Notes

PREFACE

Epigraph: Donald S. Lopez Jr., From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), ix.

1. On the development of what has become known as the “Green Tibetan” in both the West and the East see Toni Huber, “Traditional Environmental Protectionism in Tibet Reconsidered,” Tibet Journal 16, no. 3 (1991): 63–77; Toni Huber, “Green Tibetans: A Brief Social History,” in Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora, ed. Frank J. Korom, 103–119 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997); Emily T. Yeh, “The Rise and Fall of the Green Tibetan: Contingent Collaborations and the Vicissitudes of Harmony,” in Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, ed. Emily T. Yeh and Chris Coggins, 255–278 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).

2. Allan Hunt Badiner, Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1990).

3. Carole Tonkinson, Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation (San Francisco: Riverhead Books, 1995).

4. See, for example, Ian Harris, “How Environmentalist Is Buddhism?,” Religion 21 (1991): 101–114; Ole Bruun and Arne Kalland, “Images of Nature: An Introduction to the Study of Man-Environment Relations in Asia,” in Asian Perceptions of Nature, ed. O. Bruun and A. Kalland, 1–24 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1995); Ian Harris, “Getting to Grips with Buddhist Environmentalism: A Provisional Typology,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 2 (1995): 173–190; Lambert Schmithausen, “The Early Buddhist Tradition and Ecological Ethics: How Can Ecological Ethics Be Established in Early Buddhism,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 4 (1997): 1–74; Ian Harris, “Buddhism and the Discourse of Environmental Concern: Some Methodological Problems Considered,” in Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryuken Williams, 377–402 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Malcolm David Eckel, “Is There a Buddhist Philosophy of Nature?” in Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryuken Williams, 327–350 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Ian Harris, “Buddhism and Ecology,” in Contemporary Buddhist Ethics, ed. Damien Keown, 113–135 (London: Curzon, 2002); Donald K. Swearer, “An Assessment of Buddhist Eco-Philosophy,” Harvard Theological Review 99, no. 2 (2006), 123–137; Malcolm David Eckel, “Is ‘Buddhist Environmentalism’ a Contradiction in Terms,” in How Much Is Enough? Buddhism, Consumerism, and the Human Environment, ed. Richard K. Payne, 161–170 (Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2010); and Seth Devere Clippard, “The Lorax Wears Saffron: Toward a Buddhist Environmentalism,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 18 (2011): 212–248.

5. On the development of modern Buddhism see, for example, David L. McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); B. Bocking, P. Choompolpaisal, L. Cox, and A. Turner, A Buddhist Crossroads: Pioneer Western Buddhists and Asian Networks 1860–1960 (New York: Routledge, 2015). For a convenient overview and collection of material on the Western construction of Buddhism see Donald S. Lopez Jr., ed., A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

6. Some representative examples of this work are Peter Washington, Madame Bla-vatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (London: Secker and Warburg, 1993); Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steele Olcott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Horst Junginger, “From Buddha to Adolf Hitler: Walther Wüst and the Aryan Tradition,” in The Study of Religion Under the Impact of Fascism, ed. Horst Junginger, 107–178 (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

7. Jeff Wilson, Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

8 The seminal text that ushered in a wave of postcolonial Buddhist Studies scholarship was Donald S. Lopez Jr., Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

9. On meditation see, for example, Robert Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience,” Numen 32, no. 3 (1995): 228–283; Joanna Cook, Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and Change in Thai Monastic Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Erik Braun, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). On ritual see, for example, Toni Huber, The Holy Land Reborn: Pilgrimage and the Tibetan Reinvention of Buddhist India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); John S. Strong, Relics of the Buddha (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Mark Rowe, Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burials, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

10. See, for example, Liz Watson, Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Bernard Faure, The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Kim Gutschow, Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

11. While the linkage between Buddhism and science began already in the early twentieth century, one of the better-known and popular examples of this approach is Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1975). For a nuanced interpretation of this phenomenon see Donald S. Lopez Jr., Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

12. Gregory Schopen is the scholar who has done the most to explore the financial realities of early Buddhism. See, for example, his three-volume collected works: Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997); Figments and Fragments of Mahayana Buddhism in India: More Collected Papers (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004); Buddhist Nuns, Monks, and Other Worldly Matters: Recent Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014).

