AAR: Reading Religion, Sino-Tibetan Buddhism across the Ages, Edited by: Ester Bianchi and Weirong Shen, Series: Studies on East Asian Religions, 378 Pages, eBook ISBN: 9789004468375, Brill Publishers, August 2021, $156.00
In Sino-Tibetan Buddhism Across the Ages, editors Ester Bianchi and Weirong Shen have compiled a diverse collection of studies illuminating the range and depth of cultural, political, economic, and social interactions between Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism not only in Central Tibet and the Chinese heartland, but also in the multi-ethnic borderlands that bridge these cultural spheres. This volume is organized into three chronological parts that together consist of ten chapters, which range from studies of the earliest documents of Sino-Tibetan encounters unearthed from the caves at Dunhuang to examinations of urban interactions between Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist peoples in the first decades of the 21st century. The contributors’ research methods are equally wide-ranging, with chapters based on careful philological work, historical and source criticism, textual analysis, in-depth ethnographic interviews and participant observation, iconographic analysis, and semiotic analysis. Building upon several earlier anthologies as well as pioneering research on Sino-Tibetan Buddhist interactions by Monica Esposito—in whose memory this volume is thoughtfully dedicated—Sino-Tibetan Buddhism Across the Ages contains innovative studies that effectively demonstrate how cross-cultural exchange and religious hybridity have shaped the historical development of Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist traditions and continue to shape their contemporary transmission and practice.