Tsung-mi and the Sinification of Buddhism.

• Author: Foulk, T. Griffith

This comprehensive, meticulously researched study of the life and thought of the scholar monk Kuei-feng Tsung-mi (780-841) shines a well-deserved spotlight on a multi-faceted thinker who was, by any standard, a major player on the intellectual stage in medieval China. In doing so, the book also illuminates the social, political, and religious contexts in which Tsung-mi's writings were produced and shows how his work represented an adaptation of Buddhist doctrines and practices to the Chinese cultural milieu.

Previous research on Tsung-mi, most of it published in Japanese, has focused largely on his role as a historian who chronicled the lineages of early Ch'an (Zen) and championed his own line of filiation (the Ho-tse branch of the "southern lineage" of Ch'an) as the best. Considerable attention has also been paid to Tsung-mi's contribution to the Hua-yen (Kegon) tradition, which subsequently claimed him as its fifth "patriarch." Author Peter Gregory is very well versed in the Japanese scholarship and uses it to good advantage. He is not taken in, however, by its simplistic caricature of Tsung-mi as a "syncretist" who tried to bridge the gap between Ch'an (characterized as a "mind-to-mind transmission" of enlightenment) and the textually based "teachings" of exegetical traditions such as Hua-yen. Gregory's elucidation of the complex philosophical, ethical, and social considerations that influenced Tsung-mi's intellectual project is both broader in scope and more nuanced than the accounts found in most previous studies.

The book is divided into four parts. Part one, entitled "Tsung-mi's Life," collates autobiographical data gleaned from Tsung-mi's own writings, references to the monk found in other contemporaneous documents, and formal accounts of his life given in later Chinese biographies. Gregory brackets the hagiographical elements and normative judgments that are found in both the classical Chinese and modern Japanese biographies of Tsung-mi and declines to engage in the gratuitous psychologizing sometimes found in modern Western biographies of religious figures. The result is a thorough and judicious recounting of the historical evidence: a biography of Tsung-mi which, though sparse, comes as close as possible to attaining the ideals of objectivity and reliability. Gregory takes special care to present the evidence for Tsung-mi's classical Confucian education as a youth and to document his subsequent interactions with various Buddhist teachers, scholar-officials, and political figures. He also describes the monastic centers and traditions of Buddhist practice in Tsung-mi's native Szechwan that the monk knew most intimately. Part one thus provides a social and historical context for the interpretation of Tsung-mi's thought in the remainder of the book.

Part two comprises four chapters on "Doctrinal...