13. On Buddhism’s violent role in Japanese imperialism, see Brian Victoria, Zen at War (Burlington: Weatherhill, 1997); James Heissig and John C. Maraldo, eds., Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995); and Robert Sharf, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism,” in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr., 107–160 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). On Buddhism and violence in general see Elliot Sperling, “‘Orientalism’ and Aspects of Violence in the Tibetan Tradition,” in Imagining Tibet: Perceptions, Projections, and Fantasies, ed. Thierry Dodin and Heinz Räther, 317–329 (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003); Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer, Buddhist Warfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Vladimir Tikhonov and Torkel Brekke, Buddhism and Violence: Militarism and Buddhism in Modern Asia (New York: Routledge, 2013); and Iselin Frydenlund, “‘Buddhism Has Made Asia Mild’: The Modernist Construction of Buddhism as Pacifism,” in Buddhist Modernities: Re-inventing Tradition in the Globalizing Modern World, ed. H. Havnevik et al., 204–211 (New York: Routledge, 2017).

14. On the violent component of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism see Stanley J. Tam-biah, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Tessa J. Bartholomeusz and Chandra Richard De Silva, eds., Fundamentalism and Minority Identities in Sri Lanka (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Tessa J. Bartholomeusz, In Defense of Dharma: Just-War Ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2002); and Ananda Abeyesekara, “The Saffron Army, Violence, Terror(ism): Buddhism, Identity, and Difference in Sri Lanka,” Numen 48, no. 1 (2001): 1–46. On Buddhist persecution of Muslims in Myanmar see Melissa Crouch, Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Francis Wade, Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim “Other” (London: Zed Books, 2017); Michael Walton, Buddhism, Politics, and Political Thought in Myanmar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

15. Ian Harris, “‘A Vast Unsupervised Recycling Plant’: Animals and the Buddhist Cosmos,” in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton, 207–217 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 213.

16. Mark L. Blum, “The Transcendentalist Ghost in EcoBuddhism,” in Trans-Buddhism: Transmission, Translation, Transformation, ed. Nalini Bhushan, Jay L. Garfield, and Abraham Zablocki, 211–238 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009).

17. On the nature rhetoric of the Nazis and their environmental projects see Raymond H. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers 18711971 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 81–118; and Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Marc Cioc, and Thomas Zeller, How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005).

18. Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

19. Kenneth Rexroth, The Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (London: Wildwood House, 1981). Although Hearn was influential in shaping both modern Buddhism and Western “green orientalism,” in the process he also shaped Japanese views of themselves as well; see David B. Lurie, “Orientomology: The Insect Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904),” in JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life, ed. Gregory M. Pflugfelder and Brett L. Walker, 245–272 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2005).

20. See, for example, his classic work Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1959).

21. E. F. Schumacher’s “Buddhist Economics” was first published in 1966 and then went on to be published around the world (https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/buddhist-economics/). Accessed August 27, 2018.

22. Lynn T. White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155 (1967): 1203–1207. Although White’s work was refuted almost immediately (see Yi-fu Tuan, “Discrepancies Between Environmental Attitude and Behaviour: Examples from China,” Canadian Geographer 12 [1968]: 176–191), his argument about an inherent Asian, and specifically Buddhist, appreciation of nature was to have a profound impact on Euro-American understandings of Asia and its religious traditions. See, for example, Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); and John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

23. On the influence of these works in promoting eco-Buddhism within the environmental movement see Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000), 75.

24. George Yancy and Peter Singer, “Peter Singer: On Racism, Animal Rights, and Human Rights,” New York Times, May 25, 2015 (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/peter-singer-on-speciesism-and-racism).

25. J. Donald Hughes, An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life (New York: Routledge, 2001), 54.

26. Paul Oliver, “Buddhism,” in Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, ed. Shepard Krech III, John R. McNeill, and Carolyn Merchant, vol. 1, 173–176 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 176. For a similar and more recent variant of such an eco-Buddhist interpretation see Michael H. Fisher, An Environmental History of India: From Earliest Times to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 59–60, 63–66.

27. For a reevaluation of the Native American relationship with the environment see Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), and Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On Pacific Islanders see, for example, Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking Press, 2005).

28. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper, 2015), 67, 74.

29. In the same vein it should surprise no one that none of the general environmental histories ever mention the Dharma, even if they focus on Asia. See, for example, John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

30. The literature in this regard is massive; however, see, for example, S. Kaza and K. Kraft, Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism (Boston: Shambhala, 2000); Christopher Ives, “Resources for Buddhist Environmental Ethics,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 20 (2013): 541–571; Emily T. Yeh, “Reverse Environmentalism: Contemporary Articulations of Tibetan Culture, Buddhism and Environmental Protection,” in Religion and Ecological Sustainability in China, ed. James Miller, Dan Smyer Yu, and Peter van der Veer, 379–426 (New York: Routledge, 2014); Susan M. Darlington, “Buddhist Environmental Imaginaries,” in The Buddhist World, ed. John Powers, 433–452 (New York: Routledge, 2015).

