "Conventions of Usage" (pp. xii-xiii) are also provided.

One can only applaud Sharf's attempt to reframe the study of Chinese Buddhism in the book's introduction, "Prolegomenon to the Study of Medieval Chinese Buddhist Literature." While the argument put forth is not as provocative now as it would have been ten years ago when he first formulated it in the Ph.D. dissertation upon which the book is based, it is nonetheless cogent and timely. I begin this review with a brief overview of Sharf's position, as it is likely the part of the book that will have the widest appeal.

As stated at the outset, "The modern study of medieval Chinese religion has been divided broadly between two camps: the sinologists and the buddhologists. While the former ignored Buddhism, the latter tended to ignore everything but" (p. 1). Moreover, the study of Buddhism in China was guided by essentialist assumptions that divided religious traditions (Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism) into a set of normative teachings, and subdivided them further into sects, schools, and lineages. Like pieces on a religious chess board, these discrete elements were juxtaposed in relation to each other to represent a design of the religious terrain. Sharf finds two main problems with this approach. On the one hand, it is a representation superimposed after the fact: the construction of China's discrete traditions is almost exclusively the handiwork of later revisionists, who wove pieces of an earlier fabric to create a design largely of their own making. In short, it conveniently ignores the actual context, filled with the messy realities of political and social context and the real-life aspirations of a living congregation, to create "high religion" (a term used by Sharf on p. 4), that is, traditions comprised of a normative set of principles, doctrines, practices, et cetera, presumed to be universally valid. Sharf contends that the presumptions of normative traditions are inadequate for understanding what is actually happening on the ground (what Sharf calls "low" traditions), ultimately denigrating or dismissing whatever does not match the prescriptive standards of this approach.

This leads to Sharf's second objection against essentialist approaches: they idealize a hypothetically "pure," universal teaching against which all else is judged. Never mind that there is no way to validate whose interpretation of the teaching is "correct," or that the very...