Sacred Economies: Buddhist Monasticism and Territoriality in Medieval China by Michael J. Walsh (review)

134 Journal of Chinese Religions hybridized ones like Ji Dakui’s (that employ Buddhists and Daoists, but only in utterly figurative roles). So, the logic of ritual juxtaposition (trying all possible solutions at the same time) also has its limits, and a history of rain-making where local religious leaders rather than officials play the central role might further enrich our understanding of state-society relations to the extent that they were built around rituals. The issue of religious leadership raises the related issue of miracles. Snyder-Reinke carefully avoids the word (it is absent from the index), but it does come immediately to mind to this reader (and presumably, others) when thinking about rain-making. And miracles, in turn, point to charisma—this notion is also carefully avoided (even though mentioned in note 34 of chapter 6). But it was largely through such public performances as obtaining rain that charisma was built and styles of leadership were tested and validated.23 Who the leaders in Chinese local society were/are, and how their authority and their charisma are sustained, is one fascinating avenue for research that this most stimulating book opens. VINCENT GOOSSAERT, Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités (CNRS-EPHE), Paris, France Sacred Economies: Buddhist Monasticism and Territoriality in Medieval China MICHAEL J. WALSH. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. xii, 237 pages. ISBN 978-0-231-14832-0. US$50.00, £34.50 hardcover. What did it mean to be a Buddhist monk or nun in medieval China? From the standpoint of Michael Walsh’s Sacred Economies, it meant much the same as assuming any other role in Chinese society: engaging in processes of production, consumption, and exchange, negotiating complex webs of social hierarchies, and working to ensure the ascendency of one’s particular social group. Walsh counters the time-honored Weberian stereotype of monastics as otherworldly ascetics, arguing along lines recently developed by Robert Campany that eremitism was most fundamentally a social construct.24 Walsh emphasizes that Buddhist monks and nuns were always just as bound to the socio-economic realities of 23 See the special issue on charisma in China in Nova Religio, 12(2), 2008. 24 Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009). Book Reviews 135 material existence as to the ideal ontologies of their doctrinal communities. Here we see the Buddhist clergy in the trenches of commerce, haggling in market stalls and negotiating tenancy rates with dollar signs in their eyes, just like members of any other corporate institution. For a corporate institution is exactly what the sangha was, in Walsh’s estimation, and its primary material basis was the monastery: “a social and physical structure that defined, imposed, and maintained sets of social values, and sought to acquire and distribute capital— economic, cultural, or otherwise—in a competitive manner” (p. 6). But what distinguished the sangha from any other social group, and the monastery from any other institution, was its instantiation of a particularly Buddhist mode of commodity exchange. This was the exchange of soteriological currency known as merit, which according to Walsh was expressly commodified by Chinese Buddhists for use in acquiring all sorts of economic capital, especially landholdings. In the traditionally agrarian society of China land was gold, and through its acquisition Buddhist monasteries could most effectively increase their wealth and prestige and ultimately establish supremacy over competing social institutions. Walsh outlines the contours of this central argument in chapter 1, which otherwise provides the relevant theoretical backdrop for the book’s key analytical categories (“sacred space”; “cultural capital”; “religiosity”; the “gift”; etc.). Here as well Walsh argues that economic and salvific aims were entirely complementary within a Buddhist monastic context, given that these aims ultimately necessitated one another. As such, one can emphasize the socio-economic activities of monks and nuns “without detracting from the fact that devotion to the Buddha and promotion of the Dharma were still the first orders of business in the sangha” (p. 15). Chapter 2 details the history and imagery of the main exemplum of Walsh’s study, Tiantong monastery 天童寺 in Zhejiang 浙江 province, which was established in the early fourth century and...