31. Such activities are now taking place across Asia. Monks in Southeast Asia, for example, are “ordaining” trees to save them from being logged. See Susan M. Darlington, “The Ordination of a Tree: The Buddhist Ecology Movement in Thailand,” Ethnology 37, no. 1 (1998): 1–15; Nicola Tannenbaum, “Protest, Tree Ordination, and the Changing Context of Political Ritual,” Ethnology 39, no. 2 (2000): 109–127; Susan M. Darlington, “Practical Spirituality and Community Forests: Monks, Rituals, and Radical Conservatism in Thailand,” in Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia, ed. P. Greenough and A. L. Tsing, 347–366 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Abigaël Pesses, “Les rites d’ordination d’arbres: Mise en scène de l’écologie indigène en Thaïlande,” Aséanie 25 (2010): 53–90; Louis Gabaude, “Note sur l‘ordination’ sans ordre des arbres et des forêts,” Aséanie 25 (2010): 91–126; and Susan M. Darlington, The Ordination of a Tree: The Thai Buddhist Environmental Movement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012). See also the critical interpretation by H. D. Delcore, “Symbolic Politics or Generification? The Ambivalent Implications of Tree Ordinations in the Thai Environmental Movement,” Journal of Political Ecology 11 (2004): 1–30. Japanese Buddhists are also promoting various environmental projects. See Duncan Ryuken Williams, “Buddhist Environmentalism in Contemporary Japan,” in How Much Is Enough?: Buddhism, Consumerism, and the Human Environment, ed. Richard K. Payne, 17–37 (Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2010). Similarly, Buddhists in Taiwan are promoting “communities of concern.” See Seth Clippard, “Protecting the Spiritual Environment: Rhetoric and Chinese Buddhist Environmentalism” (Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona State University, 2012). Tibetan Buddhists are also working to preserve the fragile ecology of the Himalayas. See Carmen Meinert and Christian Gudehus, “‘From Worse to Better’: Anti-Desertification Policies on the Tibetan Plateau in the Past Decades,” in Nature, Environment and Culture in East Asia: The Challenge of Climate Change, ed. Carmen Meinert, 231–259 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), and the articles collected in Emily T. Yeh and Chris Coggins’s Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014). In Korea one nun is valiantly countering the “development at all costs” paradigm that has shaped modern East Asian history. See Eun-su Cho, “From Ascetic to Activist: Jiyul Sunim’s Korean Buddhist Eco-Movement,” in Nature, Environment and Culture in East Asia: The Challenge of Climate Change, ed. Carmen Meinert, 259–280 (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

32. The works of this sort are too numerous to list here, but one I especially recommend is John Stanley, David R. Loy, and Gyurme Dorje, A Buddhist Response to the Climate Emergency (Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2009).

33. Or, as Ian Harris has succinctly put it, “In the final analysis, Buddhism can contribute significant resources for the development of a global ecological ethic, but it is not, in essence, an ecological religion” (“‘A Vast Unsupervised Recycling Plant,’” 213).

34. As Lambert Schmithausen has noted, “I want to stress that in pointing out problematic aspects also, my purpose is not criticism for its own sake. I rather think that if one wants to appeal to, or mobilize, Buddhist tradition in support of the protection of nature, one must be fully aware of the problems involved in the matter, if one wishes to find viable solutions.” Lambert Schmithausen, Buddhism and Nature: The Lecture Delivered on the Occasion of the EXPO 1990, an Enlarged Version with Notes (Tokyo: International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2003), 4. And as Richard K. Payne has astutely noted in describing the value of Schmithausen’s work, it “examines the question of just what the early Buddhist tradition did think about the environment. The intellectual approach that Schmithausen takes has as its interest the sincere desire to understand what the Buddhist tradition has been. Such an approach avoids a neo-colonialist gesture of exploiting Buddhism as a resource for our own purposes. It is only by finding out what Buddhism actually says, rather than what we want it to say, that an intellectually honest, and therefore sustainable, eco-Buddhism can be created.” Richard K. Payne, “Introduction: Just How Much Is Enough?,” in How Much Is Enough: Buddhism, Consumerism, and the Human Environment, ed. Richard K. Payne, 1–16 (Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2010), 14.

INTRODUCTION

Epigraph: Francis Brassard, “The Path of the Bodhisattva and the Creation of Oppressive Cultures,” in Buddhism and Violence, ed. Michael Zimmermann, 11–23 (Bhairahawa: Lumbini International Research Institute, 2006), 16.

1. On Buddhism as the “first pan-Asian faith,” see Arthur Cotterell, Asia: A Concise History (Singapore: John Wiley and Sons, 2011), 126–135.

