Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 37 • NUMBER 2 • JUNE 2011 The Engels explore the effects of globalization on the legal consciousness and concepts of justice of northern Thais through interviews with injured persons in Chiangmai during the 1960s and 1970s and then in the 1990s. They offer a historical background of the religious beliefs and cultural norms and practices in the area as they relate to injuries and redress. They review personal injury filings in the Chiangmai Provincial Court and interview government officials, local lawyers, and insurance agents. In analyzing the shifts in legal consciousness, the Engels use the data they collected to assess shifts in five elements of legal culture: space; concepts of the self; community social networks and relationships; justice norms and procedures; and cosmology and religious beliefs. Based on these data and their analysis, the Engels assert a decline in litigation rates and emphasize as a cause of this decline a shift in perceived causation from explanations focusing on themes important in villagers’ Buddhism—for example, sacred centers, malevolent ghosts, fate, and negative karma—to more “modern” but not necessarily legally liberal themes like negligence. They suggest and dismiss other possible causes for the decline, and then utilize the narratives gathered from injured Thais to demonstrate their perceptions of causation, redress, justice, and their legal consciousness, and how those perceptions and understandings changed over a generation. They use this framework to evaluate how globalization and modernization have affected conceptions of injury, causation, remedies, and justice and provide suggestions as to how this research may be extended to broaden our sociolegal understanding. Shad Kidd Albuquerque, NM complete neglect of the most comprehensive and sophisticated study to date of Chinese autobiographical literature, W. Bauer’s massive and erudite Das Antlitz Chinas (1990). The absence of any engagement with Bauer’s analysis of the notions of autobiography, self-representation, and person in the Chinese tradition represents a missed opportunity to integrate this solid specialized study into the larger world of scholarly inquiry. Philip Clart University of Leipzig RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA. By Xinzhong Yao and Paul Badham. Religion, Education and Culture. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007. Pp. xxii + 275; plates, figures, tables. $85.00. This book is the result of a four-year collaborative project involving the University of Wales, Oxford University, and Beijing Renmin University, and funded by the Templeton Foundation, to study the prevalence and nature of “religious experience” in contemporary mainland China. The study is based on an unprecedented survey of 3,196 Han Chinese (drawn evenly from ten provinces or municipalities, excluding Xinjiang and Tibet) consisting of structured interviews (fifty-one pages in the appendix) averaging 47.3 minutes, conducted by 110 Chinese assistants in 2005. Three types of information were collected: personal and demographic data, reports on religious experience and religious conceptions, and beliefs and practices. The researchers found surprisingly high rates of reported religious experience in China (56.7 percent) and very low rates of individuals claiming to be religious (8.7 percent). Another central finding of the survey was the highly syncretic nature of religious beliefs and practices. Individual chapters examine the survey data in relation to Confucian culture, Christianity, Buddhism in Beijing, folk religion in Fujian, gender, and the nonreligious, and compare it with statistical data on religion and religious experience in Britain. Although the book contains valuable insights into religious identity, experience, conceptions, and syncretism in China as well as many tantalizing statistics, several conclusions seem hastily drawn (e.g., “urban Buddhism has become an essentially personalized religion”), and the data collected await more compelling analyses and presentation. Nevertheless, anyone studying contemporary China or interested in religious experience as a cross-cultural phenomenon will wish to be familiar with its general findings. Brian J. Nichols Central Michigan University THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF DEATH IN MEDIEVAL JAPAN. By Karen M. Gerhart. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 258; plates. $39.00. This study examines funeral manuals, courtier diaries, and illustrated handscroll biographies of noted Buddhist monks to investigate funeral and memorial ritual among Japanese elites in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Drawing insights from art history, material culture, and ritual studies, Gerhart adopts an innovative focus on ritual implements, which—not being classified as “art”—have largely escaped scholarly notice. Such implements, she argues, were not mere visual enhancements to ritual but integral to its structure and performance. She considers objects for sequestering the dead, such as screens, shrouds, coffins, and burial and crematory enclosures; Buddhist ritual implements such as canopies, censers, banners, and offering vessels; and portraits of the deceased hung at funerals and memorial services. This volume adds substantially to recent scholarship on the gradual adoption in medieval and early modern Japan of Chan (Zen)-style monastic funerals introduced from China. Gerhart illuminates key aspects of this process, showing, for example, how Zen monks displaced yinyang masters in determining the schedule of funerary events for Kyoto elites and how the deceased’s portrait and Buddhism TORT, CUSTOM, AND KARMA: GLOBALIZATION AND LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THAILAND. By David M. Engel and Jaruwan S. Engel. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Law Books, 2010. $21.95. 