BOOK REVIEWS W en - shing C hou , Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018. xiii, 240 pp. US$65 (hb). ISBN 978-0-691-17864-6 Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain is a richly detailed and beautifully illustrated study of mid- and late Qing representations of Wutai shan 五台山, a sacred mountain range in present-day Shanxi province, that has been venerated as the earthly abode of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī since around the fifth century CE. Key for the transferral of Buddhism from India to China, and visited by pilgrims from all of East and Central Asia, Wutai shan has always been a meeting place for different cultures on Chinese soil. Yet it was not until the Qing dynasty that the mountain became “China’s Tibet” (p. 7). The lavish patronage of the Qing emperors, Tibetan religious dignitaries, and countless Inner Asian Buddhists not only transformed the mountain into a flourishing center of Tibetan Buddhism, but also spurred the production of countless culturally hybrid artistic and literary reinventions of the site. Chou’s study focuses squarely on these reinventions of Wutai shan. She argues that they are best understood as objects of translation. By this she means that they render Chinese accounts of Mañjuśrī’s miraculous emanations at the mountain in the visual, literary, and religious languages of Mongolia and Tibet; they reimagine Wutai shan in terms of the tantric cosmology of Tibetan Buddhism; and they transfer the presence of Mañjuśrī from the mountain to artfully constructed simulacra in the capital of Beijing and the persona of the emperor himself. They are, in Chou’s words, “permeable conception[s] of the mountain” (p. 10)—objects that simultaneously speak in many visual idioms, and incorporate multiple perspectives and vantage points. Mount Wutai is not, strictly speaking, a book “about” a mountain, but rather about a set of objects that refer to and “translate” it. In the first chapter, “Imperial Replicas,” Chou traces the translations of multiple replicas of Wutai monasteries and copies of a famous statue of Mañjuśrī housed in Wutai’s Shuxiang temple 殊像寺. The Qianlong Emperor 乾隆帝 (1711–1799) commissioned these in order to transfer the presence of Mañjuśrī from the mountain to the imperial summer residence and the capital. During the process, an important court artist, Ding Guanpeng 丁觀鵬 (fl. 18th century), created a replica of the Mañjuśrī statue as a painting, and a second, “perfected” copy of the replica. This perfected copy seems to depict Qianlong as an emanation of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, adding another genre of Qianlong-as-Mañjuśrī images to the famous series of thangkas that David Farquhar introduced to us in 1978.1 1 David Farquhar, “Emperor as Bodhisattva in the Governance of the Ch’ing Empire,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 38, no. 1 (1978): 5–34. Journal of Chinese Religions 49, no. 1, 145–168, May 2021 © 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions 146 BOOK REVIEWS Chou’s discussion clearly builds on Patricia Berger’s prior analysis of Ding’s painting, and indeed on her interpretation of Qianlong’s obsession with copying as his quest for “perfection.”2 She expands Berger’s discussion by tracing the various stages of transformation of the replicas through carefully surveying surviving pictorial evidence. In the second chapter, “Miracles in Translation,” Chou examines the connection between a Tibetan pilgrimage guide to Wutai shan and its Chinese antecedent. The guidebook was initiated by the imperial state preceptor and religious teacher of Qianlong, Rölpé Dorjé (1717–1786), in 1767, and completed posthumously by Rölpé Dorjé’s disciples in 1831. While previous scholarship was certainly aware of the close relationship between this Tibetan guide and the Chinese-language gazetteers of the mountain, Chou is the first to establish, through a line-by-line comparison of the Tibetan and the Chinese, that the Tibetan guide represents in fact a full-fledged translation of one of the gazetteers. On the basis of her comparison, Chou argues that Rölpé Dorjé reframed the miracle stories and biographies of eminent Chinese masters from the gazetteer into an Indo-Tibetan worldview, rendering the Chinese records of the mountain accessible to an Inner Asian audience. As Tibetan translation activity has historically centered on India, Chou’s chapter is an important addition to our knowledge of Tibeto-Chinese religious exchange, and evidence of a growing Tibetan interest in China in the early modern period. In the third chapter, “Landscape and Lineage,” Chou plunges us headlong into the intricacies of the Tibetan doctrines of reincarnation, and