Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India.

• Author: Durt, Hubert
• Position: Book review

Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India. By GREGORY SCHOPEN. Honolulu: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII PRESS, 2004. Pp. xvii + 422. $29.

Buddhist Monks and Business Matters, a selection of Schopen's papers from the period 1994-2001, finds the reader at the exit of Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks, published by the same press in 1997, which collected some of his papers of the period 1984-1992. The present book will bring the reader to the gate of Figments and Fragments of a Mahayana Buddhism in India, announced here as a forthcoming publication. We may guess that this third collection of articles will bring together papers going back to Schopen's first and groundbreaking approach of thirty years ago and his latest findings of the new millennium. Long ago, Gregory Schopen confessed to me his preference for a certain type of canvas. He enjoys the limited space allotted for a contribution to a journal or to a Festschrift. I have not lost the hope that he will give us one day a brilliant synthesis in book form. Nevertheless in these contributions, modest in format, sometimes miniaturist in treatment, but radical in their content, we can follow a thread, a continuous throwing of light on the nature of Buddhist monasticism, dissipating at the same time some of the opacity still attaching to what seems to be one of the most contradictory "religious movements" in history: the Mahayana.

Although in the twelve papers collected here, we are almost constantly faced with the epigraphical and archeological evidence of the Indian subcontinent during the few centuries around the transition from the ancient era to the common era, Schopen keeps always in the background and often puts in the forefront his beloved Vinaya of the Mulasarvastivadins. Although this was the first sectarian discipline introduced to the West by Csoma, Schiefner, and W. W. Rockhill, the abundance of this compilation, extant in Tibetan, in Chinese, and, last but not least, in Sanskrit since the Gilgit discoveries in the nineteen thirties, has often been somewhat discriminated against by the customers of the "puritan" Mahaviharin Viyaya in Pali.

Schopen makes much use of the Uttaragrantha, a rather neglected section of the Vinaya of the Mulasarvastivadins which is close to the Chinese Nidanamatrka. The value of this section was rather recently perceived by Schopen, who has introduced a few short addenda in order to update his collected papers...