2. Donald S. Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8 On the trepidation of non-Buddhologists dealing with Buddhist materials see also Stephen Teiser’s comments on the “fear” of Sinological readings of the Heart Sutra. Stephen F. Teiser, “Perspective on Readings of the Heart Sutra: The Perfection of Wisdom and the Fear of Buddhism,” in Ways with Words: Writing About Reading Texts from Early China, ed. Pauline Yu et al., 130–145 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). For a valuable overview of the sui generis study of Buddhism and its implications see Richard Cohen, “Why Study Indian Buddhism?” in The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History, ed. Derek R. Peterson and Darren R. Walhof, 19–36 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

3. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan van Antwerpen, Rethinking Secularism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

4. As Tomoko Masuzawa has noted, the “modern discourse on religion and religions was from the very beginning … a discourse of secularization … [and] a discourse of othering.” In the nineteenth century, when the academic division of labor was forged, the work of political science, economics, and sociology was to be directed at the modern, rational West, while anthropology and Orientalism were to focus on “the rest,” all of which was taken to be inherently backward and thus religious. See The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 14–20.

5. Robert B. Townsend, “A New Found Religion? The Field Surges Among AHA Members,” Perspectives on History, December 1, 2009, available at www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2009/0912/0912new3.cfm.

6. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 21–22.

7. On the urgent need for Buddhologists to address “hard history” see the comments of Gregory Schopen, “The Cheshire Cat, the Queen of Hearts, and New Directions in Buddhist Studies,” Keynote Lecture at the 2012 Graduate Student Conference in Buddhist Studies, University of Virginia. (Available on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JRz2ao1zDM, accessed April 15, 2013.)

8. My approach is informed by environmental history scholarship that seeks to balance ideological and materialist approaches: “The challenge for environmental history and for environmental anthropology, however, is to take proper account of both these levels of reality: the idiosyncrasies of human meanings in particular contexts, and the material repercussions of such cultural systems. ‘Materialism’ should not mean believing that cultural patterns of consumption and production are determined by the physical environment, only that cultural behavior takes place within a material world whose properties constrain what is possible and determine the environmental consequences of that behavior. We need to be able to acknowledge both the specificity of the cultural motivation and the generality of material laws.” Alf Hornberg, “Introduction: Environmental History as Political Ecology,” in Rethinking Environmental History: World System History and Global Environmental Change, ed. Alf Hornberg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier, 1–26 (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2007), 2–3.

9. William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–2.

10. “The cropping of wild resources on the outer edge of the system … makes sense in an arrangement where the value is added nearer to the center, on the Del Monte principle alluded to above; as the system grows and differentiates, it develops a zonation in which native populations are used as intermediaries in the outermost zone in exploiting primary terminal products, through a zone in which unfree labor is used in exploiting secondary live products, to an inner zone in which skilled (though often dependent) labour is used to add value to the products of the other two in a variety of manufacturing processes. The first of these produces largely raw materials, the second of them half-finished commodities, and the innermost one the fully manufactured product. The characteristic of the core, is its lengthened chains of processing.… The central zone is thus characterized particularly by its knowledge (both technological and spatial) and by its reticulating web of contacts…. The focal areas where such systems emerge—the nuclear areas of early civilizations—are typically geographically unusual areas of complex ecology, where complementary exchanges between contrasting ecological zones can easily occur…. The development of economic core regions sets the context of production in an ever-enlarging hinterland, where characteristic patterns of zonation develop…. The formation of early states was often accompanied, therefore, by the development of semi-independent opportunist mobile populations, either on land or sea, who simultaneously exploited specialist ecological niches, and occupied an articulating role in the economy (which later was taken over by specialist merchants).” Andrew Sherratt, “Cash-Crops Before Cash: Organic Consumables and Trade,” in The Prehistory of Food: Appetites for Change, ed. Chris Gosden and Jon Hather, 13–34 (London: Routledge, 1999), 19–21.

11. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

12. Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 4.

13. As William Cronon has argued, “stories about the past are better, all other things being equal, if they increase our attention to nature and the place of people within it.” William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1375.

14. The classic work on Buddhist accommodation with local religious practices, which shaped a generation of scholarship, is Alicia Matsunaga’s The Buddhist Philosophy of Assimilation (Tokyo: Sophia University and Charles Tuttle, 1968).

