Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown: Poems by Zen Monks of China by Charles Egan (review)

88 Journal of Chinese Religions language of Buddhist kingship that linked the Manchu Qing to its Mongol and Tibetan allies, it is particularly refreshing to see a thoughtful analysis of the role of religion in the personal beliefs of the dynasty’s most powerful individuals. Ter Haar demonstrates that religion was more than a political tool, that Prince Yong 雍 had a sophisticated understanding of Buddhism long before he ascended to the throne, and retained strong and intimate friendships with monks of the Bolin Monastery (Bolin si 柏林寺) throughout his reign. On the whole, this is a very useful and interesting book. All of the chapters are solid scholarship, and some of them represent genuinely new directions. I couldn’t help, however, feeling that many of the essays felt a bit disconnected both from each other, and from the purpose of the book. Certainly the conference discussions will have dwelt at length on how Overmyer’s work has shaped the direction of scholarship, but I do wish that more of the authors had followed the lead of Clart’s thoughtful introduction and included a bit more of this sort of introspection in their written chapters. Secondly, I wish that more Asian scholarship had been included. Of course, doing so is a very complicated undertaking, but given that Overmyer’s translated works have also been influential outside of Anglophone scholarship, it would have been nice to have heard a bit more from scholars in Japan, or particularly from his collaborators in China. These points aside, this is an interesting and beautifully produced book, and an entirely fitting tribute to one of the enduring pillars of this field. THOMAS DUBOIS, National University of Singapore Clouds Thick, Whereabouts Unknown: Poems by Zen Monks of China CHARLES EGAN. Illustrations by CHARLES CHU. Translations from the Asian Classics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. xviii, 306 pages. ISBN 978-0-231-15039-2. US$ 29.50, £20.50 paper. For most Western readers, the poetry of the Ch’an sect in China is limited to the works attributed to the itinerant monk ‘Han-shan’ 寒山, the corpus of whose poems in fact comes from at least two different periods and thus cannot be the work of a single person. Seen in the context of the Chinese poetic tradition regarded as poetry, Han-shan is a very odd and frankly unsatisfactory figure, whose current fame is less a matter of poetic excellence than of his Book Reviews 89 fortuitous popularity in the West (the book under review informs us in passing of the existence of the recent Chinese book whose title translates as “Han-shan and the Hippies”). It is just one of the many virtues of this book that it places the Han-shan corpus in its proper context, the tradition of Chinese verse produced by monks of the Ch’an sect itself. Seen within this setting, Han-shan takes an honorable place among the men who have left us moments of the Ch’an vision cast in verse from T’ang times down to the mid-seventeenth century. The book opens with a concise but substantial introduction that traces the history of Buddhist ideas from their origins in India to the particular forms embodied in the poetry translated in this volume. The account of Indian Buddhism relies above all on the work of Paul Williams. That on the history of Ch’an Buddhism in China also draws on recent research, especially that of John McRae, that has replaced the received but tendentious genealogy of Ch’an schools and masters with a more genuinely historical understanding, one that takes the texts found at Tun-huang into account. This introduction would, in fact, serve very well as a concise, reliable primer for students on the actual history of the Ch’an sect as well as of the parts of the Indian Buddhist tradition that lie behind it. Following this historical account of the Ch’an religious tradition, the compiler provides an introduction to Ch’an theory and practice in poetry, as well as an introduction to the forms and procedures common to the Chinese poetic tradition as a whole and their relation to Ch’an poetry, including attention to...