Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China by Robert Ford Campany (review)

Robert Ford Campany is certainly not a name unfamiliar to Western scholars and students researching in the areas of Chinese religions (Buddhism, Daoism, and folk beliefs) and pre-Tang 唐 (618–907) classical tales of the strange and supernatural known as zhiguai志怪 (records of anomalies) in Chinese. In 1996, Campany published a monumental work titled Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China(hereafter Strange Writing), which helped establish him as a leading Western scholar on zhiguai xiaoshuo志怪小說 (classical tales about the strange and supernatural). Since then, he has narrowed his research on zhiguailiterature in general to a subgenre of zhiguai, Daoist hagiographies/Buddhist miracle tales, as shown in a series of significant peer-reviewed articles and booklength studies he has published in recent years.

Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China(hereafter Signs from the Unseen Realm), which has been unfortunately misprinted as “Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Modern [ sic] China” on the front cover of this book, represents his most recent attempt to study the growing popularity of Buddhism during the Six Dynasties (220–581 c.e.) through literati records of Buddhist miraculous phenomena and happenings. As the subtitle suggests, Signs from the Unseen Realmis a translation and study of the Mingxiang ji冥祥記 (Records of miraculous signs, translated by Campany into “Records of signs from the unseen realm”), which, compiled by the scholar-official Wang Yan 王琰 around 490 c.e., is the most representative and the largest extant collection of Buddhist miracle tales from early medieval China. In the book, Campany offers a complete translation of the Mingxiang jiand also conducts an in-depth exploration of the collection, compilation, circulation, reception, transmission, and transformation of this zhiguaitext.

Like Campany’s translation and study of the Shenxian zhuan神仙傳 (Biographies of immortals) titled To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s “Traditions of Divine Transcendents”(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Signs from the Unseen Realmconsists basically of two parts. The first part (pp. 1–62) is devoted to a substantial introduction to the author and textual history of the Mingxang jiand offers an inspiring discussion of the nature and genre of the text; the social and religious contexts in which the work was compiled, circulated, and received; religious themes as reflected in the text; its narrative patterns; and rhetorical and stylistic features. Part 2 (pp. 63–260) is a detailed, fully annotated translation of 129 items from the Mingxiang jiplus a substantial author’s preface, with many translated items followed by comments of unequal length on the religious life inferred from the tales or religious themes and ideas revealed in them. Following a long list of reference books (pp. 265–292) and a well-organized index (pp. 293–300) at the end of the book are two appendixes (pp. 261–264). The first (pp. 261–262) is a translation of four “Fragments and Questionable Items,” and the second (pp. 263–264) is “A List of Major Motifs” identified in the text.

Part 1 is preceded by preface (pp. xi–xvi), acknowledgments (xv–xvi), and “Conventions” (pp. xvii–xix). In the preface, Campany first gives a brief introduction to the overall structure of the book, and then outlines the rationale for his translation and study of the Mingxiang ji. He notes that research on (the history of) Chinese Buddhism has been overwhelmingly concentrated on sutras translated into Chinese from Indic languages. He calls for more attention to be given to the “unjustly neglected texts” like the Mingxiang ji(p. xiv) on the grounds that, when compared with sutras and commentaries to them, these sorts of texts can tells us more about “how Buddhism was lived and practiced in early medieval China” (p. xii) because they are “an artifact...