Embodying the Dharma; Buddhist Relic Veneration in Asia.

• Author: Durt, Hubert
• Position: Book review

Embodying the Dharma; Buddhist Relic Veneration in Asia. Edited by DAVID GERMANO and KEVIN TRAINOR. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2004. Pp. 201. $40.

Studies on Buddhist relics have been issued abundantly in recent years. We are still far from saturation. Attention to the worship of relics, an aspect neglected if not despised by Buddhology for so long, has opened an innovative vision of the history of this religion and also allowed new approaches to an interpretation of the "sacred," one of the main preoccupations of religious studies. The reader is told (p. 185) that the present book is the culmination of a seminar on Buddhist Relic Veneration that met annually over a four-year period (1994-1997) under the aegis of the American Academy of Religion. With this publication in 2004, the editors faced the risk of publishing outdated or redundant papers. They remarkably avoided this obstacle. Although very different in spirit and in object, all seven papers collected here are original, bring new material, and have been updated, as we may see in each paper's annotation.

On this last point, I wish to observe that in an age of more refined computerizing, there would be a vibrant welcome to a return of the classical "footnotes" at the foot of the pages, as in the 2004 publication by Princeton Univ. Press of the comprehensive Relics of the Buddha by John S. Strong. Therefore it has to be regretted that in the present book, the rich and updating annotation had to be relegated to the end of each paper. Moreover, the present book lacks a general bibliography.

The originality of every contribution is remarkable because in the meantime several of the contributors to the present book have written other important works related to relics. Such is the case for Kevin Trainor, author of the introduction here, who also wrote Relics, Ritual and Representation in Buddhism: Rematerializing the Sri Lankan Theravada Tradition (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997) and for John Strong whose recent book has been mentioned above. Both authors succeeded in avoiding redundancy. The evocation by Trainor of the reaction to relics by the pioneers of Buddhist studies is contrapuntal with the evocation by Robert H. Sharf of the approach to that matter by the anthropologists of the early twentieth century. Sharf, in the concluding article of the present book, converges with Trainor when he reproduces (p. 184, n. 7) a precious extract of the Buddhist Catechism (whose first...