New Books In World Affairs

In Conceiving the Indian Buddhist Patriarchs in China (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), Stuart Young examines Chinese hagiographic representations of three Indian Buddhist patriarchs–Asvaghosa (Maming), Nagarjuna (Longshu), and Aryadeva (Sheng tipo)–from the early fifth to late tenth centuries, and explores the role that these representations played in the development of Chinese Buddhism’s self-awareness of its own position within Buddhist history and its growing confidence that Buddhism could flourish in China despite the distance between the middle kingdom and the land of the Buddha. On the one hand, this project traces these three legendary figures as they are portrayed first as exemplars of how to revive the Dharma in a world without a Buddha, then as representatives of a lineage stretching back to Shakyamuni, and finally as scholar types who transmitted the Dharma to China via their exegetical and doctrinal works. More broadly, however, Young uses this transformation as an index of changing views of m