Modern Chinese Religion I: Song-Liao-Jin-Yuan (960–1368 AD) ed. by John Lagerwey and Pierre Marsone (review)

Preliminary Comments

Not even that long ago, John Lagerwey started with his mammoth project of creating handbooks on Chinese religion that would consist of articles by experts in their respective subfields, who would present preliminary versions at conferences and then rewrite them on the basis of the comments by their fellow participants (and one suspects the editors). He got the cooperation of Brill (their acquisition editor Albert Hoffstädt in particular) to publish these volumes in their Handbook of Oriental Studies series. The result is impressive, and one can only hope that libraries everywhere will buy the entire series—as expensive as they are (although not necessarily that much, given their size and rich illustrations!). Not every single article is equally interesting or of the same academic level, but on the whole these volumes—the present ones included—maintain a high level of scholarship and are reasonably well-edited. For the reviewer, however, they are also a bit intimidating, and I suspect that for the ordinary reader the feeling will be very similar: how are we going to deal with some 1,500 pages of academic text in one go? The reader can be easily advised: read only what you need, most chapters are excellent introductions (and more!) to their fields, and all can be read independently. The reviewer however has no choice but to muddle through.

As for the editors, John Lagerwey is best known as a specialist of early Daoism, for several studies on Daoist ritual (of which his cooperation with photographer Patrice Fava, Le continent des esprits: la Chine dans le miroir du taoïsme,¹ is my favorite), and of course his collaborative project on Hakka society and religious culture. Pierre Marsone may be less known to the English-reading audience, but he is the author of two important French-language studies, on Wang Chongyang 王重陽 (quoted in the handbook) and the Liao dynasty.² One of a number of assets of the present book and its colleagues is that we get a much better usage of international scholarship, including French, Chinese, and Japanese, thanks to these broad-minded editors and their collaborators.³ After all, how could one write seriously on Chinese religious culture without reading at least French and Japanese in addition to Chinese and English?

In this review I will not provide summaries of the articles⁴ but present an overall indication of the quality of the book and its contributions in so far as I am competent (or pretend to be so). I also attempt to raise some larger issues that might still deserve further attention, again within the very real limitations of my personal knowledge and academic interests. I intend to do so in the spirit of admiration for the enormous contributions that are made here, but it is the task of the reviewer to moan a bit and think a book through in a larger research context.

As any handbook should, the articles usually provide good surveys of major issues in the field, extensive bibliographical references to secondary literature in major sinological languages, Chinese and Japanese characters, and often an excellent idea of the primary sources as well. Although the articles crossreference each other, they do not form a single argument and may overlap in topic as well as diverge in interpretations. There is a detailed index and one combined bibliography. Given the size of this book, few people will read it from cover to cover. The fairly detailed index allows the reader to see what other contributors wrote on the same topic as one is reading about. Nonetheless, I would advise the potential reader to combine articles and not stick to the established categories. Quotations are also given in Chinese characters and there are abundant illustrations, black and white as well as full color. Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian (or classicist) doctrine (or...