Guardian of a Dying Flame: Sariputra (c. 1335-1426) and the End of Late Indian Buddhism.

• Author: Sanclemente, Diego Loukota

Guardian of a Dying Flame: Sariputra (c. 1335-1426) and the End of Late Indian Buddhism. By ARTHUR PHILIP MCKEOWN. Cambridge, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES, 2018. Pp. 480. $50.

McKeown's Guardian of a Dying Flame provides a rich window into a period seldom discussed in the trajectory of Buddhism in Asia by presenting new biographical material related to the last known abbot of Bodhgaya, Sariputra (c. 1335-1426) and his well-documented passage through the Delhi Sultanate, Malla Nepal, Tibet, and Ming China. A reworking of the author's 2010 Harvard dissertation, the monograph provides an enticing web of information on the close interconnection of the Buddhist world at the time, covering in its survey not only the places where Sariputra worked and lived, but also Buddhist Southeast Asia, whose alignment in terms of aesthetic, ritual, and doctrinal interests with the rest of the Buddhist world of the time is convincingly presented. The single most attractive element of the book is however the edition, translation, and interpretation of three so far unpublished and unstudied Tibetan biographical texts on Sariputra, available in manuscripts preserved in the library of the Cultural Palace of Nationalities in Beijing and the Tibetan archive of the Northwest University for Nationalities in Lanzhou.

The book is divided in three parts. Part I deals with the historiographical context of the life of Sariputra at large. The ample introduction (Chapter 1) surveys some of the historiographic models for the decline of Buddhism in India, endorses D. C. Sircar's proposal of the eighteenth century as the time of the final disappearance of all forms of Buddhism from India (p. 19), and presents an array of evidence that points in favor of this longer chronology, with the life of Sariputra presented as a key piece: a consideration of the soundness of this proposal will be dealt with further on in this review. The following Chapter 2 digests judiciously the available Chinese and Tibetan historical sources and manages to distill a fairly clear chronology of Sariputra's travels from his native land to Gangetic India, and then Tibet, the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal, back again to Tibet, and finally further on to the Ming court in Beijing and Mount Wutai, where he seems to have died.

Part II examines the three Tibetan biographical texts in detail (Chapters 3-5). The texts themselves are presented with diplomatic editions and translations in an appendix, along with three siddha biographies allegedly authored by Sariputra...