associated genres of lineage history and biography (namtar and trungrap). Her discussion focuses on three albums that were produced at the Qing court and depict the preincarnation lineages of Rölpé Dorjé, Qianlong, and the sixth Panchen Lama (1738–1780), all of whom were considered to be reincarnations of Mañjuśrī. Chou argues that these albums were intended to visualize the interconnectedness of these three figures. In the fourth chapter, “Panoramic Maps,” Chou analyzes two Mongolian maps of Wutai shan, a wall painting at Badgar monastery in Inner Mongolia, and a woodblock print that was carved by a Mongolian lama at Cifu temple 慈福寺 on Wutai shan. Chou claims that the purpose of the Badgar map was to incorporate Wutai shan into a circuit of famed Gelukpa pilgrimage sites. The Cifu prints, by contrast, were intended to disseminate local knowledge about Wutai shan to the empire’s peripheries. They also overwrote the Chinese and Mahāyāna history of the mountain in line with Tibetan tantric cosmology, and affirmed Wutai shan as Gelukpa territory by inscribing the lineage history of the Gelukpa patriarchs onto the map. Chou draws attention to the divergent hand colorings of the extant woodblock prints, arguing that they reveal the different uses to which the Cifu maps were put. Some of them were used as maps, while others seem to have served as objects of veneration. Mount Wutai is a major contribution to the growing corpus of studies on Wutai shan. Despite the importance of the mountain for the history of the Gelukpa Buddhism and the Qing court’s connections with Mongolia and Tibet, studies that focus on the Inner Asian connections of the mountain in early modern Asia have only began to emerge over the last decade. Together with Isabelle Charleux’s Nomads on Pilgrimage—another important and recent monograph on the Inner Asian connections to the mountain—Mount Wutai 2 Patricia Berger, Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003). JOURNAL OF CHINESE RELIGIONS 147 will stand as a pioneering book-length study on Qing-period Wutai shan.3 The impact of Chou’s study, however, will be felt far beyond the narrow confines of Wutai shan studies, in the fields of Qing history, art history, and religious studies. Chou’s substantial engagement with Tibetan language sources and Tibetan Buddhist tantric cosmology owes much to Berger’s Empire of Emptiness, which described the Qianlong emperor’s serious engagement with Tibetan Buddhism and Mādhyamika philosophy, and amply demonstrated that the Qianlong emperor’s patronage of Tibetan Buddhism was motivated, at least in part, by a deep personal interest. The last two decades of scholarship on Tibetan Buddhism at the Qing court have been mainly occupied with settling the question of whether Qianlong’s activities should be seen as political expediency or as a genuine religious pursuit. Due in no small part to Berger’s work, this vexing either-or debate has finally been laid to rest. This has freed Chou to immerse herself even deeper than Berger into the subtleties of Tibetan tantric iconography and soteriology, and has allowed her to unveil arcane layers of signification that remain hidden to anyone but those with a profound knowledge of Tibetan Buddhist doctrine. To be sure, Chou could have delved further into the Tibetan language record. A substantial part of her discussion of the Tibetan literature is based on translations and secondary sources. But her analysis of the principal Tibetan sources for her study is solid and original, and her references to the Tibetological literature are extensive. Even with the current enthusiasm for Inner Asia on the part of New Qing historians, Chou’s level of engagement with Tibetan records and the Tibetan religious doctrines remains rare, and is to be commended. Notable also is the way in which Chou brings Inner Asian perspectives to Qing studies. Having heard much about the ideological productions of the Qing court in recent years, we have yet to gain a clear picture of how these ideologies were received at the periphery. Extending her focus beyond court objects to the artistic and literary productions of Inner Asians, Chou succeeds in making visible some of the ways in which the center’s projections were consumed at the margins. In addition, Chou also demonstrates that Inner Asians were not only recipients, but also agents of transformation. They fully participated in the reinvention and reconstruction of Wutai shan, the capital, and the court. Chou’s argument for understanding the polyglot representations—replicas, gazetteers, hagiographies, and maps—of Wutai shan as “objects of translation” that encompass and subsume the vantage points of the empire’s diverse and multi-ethnic constituencies