Buddhism and Tales of the Supernatural in Early Medieval China: A Study of Liu Yiqing's (403–444) Youming Lu. By Zhenjun Zhang. Brill Academic Publishers, August 21, 2014. 267 pages. ISBN-10: 9004277277 ISBN-13: 978-9004277274
摘要
This book is concerned to demonstrate Buddhist influences on the Youming lu (Records of the Hidden and Visible Realms), an important but understudied collection of strange tales that circulated around the time that Buddhism was first becoming widespread in China. Zhang examines notions of karmic retribution and transmigration, torturous bureaucratic hells, and the Buddha as savior figure, which initially appear in the Youming lu, as well as images of monks and demons and various dream motifs therein that illustrate a blending of Indian and Chinese cultural elements. This book is useful as an overview of the Youming lu itself: its authorship, textual history, contexts of compilation, and selected contents that appear to Zhang to resemble Buddhist things. But it is otherwise marred by adherence to old, blunt scholarly paradigms, such as Sinicization versus Indianization, Chinese Buddhist “schools,” and the two‐tiered model of Chinese society: elite and popular. Zhang's claims that the Youming lu represents the latter tier are untenable: “popular Buddhism” is ill‐defined and Liu Yiqing was royalty, the quintessential elite literatus. Also, there are several places where Zhang relies on outdated scholarship, especially in Buddhist studies, and he spends too much time trying to defeat decades old Chinese straw men. Lastly, the book often generalizes to the point of distortion, which renders many of its arguments unconvincing: Chinese Buddhists were not always vegetarian (pp. 13–14, 131); Buddhist influence is not necessarily evinced by tales that contravene “the traditional Chinese idea … that human beings cannot be revived after death” (p. 198); and Madhyamaka “emptiness” does not render “Buddhist” the general “sense of the transitory and illusory nature of life” in dream motifs (p. 188).