15. Alan G. Grapard, “Flying Mountains and Walkers of Emptiness: Toward a Definition of Sacred Space in Japanese Religions,” History of Religions 21 (1982): 195–221. On the process of mandalization in Tibet see Toni Huber, The Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain: Popular Pilgrimage and Visionary Landscape in Southeast Tibet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

16. The model of domestication is an important one since it includes the economic dimension of conversion. Todd T. Lewis, “Newar-Tibetan Trade and the Domestication of Simhalasärthabähu Avadäna,’” History of Religions 33, no. 2 (1993): 135–160. On this dynamic see Jason Neelis, Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks: Mobility and Exchange Within and Beyond the Northwestern Borderlands of South Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

17. There are exceptions, such as Robert DeCaroli, who has noted that the Buddhist tradition of absorbing local spirits that is found across Asia is not about “accommodation” but quite specifically about eliminating “divisive or fractious elements that might have detracted from a powerful centralized state.” Robert DeCaroli, Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of Buddhism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 160.

18. Richard Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), 151.

19. Peter Schwieger, The Dalai Lama and the Emperor of China: A Political History of the Tibetan Institution of Reincarnation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

20. Thomas T. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 105.

21. S. A. M. Adshead, China in World History (London: Macmillan, 1988), 52, 102.

22. On using network analysis to reveal the linkages between economic trading networks and the expansion of Buddhism see Jason Neelis, “Networks for Long-Distance Transmission of Buddhism in South Asian Transit Zones,” in Buddhism Across Asia: Networks of Material, Intellectual and Cultural Exchange, ed. Tansen Sen, 3–17 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014).

23. On these recent historiographical developments see J. H. Elliott, History in the Making (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 211–214.

24. On new approaches to the study of interactions across Asia, Eurasia, and Afro-Eurasia, see the collection of essays “Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for Our Times,” Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 4 (2010): 963–1029.

25. Although most Buddhist Studies scholarship remains wedded to the nation-state there are several fine examples that explore the value of moving beyond such modern (and arbitrary) categories. See, for example, Gerd Mevissen, “Images of Mahäpratisarä in Bengal: Their Iconographic Links with Javanese, Central Asian and East Asian Images,” Journal of Bengal Art 4 (1999): 99–129; Stephen F. Teiser, Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); Matthew T. Kapstein, Buddhism Between Tibet and China (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2009); John Clifford Holt and Sree Padma, “Buddhism in Andhra and Its Influence on Buddhism in Sri Lanka,” in Buddhism in the Krishna Valley of Andhra, ed. Sree Padma and A. W. Barber, 105–126 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); Jonathan S. Walters, “Dhan-yakataka Revisited: Buddhist Politics in Post-Buddhist Andhra,” in Buddhism in the Krishna Valley ofAndhra, ed. Sree Padma and A. W. Barber, 169–208 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); and Paul Copp, “Altar, Amulet, Icon: Transformations in Dhäram Amulet Culture, 740–980,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 17 (2008): 239–264.

26. Engseng Ho, “Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies,” Journal of Asian Studies 76, no. 4 (2017): 907.

27. John R. McNeill, “Environmental History in General and in Asia,” in Environmental History: As if Nature Existed, ed. John R. McNeill, José Augusto Pádua, and Mahesh Rangarajan, 13–25 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010).

28. Richard Grove and Vinita Damodaran, “Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental Change: Unearthing the Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History,” in Nature’s End: History and the Environment, ed. Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, 23–49 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

29. In this regard my approach is informed by Jerry H. Bentley’s critique of “moderno-centrism”: “By modernocentrism I mean an enchantment with the modern world that has blinded scholars and the general public alike to continuities between premodern and modern times (see Bentley 1998). This enchantment manifests itself in a pair of mostly unexamined and indeed contradictory premises that stand behind most historical scholarship: a belief that the modern era is so radically different as to be wholly incomparable to earlier ages, but also a faith in the power of social theory generated on the basis of modern experience to guide scholarly analysis of past ages. The first premise enables scholars to discount the significance of long-distance trade, travel, communication, and cross-cultural interaction in premodern times, while the second underwrites the imperialism of modern social theory over premodern worlds.” Jerry H. Bentley, “Beyond Modernocentrism: Toward Fresh Visions of the Global Past,” in Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World, ed. Victor H. Mair, 17–29 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 17. Indeed, as Amitav Ghosh has recently put it, Western modernity’s one truly distinctive feature is “its enormous intellectual commitment to the promotion of its supposed singularity.” Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 103.

30. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). See also Robert B. Marks, “Commercialization Without Capitalism: Processes of Environmental Change in South China, 1550–1850,” Environmental History 1 (1996): 56–82.