152 Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 37 • NUMBER 2 • JUNE 2011 very valuable contribution to the study of the formation of the Tibetan Buddhist canonical collections. The centerpiece of the book is an edition of an important survey of Buddhist literature in Tibetan composed by Bcom ldan Rig pa’i ral gri (1227-1305), a learned Bka’ gdams pa master. The text presented is a diplomatic edition of one of the two extant copies, with variants from the other provided in the apparatus. Each “entry” is supplemented by cross-references to the lateimperial Lhan/Ldan dkar catalog, the entries in the so-called “Catalog Section” of Bu ston’s History of Buddhism (Chos ’byung), and the Tōhoku catalog of the Sde dge xylographic Bka’/Bstan ’gyur. The work is notable in that its fundamental ordering principle is the chronology of the translations themselves, in contrast with many of the other indigenous Tibetan catalogs; and it provides a fascinating glimpse into early thirteenth-century Tibetan bibliography. The text is introduced by a learned and well-documented essay that considers the historical context of the work, similar examples of the genre, and the role of Mongol patronage in Tibetan efforts at canonical production. It is a signal contribution to a vital area of study and should be a reading required of anyone whose work involves the study of Tibetan Buddhist literature. Christian K. Wedemeyer University of Chicago memorial tablet, as supports for the dead person’s spirit, assumed an increasingly central place in mortuary rites. This study raises important questions about pollution concerns, changing concepts of the afterlife, and family religion, and a brief conclusion summarizing some of these broader implications would have underscored the significance of Gerhart’s findings. Her study otherwise provides rich material for readers interested in medieval Japanese religious culture and Buddhist death practices. Jacqueline Stone Princeton University GANDHĀRAN AVADĀNAS: BRITISH LIBRARY KHAROSTHI¯ FRAGMENTS 1-3 AND 21 AND  SUPPLEMENTARY FRAGMENTS A-C. By Timothy Lenz. Gandhāran Buddhist Texts, Vol. 6. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Pp. 192 + 58, illustrations. $85.00. The Gandhāran Buddhist Texts series offers editions, translations, and studies of the British Library’s collection of Buddhist manuscripts written in the Gāndhārı̄ language and in the Kharosthı̄ script, which date from the first century CE. This volume examines four or five fragmentary scrolls containing avadāna-s, or stories, all written in the same hand—by the same monk, it seems, who wrote the series of previous-life stories that Lenz discussed in Gandhāran Buddhist Texts, volume 3. The manuscript fragments comprise twenty-one avadāna-s, all tantalizingly brief. Most contain little more than a title, a main character, and a skeletal plot, with instructions that the text should be expanded “according to the model.” These stories address a wide variety of issues, from the disappearance of the Dharma to the history of the first Buddhist Council after the Buddha’s nirvana, and (unlike later avadāna-s) are less concerned with karma and its rewards. In a clear and concise fashion, Lenz explains the paleography, phonology, and morphology of these stories and then presents the reconstructed texts with a translation and commentary. Lenz also explores important questions about the early practice of Buddhism in India, puzzling over the purpose of these writing exercises and the role of avadānists, specialists in writing and reciting edifying stories for Buddhist or would-be Buddhist audiences. These schematic stories are fascinating puzzles, rough drafts for Buddhist literature to come, and Lenz is an excellent guide for making sense of them. Andy Rotman Smith College KLEINE SCHRIFTEN. By Oskar von Hinüber; edited by Harry Falk and Walter Slaje. Veroffentlichungen der Glasenapp-Stiftung, 47. 2 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009. Pp. liv + 1165. $267.00. Neither the hefty price tag nor the appearance of being in German (in fact, more than half the articles and a number of the book reviews are in English) should obscure the fact that the publication of this two-volume collection of von Hinüber’s work is a major event in Buddhist Studies for the Anglophone scholarly community. No college or university library with a serious interest in Buddhism should be without these books. Some of the articles, to be sure, discuss detailed philological issues of Pali, Sanskrit, and various dialects of Middle Indic, which will be accessible only to specialists; but many also raise important wider issues, for example, the nature of Buddhist Law, the nature and history of Pali (“Pali as an Artificial Language,” “On the Tradition of Pali Texts in India, Ceylon and Burma”), “Origins and Variety of Buddhist Sanskrit,” “Old Age and Old Monks in Pali Buddhism,” the date of the Buddha, and “Buddhism in Gilgit Between India and Central Asia.” Von Hinüber’s writing is lucid and accessible. The volume features extensive indices. Steven Collins University of Chicago AN EARLY TIBETAN SURVEY OF BUDDHIST LITERATURE: THE BSTAN PA RGYAS PA RGYAN GYI NYI ’OD OF BCOM LDAN RAL GRI. By Kurtis Schaeffer and Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp. Harvard Oriental Series, 64. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 277. $45.00. This long-awaited volume of the Harvard Oriental Series, the first ever devoted to a Tibetan subject, makes a NĀGĀRJUNA’S MADHYAMAKA: A PHILOSOPHICAL INTRODUCTION. By Jan Westerhoff. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 242. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $24.95. 153 Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 37 Westerhoff’s lucid overview considers Nāgārjuna’s thought “from a systematic perspective,” taking the various texts attributed to Madhyamaka’s founder as “part of a coherent philosophical argument and [as] express[ing] a unified philosophical position.” Among other things, Westerhoff illuminatingly attends to the varying senses of svabhāva. The chief target of all of Nāgārjuna’s arguments, svabhāva, alternately picks out such arguably distinct ideas as “substance” and “essence.” Westerhoff notes a related conflation of distinct kinds of dependence relations (viz., causal and notional), a conflation that can be seen, in Westerhoff’s treatment of Nāgārjuna on causation, as revealing what may be Madhyamaka’s principal concern. Thus, if the merely notional interdependence of cause and effect fails to capture the asymmetry that characterizes causation (i.e., if it • NUMBER 2 • JUNE 2011 is hard to see how one could think causes depend for their existence on their effects), the point looks different in light of ineliminable reference to someone’s perspective on the instances of causation that can be in view. The very existence of causes, then, may after all be at stake even given merely “notional” relations, as it is “our cognitive act of cutting up the world of phenomena in the first place” that necessarily individuates the events that can be thought to require causal explanation. While some may complain that attributing a “systematic” project to Nāgārjuna gives short shrift to possible readings of him as an anti-systematic thinker, Westerhoff’s is a clear and cogent case for a philosophically sophisticated reading of Madhyamaka. Dan Arnold University of Chicago 154