builds on Pamela Crossley’s notion of simultaneity.4 Although this notion has been widely invoked in New Qing history, few scholars have followed through with thorough, sourcebased studies of the empire’s multilingual records. Chou’s discerning examinations of the translation of a Chinese gazetteer into a Tibetan pilgrimage guide, or a Mongolian map, do just that. Her results are illuminating, and an example of the insights that can be gained by taking Qing multilingualism seriously. These insights notwithstanding, Chou’s argument for understanding Wutai shan’s transcultural representations as “objects of translation” remains somewhat elusive. Certainly, all of the objects that she discusses translate meaning across genres, cultures, and styles. Yet at the end of the book one is left wondering about just which aspect of their translational activity unites—or distinguishes—maps, simulacra, pilgrimage guides, and 3 Isabelle Charleux, Nomads on Pilgrimage: Mongols on Wutai shan (China), 1800–1940 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 4 Pamela Crossley, A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). 148 BOOK REVIEWS hagiography. A tighter argument would have been desirable, perhaps in the form of a conclusion instead of a coda that jumps directly from the late Qing to the contemporary mountain by providing a synopsis of the transformative activity of a Nyingmapa treasure revealer on Wutai shan in 1987. The strength of Chou’s contribution lies elsewhere. It is the careful attention to detail in which Chou describes the artistic transformations that turn a copy of a Mañjuśrī statue into a painting, and a copy of that copy into a representation of Qianlong as Mañjuśrī-incarnate, or the detail in which she describes the different functions of Cifu maps by means of their divergent coloring, that makes her study compelling. These passages are convincing not least because of the numerous fine illustrations that accompany them. Hailing from museums, art collections, archives, and religious sites in Asia, Europe, and North America, they not only give testimony to the many years of labor that have gone into producing this fine monograph. Reproduced in color, and printed on high quality paper throughout, they also make for an edition that is pleasing to behold, and that does full justice to a book that promises visions of a sacred mountain. natalie Köhle Hong Kong Baptist University Hong Kong PhiliP Clart, DaviD oWnby & Wang Chien-Chuan, eds., Text and Context in the Modern History of Chinese Religions: Redemptive Societies and Their Sacred Texts. Leiden: Brill, 2020. 342 pp. US$206 (hb). ISBN 978-90-04-42413-5 This uniformly well-written and well-edited volume is the end result of a collaborative research project led by the three editors and funded by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Based on fieldwork, the collection of rare material, and workshops, it aimed at providing a first inclusive analysis of the production of texts by the new religious movements of China’s twentieth century. The study of these movements has emerged as a distinct field since the early 2000s under the category of “redemptive societies,” a termed originally coined by Prasenjit Duara. There is an ongoing debate among scholars, in both Chinese and in Western languages, about the term and the category, which are not accepted by all, a healthy discussion that has the merit of attracting critical attention to the phenomenon which has long been a blind spot in the religious, cultural, intellectual, and political history of modern China. Whatever one’s stance on the issue may be—this reviewer finds both the category and the term coherent and useful—there is no denying that the present volume is a major contribution to this fast-growing field. Whereas most earlier studies foregrounded the socio-political impact of the redemptive societies, such as their mass organization (the largest ones had tens of millions of registered members), their vexed relations with the Beiyang, KMT, Manchukuo, Japanese, and Communist regimes; their role as vehicles to recycle the disenfranchised gentry class and its “Confucian” ways of life; and their loud voice in the culture wars of the time, relatively little attention was given to their religious messages and their impact. Historians had noted that the societies ran journals and large presses, and even radio stations, but we still knew very little about the contents of their massive printed output. To be sure, much of it was not easily available, and it is only recently that large amounts of this literature have been included in ambitious reprint collections, many of them under the editorship of Wang Chien-chuan 王見川, Fan Chun-wu 范純武, and