Buddhism and Its Religious Others: Historical Encounters and Representations ed. by C. V. Jones (review)

This volume presents very fine essays based on a workshop at Oxford in 2018 on "Buddhism and the Religious Other," which explored Buddhist views of other religious traditions during the spread of Buddhism across South, Central, and East Asia. The volume offers a helpful overview of recent discussions of Buddhist origins and early relationships in the complex, ever-shifting context of ancient India, as well as the spread of Buddhism across other regions of Asia. While most authors discuss the period from Buddhist origins through the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era, a few authors discuss more recent developments. There is a wealth of information on Buddhist interpretations of their encounters with practitioners of other religious traditions, as well as debates within Buddhism.

As the editor C. V. Jones comments in the Introduction, the goal of the volume is not to present a discussion of contemporary approaches to interreligious relations: "The sources investigated in this volume do not aim to facilitate dialogue or promote anything like religious pluralism, but on a more immediate level make some statement about the fact that the words and deeds of Buddhists did not exist in the world unchallenged" (2). While acknowledging the contemporary debate over the category of "religion," Jones defends the pragmatic validity of applying the concept to Buddhism and its "religious others" (3) and explains the assumption framing this collection: "For all of its success across Asia, Buddhism has seldom had a monopoly on religious truth or activity, and in each climate Buddhists shaped their identity and that of their tradition in response to the challenges presented by different religious others" (15). Jones notes that while Buddhism's reputation for religious tolerance finds a basis in Buddhist ethics, the history of Buddhist thought includes many instances of confrontation where Buddhists used martial imagery to interpret religious competitors as rivals and enemies to be defeated (18).

Boundaries between internal and external others were not always hard and fast. Often, the relationships were multisided, with boundary lines fluid and shifting. Vincent Eltschinger problematizes the relation between the internal other and the external other, proposing that until the fifth or sixth century CE, Buddhists were writing mainly in opposition to other Buddhists, who were sometimes viewed as "pseudo-Buddhists" (69). In these disputes, Eltschinger studies the metaphor of the Buddha as a warrior who crushes non-Buddhist doctrines "as an elephant tramples on sand castles; he is also like the sun eliminating darkness" (81). Nathan McGovern explains how scholars are currently revising traditional views of the place of early Buddhists among the Brahmanical traditions of ancient India. Stephen Bokenkamp notes that in response to the many Chinese authors in the fifth and sixth centuries CE who saw Buddhism and Daoism as having a common origin and "a single destination" (179), Buddhists rejected these claims, sharply distinguishing their teachings from Daoist views. Benedetta Lomi explores how Japanese Buddhists accepted the benign kami as manifestations of Buddhist figures out of compassion for all sentient beings, allowing for the assimilation of indigenous and Buddhist figures. Nonetheless, even as most premodern Japanese practitioners accepted "the idea of a correspondence between a universal source and local phenomena" (190), which dominated Japanese religious life prior to the Meiji restoration, Japanese Buddhists also forcefully rejected those Indian and Chinese traditions that contradicted the Buddhist teaching of codependent arising (193). Aleksandra Wenta examines the claims of tantric Buddhist teachers to have the power to paralyze non-Buddhist teachers so that they could not debate; she also finds the distinction between the proximate Buddhist other and the non-Buddhist other to be fluid, as "Tantric Buddhist authors were concerned with evil and the reform of everything classifiable as such, whether outside or inside their system" (150).

In contexts where the distinctions between Buddhist and other forms of practice were not always clear, many Buddhist thinkers strove to clarify the distinctions between their identity and...