The issue of sinification--the manner and extent to which Buddhism and Chinese culture were transformed through their mutual encounter and dialogue--has dominated the study of Chinese Buddhism for much of the past century. Robert Sharf opens this important and far-reaching book by raising a host of historical and hermeneutical problems with the encounter paradigm and the master narrative on which it is based. Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism is, among other things, an extended reflection on the theoretical foundations and conceptual categories that undergird the study of medieval Chinese Buddhism.
Sharf draws his argument in part from a meticulous historical, philological, and philosophical analysis of the Treasure Store Treatise (Pao-tsang lun), an eighth-century Buddho-Taoist work apocryphally attributed to the fifth-century master Seng-chao (374-414). In the process of coming to terms with this recondite text, Sharf ventures into all manner of subjects bearing on our understanding of medieval Chinese Buddhism, from the evolution of T'ang gentry Taoism to the pivotal role of image veneration and the problematic status of Chinese Tantra.
The volume includes a complete annotated translation of the Treasure Store Treatise, accompanied by the detailed exegesis of dozens of key terms and concepts.
June 5, 2012; This in-depth study of Treasure Store Treatise brings our attention to the Chinese Buddhist active wrestling with its predecessor--Indian Buddhism that has been hidden or flattened out by the narratives of sinicization, syncretism, and "fidelity" or "authenticity". By tracing the dynamics of intertextuality of this treatise within Chinese cosmology, Sharf efficaciously reveals to us the conscious and unconscious processes of creative production as practiced by generations of Chinese Buddhist to form their own religious identities and religiosities. The research methodology is definitely worthy of borrowing in my research on the literary culture around Surangama sutra.
May, 2012; The first part of the book can serve as a great model for part of my dissertation on the literary culture of surangama sutra. The second part of this book, the annotated translation, I'll leave that to my second book. Investing so much on translation nowadays is a career killer despite the dire need for more scholarly translations of many Buddhist texts like surangama sutra. This book calls into question of the paradigm of sinicization without providing another paradigm. Indeed, his suggestion that we view our categories of analysis as provisional, heuristic, or even contingent outcome of complex, manifold, and discrepant even random encounters and borrowings as well as creative misreadings is a great heuristic in studying Chinese Buddhism. And I totally agree with Sharf that instead of another paradigm to replace sinicization, a more fruitful way to engage with Buddhism (however you wanna interpret it) is to find a useful heuristic to ask meaningful questions that can illuminate (to some extent) the mind-boggling complexity of what we commonly call Buddhism. Hopefully, such heuristics in studying the past will also remind us to be mindful of our own blindness in the modern era.