31. For an overview of the new periodizations espoused by environmental historians, especially those beyond the Marxist and Weberian-informed “early modern to modern,” see Robert B. Marks, “World Environmental History: Nature, Modernity and Power,” Radical History Review 107 (2010): 209–224. For recent reappraisals of the now long-standing debate on the value and limits of the “early modern” as a periodization in world history see Jack A. Goldstone, “Divergence in Cultural Trajectories: The Power of the Traditional Within the Early Modern,” (pp. 165–193); R. Bin Wong, “Did China’s Late Empire Have an Early Modern Era?” (pp. 195–216); and Kenneth Pomeranz, “Areas, Networks, and the Search for ‘Early Modern’ East Asia,” (pp. 245–269), all in Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–1800, ed. David Porter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

32. Richard Drayton and David Motadel, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History 13 (2018): 1–16.

33. Mahesh Rangarajan, “Environmental Histories of India: Of States, Landscapes, and Ecologies,” in The Environment and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, 229–254 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 238. On the problem of the lack of scholarship on the premodern period see Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramak-rishnan, “Introduction,” in India’s Environmental History: From Ancient Times to the Colonial Period, ed. Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, 1–15 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2012), 1–6. On how to address it, see Kathleen D. Morrison, “Conceiving Ecology and Stopping the Clock: Narratives of Balance, Loss, and Degradation,” in Shifting Ground: People, Animals, and Mobility in India’s Environmental History, ed. Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan, 39–64 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).

34. The inspiration for this narrative approach is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

35. Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–621; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222; Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Alan Haywood, and Michael Ellis, “The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369, no. 1938 (2011): 835–841; Clive Hamilton, “The Anthropocene as Rupture,” Anthropocene Review (2016): 1–14; and Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us (New York: Verso, 2016).

36. On the importance of including Asia in discussions of the Anthropocene, see Ghosh, The Great Derangement, as well as the several articles in the February 2017 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies.

CHAPTER 1

Epigraph: Maurice Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Digha Nikäya (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 466.

1. See my Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

2. Kumkum Roy, “Society at the Time of the Buddha,” in Buddhism and Law: An Introduction, ed. Rebecca Redwood French and Mark A. Nathan, 31–45 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 33.

3. Scholars have identified two chronologies for the life of the Buddha, the long and short. For the scholarly debates on the dating of the Buddha see the three-volume collection The Dating of the Historical Buddha, ed. Heinz Bechert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1991–1997).

4. The Mahavastu notes that during the reign of King Vattagämani the three Pitakas and the commentary on them were “recorded in books … in order to ensure the long life of the Law.” Etienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Saka Era (Louvain: Peeters, 1988), 369. On the history of the early oral transmission of the Dharma and it eventually being written down, see K. R. Norman, A Philological Approach to Buddhism (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1997), 41–57 and 77–94. For a detailed survey of the idea and creation of the “Buddhist canon” see Jonathan A. Silk, “Canonicity,” in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism, ed. J. A. Silk et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 5–37.

5. On the difficulty of knowing anything about pre-Asokan Buddhism see, for example, Steven Collins, “On the Very Idea of the Päli Canon,” Journal of the Pali Text Society 15 (1990): 89–126.

6. See, for example, Jonathan Walter’s fascinating investigation into the transformation of the Buddha biography from the early Pali Canon and Therigatha, which are all focused on Sakyamuni’s life, and the later Apadana, Buddhavamsa, and Cariyapitaka, which appear in post-Asoka India and present a universal soteriological dispensation that obviously mirrored the political consolidation of the Mauryan Empire, which in turn continued in the universal tropes of rulership among the Sungas and Satavahanas. Jonathan S. Walter, “Stüpa, Story, and Empire: Constructions of the Buddha Biography in Early Post-Asokan India,” in Sacred Biography in Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia, ed. Juliane Schober, 160–192 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997).

7. John S. Strong, The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1995), 9–10.

8. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 51. For a preliminary attempt to address this oversight, see Sheldon Pollock, “Axialism and Empire,” in Axial Civilizations and World History, ed. Johann P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, 397–450 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 400–411.

9. For an overview of these developments and a reevaluation of their impact on the development of early Buddhism, see Greg Bailey and Ian Mabbett, The Sociology of Early Buddhism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13–107. See also Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

10. On the so-called sixteen great countries (sodasa mahäjanapada) see Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism, 7–9. And on how these entities were less historical realities than a “technical term” in Buddhist literature, see Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism, 54.

11. For more detailed studies on the shift from these “republics” (gana-sanghas) to the more complex political systems of kingdoms and empires, see Romila Thapar, From Lineage to State: Social Formations in the Mid-first Millennium B. C. in the Ganga Valley (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Uma Chakravarti, The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987).

12. Makhan Lal, “Iron Tools, Forest Clearance and Urbanisation in the Gangetic Plains,” Man and Environment 10 (1986): 83–90.

