Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China by Stuart H. Young (review)

Vaiśravaṇa. Shahar skillfully draws out the tensions between Buddhist monasticism and Confucian reproduction that manifest in earlier iterations of Nezha’s tale. Then chapter 8 delves into the question initially raised for the book’s second part, considering how Nezha and Vaiśravaṇa fit into the esoteric pantheon of the Tang and Song dynasties. Shahar claims that Nezha appealed to Chinese devotees because he combined familiar and unfamiliar characteristics: in defeating a dragon he resembled Chinese culture heroes, but his wrathful appearance lent him the aura of exotic power. The last chapter traces Nezha’s roots in the Indian child-gods Nalakūbara and Kṛṣṇa, both of whom were caught in oedipal conflicts with father figures. Of these final chapters, 7 and 9 stand out for their brevity (each is approximately ten pages long), which could have been remedied by further expanding them or integrating their contents into other chapters. However, this is a minor point that does not affect the book’s overall success. In Oedipal God Shahar combines theoretical sophistication and interdisciplinary methodology to create an original, thought-provoking work with much to offer scholars and graduate students in Chinese religions, as well as in the fields of comparative literature, cross-cultural psychology, and anthropology. Shahar’s approach may sacrifice some historical specificity, but in this case the cost is worth it. Oedipal God draws spatial, temporal, and theoretical connections across conventional disciplinary boundaries to offer new ways of thinking about religion in China. MEGAN BRYSON University of Tennessee, Knoxville STUART H. YOUNG, Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. 352 pp. US$60 (hb). ISBN 978-0-8248-4120-1 If Buddhist studies in the 1990s was the age of the imaginaire, the first decades of the twenty-first century may be remembered as age of the “repertoire.” Our collective fascination with the “repertoire” can be traced to Ann Swidler’s 2001 monograph Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. The theoretical framework Swidler developed challenges Geertz’s claim that culture is a coherent system. For Swidler, people draw from a variety of repertoires, and “culture” is simply the set of available tools. For Swidler, “culture is like a set of skills, which one can learn more or less thoroughly, and with more or less grace and conviction.”1 Robert Campany has taken up Swidler ’s theoretical framework and deployed it to great effect in the study of early medieval Chinese religions. For Campany, the repertoire allows us to see religions as multiply constituted, to see humans as agents of history, and to avoid reifying entire religious traditions as monolithic Geertzian systems.2 1 Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 25. 2 Robert Ford Campany, “Religious Repertoires and Contestation: A Case Study Based on Buddhist Miracle Tales,” History of Religions 52, no. 2 (2012): 107. 206 BOOK REVIEWS New people and projects are now making their homes on this theoretical coral reef of the repertoire. Stuart Young’s Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China is a welcome new addition to the literature, drawing inspiration from Campany to explore how medieval writers made use of Indian patriarchs in their construction of Chinese Buddhism. Young’s project focuses on three Indian Buddhist patriarchs— Nāgārjuna, Aśvaghoṣa, and Āryadeva (first–third centuries CE)—asking how each was constituted and configured on Chinese soil. His goal is not to mine Chinese materials to reconstruct the history of these Indian figures; instead, Young wants to understand how Indian patriarchs were deployed in medieval China (pp. 246–247). In chapter 1, “Buddhist Sainthood in Dharmic History,” Young shows how fifth-century hagiographies of the three patriarchs position them as powerful liminal figures. The patriarchs are all born, like the Chinese, into a world without a living Buddha. They thus provided hope that the flame of the Dharma could be rekindled and transmitted in our apocalyptic age. These saints used the repertoires of exegesis, debate, meditation, and eremitism (p. 65). In chapter 2, “An Indian Lineage Severed,” Young explores the Tradition of the Causes and Conditions of the Dharma...