Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia by Thomas David Dubois (review)

spirit). A reader will be hard-pressed to find any name, title, or concept left out of these three indices. In addition, there is a concordance of French or Latin terms and their Chinese equivalents organized alphabetically according to the French and Latin. The same terms organized alphabetically according to the Chinese pinyin, would have also been useful for those whose Chinese is stronger than their French. Finally, there is an exhaustive bibliography, a table of the illustrations printed in volumes I and II, and a list of the descriptive notices on the 438 manuscripts provided in the same two volumes. The editors astutely organized this final list according to the countries and institutions where the manuscripts are currently preserved. By having done this they give specialists an easy way to find the article in which the specific manuscript they want to know more about is discussed. Furthermore, they also provide the generalist with a good sense of the geographic dispersion of these texts in Europe and East Asia and an even greater appreciation for the extensive international collaboration that went into these three volumes. This publication is in short a tour de force on how the Chinese manuscripts at Dunhuang and Turfan illuminate new dimensions of and interrelations between medicine, religion, and society in medieval China. For specialists, these volumes amplify earlier analyses of rare Chinese medical manuscripts in both Donald Harper’s Early Chinese Medical Literature, Marc Kalinowski’s Divination et societié dans la Chine médiévale (2003), and Cullen and Lo’s Medieval Chinese Medicine (2005).3 Historians of Chinese religion and medicine more broadly will find its rich contents particularly revelatory and its appendices very useful. Historians of medieval China and of Chinese civilization, generally, should also discover many themes, texts, and terms they may well wish to pursue further, especially regarding Buddhism in daily life. As is the case with Albert Chan’s exceptional Chinese Books and Documents in the Jesuit Archives in Rome,4 there is no longer a need to circumnavigate the globe to the libraries where these texts are preserved. One can learn an enormous amount about specific Chinese manuscripts from Dunhuang and Turfan by reading through these beautifully produced volumes comfortably at home while sitting (or standing, as I do) at your own desk. MARTA HANSON Johns Hopkins University THOMAS DAVID DUBOIS, Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xii, 259 pp. £17.99, US$27.99 (pb). ISBN 978-1-107-40040-5 In this book Thomas DuBois provides an introduction to approximately 700 years of East Asian history from a unique angle, that of religion. In the opening chapter DuBois makes a strong case for this perspective by highlighting religion’s 3 Donald Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts, Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series (London/New York: Kegan Paul International, 1998). 4 Chinese Books and Documents in the Jesuit Archives in Rome: A Descriptive Catalogue, Japonica-Sinica I-IV (Armonk, NY/London, England: M.E. Sharpe, 2002). BOOK REVIEWS 117 intellectual legacy, aesthetic developments, and political import—the latter subsequently dominating the narrative. In what follows, DuBois pursues the links of religion with (supposedly) ‘‘secular’’ aspects of history from the early Ming 明 dynasty (mid-fourteenth century) in China and the civil war period in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Japan to the present. Where required by the context, he reaches considerably further back, always careful to explore the deep-rooted cultural genealogies impacting religion. DuBois’ perspective is focused on China and Japan; his omitting the Korean case is both understandable (in terms of the sheer length of the book) and regrettable, as Korea would have yielded both interesting details and points of comparison. From the perspective of the specialist, what the nine substantive chapters present are to a great extent the ‘‘usual suspects’’ of East Asian religious history: the ‘‘Three teachings’’ of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism; the rise of the Confucian state under the early Ming; Buddhist schools and the state-building process in sixteenthcentury Japan (including the fighting monks of the Ikk o-ikki 一向一揆); the rise and demise of the Jesuit missions in early modern East Asia; the role of...