13. On the relationship between iron, changing methods of warfare, and the rise of centralizing states, see Victor H. Mair’s study on the rise of the Qin dynasty, which first unified China, in The Art of War: Sun Zi’s Military Methods (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 37–39.

14. William N. Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 1–37.

15. Jonathan P. Berkey, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5.

16. Chakravarti, Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism, 19

17. The Sardulakarnavadana, which was translated into Chinese in 230 CE, notes that the Magadhan mashaka is equal to twelve grains of gold; sixteen mashaka equal one Chinese jin. I thank Brian Baumann for this information.

18. Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha, 236.

19. This passage is from the Anguttara Nikäya and is quoted in Chakravarti, Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism, 83. For a similar passage see also the Mahasihanada Sutta in the Majjhima Nikäya, 12.41.

20. Himanshu P. Ray, The Winds of Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 132.

21. Jes P. Asmussen, Xuastvanift: Studies in Manichaeism (Copenhagen: Prostant apud Munksgaard, 1965), 150. See also Ronald M. Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 78.

22. Ray, The Winds of Change, 153–154.

23. For studies on how Confucian ideals responded to—or were created in relation to—expanding market economies in the Han and Ming periods, see Tamara T. Chin, Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014); and Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

24. Patrick Olivelle, Dharmasutras: The Law Codes of Apastamba, Gautama, Baudhay-ana, and Vasistha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 105.

25. Gustavo Benavides, “Buddhism, Manichaeism, Markets and Empires,” in Hellenisa-tion, Empire, and Globalisation: Lessons from Antiquity, ed. Luther H. Martin and Panayotis Pachis, 21–40 (Thessaloniki: Vanias Publications, 2004), 23.

26. Michael J. Walshe, “The Economics of Salvation: Toward a Theory of Exchange in Chinese Buddhism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75, no. 2 (2007): 363.

27. I. B. Horner, Milinda’s Questions, vol. 1 (London: Luzac and Company, 1963), 171. On the courtesan tradition of treating men of different backgrounds equally, see Ludwick Sternbach, Ganikä-vrtta-samgrahah or Texts on Courtezans in Classical Sanskrit (Hoshia-pur: Vishveshvaranand Institute Publications, 1953), 72–73.

28. Chakravarti, Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism, 99.

29. Over time Buddhist texts came to identify more and more jobs; for example, in the Digha Nikaya there is a standard list of twenty-five occupations (Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha, 93), but in the later Milandapandha there are seventy-five. Xinru Liu, Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges, AD 1–600 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 37.

30. Gustavo Benavides, “Economy,” in Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr., 77–104 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 82–83.

CHAPTER 2

Epigraphs: Bhikkhu Ñanamoli (edited and revised by Bhikkhu Bodhi), The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 891. Luis Gomez, The Land of Bliss: The Paradise of the Buddha of Measureless Light: Sanskrit and Chinese Versions of the Sukhavativyuha Sutras (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), 167. Burton Watson, The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi: A Translation of the Lin-chi Lu (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), 97. Kazi Dawa-Samdup, Sri-Cakrasamvara-Tantra: A Buddhist Tantra (New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1987 rpt.), 54–55.

1. For convenient overviews of Buddhist thought and its historical development see, for example, Hajime Nakamura, Indian Buddhism: A Survey with Bibliographical Notes (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987); Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Noble Ross Reat, Buddhism: A His tory (Fremont: Jain Publishing, 1994); Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to Its History and Teachings (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001).

2. On the development of reincarnation theory as a part of the Eurasian axial turn see Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

3. Teiser, Reinventing the Wheel, 26–33.

4. Richard Gombrich, Precept and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 170.

5. Francisca Cho, Seeing Like the Buddha: Enlightenment Through Film (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017), 31.

6. Over time this radical idea of early Buddhism was eventually transformed so much that various notions of self came to be espoused in late Indian Buddhism as well as to largely define Chinese Buddhism. On these developments see Jungnok Park, How Buddhism Acquired a Soul on the Way to China (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, 2012).

