For the past three decades Albert Welter has been publishing well-wrought monographs exploring the Buddhism of the early Song dynasty, with a predominant focus on the publications of monks working in the region of Hangzhou, an important regional capital of the tenth century that was to become the capital of the Southern Song state during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and a city made famous in Europe too from the late thirteenth century thanks to its celebrated visitor, the Venetian Marco Polo. So rich are the sources on this region that the Italian and his travel account pass entirely without mention, though the works of one visiting Japanese Buddhist, Eisai 栄西 (1141–1215), are drawn upon to emphasize the way in which Hangzhou had constituted itself as a central religious magnet, drawing pilgrims through its carefully constructed sanctity from across the entire East Asian Buddhist world. As a one-time student of the outstanding contemporary bibliographer and researcher into the Chinese roots of Zen, Ishii Shūdō 石井修道, Albert Welter makes full use of the surviving texts of the tradition, but in the first instance the focus here as indicated in the title is on the material culture made manifest in the built environment of the era, and of the fate of that material culture today. Even so, he demonstrates how textuality is intimately involved in the creation of the structures that he describes.
Thus, it is impossible to dissociate the history of the Yongming Stūpa 永明塔, the subject of his first substantive chapter, from the written hagiography of the founding father of Hangzhou Buddhism in the Song, the Chan master Yanshou 延壽 (904–975). The thriving cult of his relics as promoted under the Ming even, it is argued, induced the successors of the pioneering Catholic missionary Matteo Ricci to condone a similar cult of their own (pp. 56–7). The relics are gone, and the stupa was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (though no mention is made of what happened under the Taiping rebel occupation in the 1860s), but a modern cult now based around a statue of Yanshou is documented here in a new setting, with photographs dating to 2016 and 2018. Even more extraordinary is the history of the Leifeng Pagoda, which was erected in the tenth century, as part of a drive by the ruler of the day to provide his kingdom with relics of the Buddha after the fashion attributed to Aśoka, in the form of small pagodas containing the Buddha's word in the shape of a particularly potent text that served as an instantiation of his presence. In 1924 the collapse of this much more spectacular landmark revealed that the bricks from which it had been constructed concealed multiple printed copies of the same text. This once sacred space too has been revived in recent decades as a tourist attraction, providing in a new pagoda designed to accommodate large numbers of tourists, a lavish exhibition of Hangzhou's rich cultural heritage, and also throwing light on how that Buddhist heritage is now promoted within new parameters.
The author is to be congratulated on his clear and readable presentation of a dual narrative spanning over a thousand years up to this century, and on having relegated much useful scholarly detail to his footnotes and to two appendices providing the most relevant sources in the original Chinese and in translation. Nothing much, it seems, needs to be added to this narrative: in n. 14 on p. 188 Chinese-language accounts of the collapse of 1924 are provided, but readers of English might also like to read the short “miscellaneous communication”, “The 雷峯塔 Lei Feng T'a”, by A.C. Moule, in the 1925 issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 57/2, pp. 285–8, since though he was not an eyewitness to the sudden reduction of the entire edifice to a pile of bricks, he had spent his childhood in Hangzhou, and he tells us that his father had made him a paperknife from some wood taken from the pagoda. Evidently – though Moule is understandably far too filial to make the point – such subtractions by many hands over the course of time had had a cumulatively catastrophic consequence. The source preserved in Japan that is cited on pp. 80–81 concerning the tenth-century impetus for creating relics in textual form in the territory controlled from Hangzhou is clearly not historical, but a close reading of its mythmaking (as I hope to show in future) does, I believe, provide some useful insights into a significant aspect of an important religious tradition. But anyone working in this area in future will be sure to find Albert Welter's work a very helpful starting point for further explorations of any number of significant topics, historical and contemporary. We certainly look forward to his further publications as part of the larger project on Hangzhou Buddhism that he has initiated.
