Images, Relics, and Legends: The Formation and Transformation of Buddhist Sacred Sites ed. by James Benn, Jinhua Chen, James Robson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS JAMES BENN, JINHUA CHEN, and JAMES ROBSON, eds., Images, Relics, and Legends: The Formation and Transformation of Buddhist Sacred Sites (Essays in Honour of Professor Koichi Shinohara). Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 2012. xxv, 334 pp. CAN/US$34.95, £22.95, J25.95 (pb). ISBN 978-0-88962-909-7 The study of sacred space and sites has come a long way from Mircea Eliade’s irruption of the sacred or Rudolf Otto’s ‘‘wholly other.’’ Thanks in no small part to Henri Lefebvre’s tripartite conceptualization of space (spatial practice, representations of space, representational spaces), and to scholars of religion such as David Chidester and Edward Linenthal, to name just a few, our understandings of sacred space now must include a strong material component, a more interdisciplinary approach, and an acknowledgement of sociopolitical factors at work in and around any given site. Benn, Chen, and Robson’s edited volume gets us a lot closer to this. The essays in this volume take seriously Lefebvre’s argument that social space is a social product embodying social relationships and it behooves us to determine those relationships. This wonderful book—wonderful because of the range, complexity, and depth of its essays—is a Festschrift in honor of Professor Koichi Shinohara of Yale University, whose career has spanned several decades and whose publications cover a remarkable breadth of topics (as listed in the biographical sketch at the beginning of the book by Jinhua Chen), including his research on hagiography and monastic biography in medieval China. Professor Shinohara is perhaps most well known for his work on Daoxuan 道宣 (596–667) and Daoshi 道世 (596?–668z), though, as Chen points out, Shinohara’s work also covers miracle stories, sacred sites, images, and so forth.1 This collection of essays stems from a conference held at the University of British Columbia in October 2004. Given the level and complexity of research in the essays, this is a book for specialists and not for general readership. The volume begins with a biographical sketch by Chen Jinhua, who lists all the major publications by Professor Shinohara (and there are many!). This is followed by an excellent introduction by James Robson, who captures the essence of each of the subsequent fourteen essays. (Readers would do well to look at Robson’s 1 See for example, Koichi Shinohara, ‘‘The Moment of Death in Daoxuan’s Vinaya Commentary,’’ in The Buddhist Dead, ed. Jacqueline I. Stone and Brian Cuevas (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 105-133; Speaking of Monks: Essays on Religious Biographies in Asia, with Phyllis Granoff (Oakville, Ontario, New York, London: Mosaic Press, 1992); and ‘‘Evolution of Chan Biographies of Eminent Monks,’’ Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 85 (1998): 305-324, to list just a few. In the biographical sketch provided at the beginning of Images, Relics, and Legends, Jinhua Chen lists four pages of bibliography by Koichi Shinohara. Journal of Chinese Religions, 42. 1, 100–142, May 2014 # Society for the Study of Chinese Religions 2014 DOI: 10.1179/0737769X14Z.00000000010 Introduction for more details than I will provide here on each essay.) Robson quickly takes us to a turning point of sorts established by Professor Shinohara with regards to Buddhist sacred geography when he (Shinohara) ponders how new Buddhist sacred sites are created so far away from the historical sites directly associated with the Buddha in India. To put this more bluntly: how do Buddhists construct, maintain, and reproduce sacred geographies? Putting aside for the moment the question as to what one might mean by the term ‘‘sacred,’’ the importance of Professor Shinohara’s question and subsequent research demonstrates the importance of cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary approaches in trying to understand the production of sacred space. We see this in the first essay of the volume by Professor Shinohara in which he explores how a utopic space (borrowing from Jonathan Z. Smith’s useful binary— locative and utopian space) becomes a physical sacred site that attracts pilgrims. Shinohara employs a visionary monastery as a utopian place and then explores what function this had in medieval Chinese Buddhism. According to the stories, the Northern Qi monk Yuantong 圓通 (d...