In the Forest of the Blind: The Eurasian Journey of Faxian's.

• Author: Barrett, T.H.

In the Forest of the Blind: The Eurasian Journey of Faxian's Record of Buddhist Kingdoms. By MATTHEW W. KING. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS. Pp. xvi + 294. $160 (cloth); $40 (paper).

This is a spirited account of a great classic of transcontinental and transcultural travel, and of the ways in which after a millennium and a half as an East Asian text it was taken up anew at the other end of Eurasia and reborn successively in French, Mongol, and Tibetan guises. We begin our journey in the Paris of Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat (1788-1832), whose construction of Buddhist Asia and some of the components involved are covered in a sixteen-page introduction, though this includes also a stern warning that we are not going to be treated to a "field history," a narrative of how Europeans came to understand this construct; the names of Michel de Certeau, Prasenjit Duara, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Catherine Chin, Lisa Lowe, Kuan-hsing Chen, Deleuze and Guattari, Saidiya Hartman and John Muir are brandished in a preliminary way to underscore the point. The first chapter then covers the travels of Faxian [phrase omitted], in this book assigned the dates 337-422, from China to South Asia and back. There is much that is still uncertain about his life and adventures, so that Haiyan Hu-von Hiniiber has, for example, come up with a reconstruction of the origins of his travel record somewhat different from the one adopted here. For the reader's journey, however, it is best to take Faxian and his travelogue as read, given that what follows is the focus of the main argument.

So, in the second chapter we are back in early nineteenth-century Paris, exploring the confused understanding of Buddhist Asia out of which the French translation of Faxian emerged. On pp. 50-51 it is pointed out that the first scholar to perceive that religious phenomena encountered in various Asian countries were all linked to an individual who had lived in South Asia many centuries earlier was Michel Jean-Francois Ozeray in 1817, but his "analysis was undisciplined. His claims lacked method, were unaccountable to any field, and were presented without evidence." In his republication of Ozeray's French original with English translation, Urs App, The First Western Book on Buddhism and Buddha (Wil, Switzerland: University Media, 2017) offers a more generous assessment of his work. In the next chapter, however, the narrative takes us into new and less contestable territory, as it turns to Dorji...