7. Scholars generally recognize the existence of seven different Vinayas. Each of them represent the different rules—and the underlying theological justifications—of seven different early Buddhist schools: the Theravädins, Mahäsämghikas, Mahäsämghika-lokottaravädins, Mahisäsakas, Dharmaguptakas, Sarvästivädins, and Mülasarvästivädins. Nevertheless, “following Louis Renou and Jean Filliozat, leading vinaya specialists such as Charles Prebish have categorized the vinaya corpus into canonical, paracanonical, and noncanonical literature: (A) canonical literature preserved in the vinaya-pitaka mainly covers three divisions of texts, generally comprising: (1) sütravibhañga, or the detailed analyses of offenses and respective punitive measures listed in the prätimoksasütra, (2) skhandhakas, or regulations for the organization of the Buddhist community, and (3) appendices, mostly comprising summaries of the monastic rules listed in the two previous sections; (B) para-canonical vinaya literature refers to: (1) the set of precepts from the prātimokṣasūtra that is recited every fortnight during the so-called poṣadha ceremony, and (2) karmavācanā texts of correct procedures to settle communal transactions and disputes; and (C) noncanonical vinaya literature covering (1) commentaries and (2) miscellaneous texts, which include translations with unclear school affiliation and other vinaya-related texts.” Klaus Pinte, “Vinaya,” Oxford Bibliographies Online (www.oxfordbibliographies.com). Last modified September 13, 2010.

8. On the different regulations of the various prātimokṣa found in the vinayas see Werner Pachow, A Comparative Study of the Prātimokṣa on the Basis of Its Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit and Päli Versions (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2000).

9. André Bareau, Les sectes bouddhiques du Petit Véhicule (Saigon: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1955).

10. Jonathan Silk, “What, if Anything, Is Mahāyāna Buddhism? Problems of Definitions and Classifications,” Numen 49 (2002): 355–405.

11. Paul Harrison, “Searching for the Origins of the Mahāyāna: What Are We Looking For?,” Eastern Buddhist 28 (1995): 65; Jan Nattier, A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path According to the Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā-sūtra)) (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003); and Daniel Boucher, Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna: A Study and Translation of the Rāṣṭrapālaparipṛcchā-sūtra (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008).

12. Douglas Osto, Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra (New York: Routledge, 2008).

13. David J. Kalupahana, Nagarjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).

14. For a comprehensive of survey of Mahayana Buddhist thought see Paul Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations (London: Routledge, 1989).

15. These terms are borrowed from Strong, Experience of Buddhism, 181–187.

16. On the importance of this debate in Buddhism, see Peter Gregory, Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlightenment in Chinese Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1987).

17. On the problems related to the appearance of Mahayana Buddhism see the essays in Schopen’s Figments and Fragments of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India.

18. Liu, Ancient India and Ancient China, 39. On the Buddhist response to these developments see, for example, Osto, Power, Wealth and Women in Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism.

19. Xinru Liu, Silk and Religion: An Exploration of Material Life and the Thought of People, AD 600–1200 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 28.

20. “In short, the Buddhist values of the seven treasures and the emphasis on donating these items developed out of an economic environment where both ruler and urban dweller sought luxury goods…. On the one hand they bestowed prestige on their owners—the monasteries, the donors, the purchasers influenced by fashion. On the other hand their production and transaction encouraged substantial economic activities. Thus Buddhist values reinforced and extended trade while sustaining certain economic activities even through a period of urban decline” (Liu, Ancient India and Ancient China, 177, 180).

21. See John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). The introduction of Buddhism did not only affect Chinese material culture, however. It also impacted more intangible things such as how to organize space. See Anne Cheng, “La notion d’espace dans la pensée traditionnelle chinoise,” in Aménager l’espace, ed. Flora Blanchon, 33–44 (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1993).

22. Ray, Winds of Change, 41–44, 116. On this issue see also Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), chap. 4; and H. P. Ray, “South and Southeast Asia: The Commencement of a Lasting Relationship,” in Fruits of Inspiration: Studies in Honour of Prof. J. G. de Casparis, ed. Marijke J. Klokke and Karel R. van Kooij, 135–155 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2001).

23. Benavides, “Economy,” 82.

24. David B. Gray, The Cakrasamvara Tantra (New York: American Institute of Buddhist Studies, 2007), 9.

25. On the popular views of tantra, see Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

26. David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 306.

27. As Davidson has shown in his Indian Esoteric Buddhism (chap. 3), the social breakdown of post-Gupta period had six consequences: (1) When the financial support of the business community failed, Buddhists sought support from the new political powers. (2) This resulted in the contraction of Buddhist sites, especially in south India. (3) Women were no longer involved with the Dharma. (4) Buddhist scholars created a radical skepticism, prasangika madhyamika, which claimed the high ground “by virtue of its extremism.” (5) Buddhist intellectuals moved away from abhidharma toward Brahmanical epistemology. (6) Because of patronage shifts monasteries became landed fiefs, or “super monasteries” (mahavihara).

CHAPTER 3

1. This story is told in Bernard Faure’s Unmasking Buddhism (Oxford: Wiley Black-well, 2009), 121. Although vegetarianism is much lauded in Tibetan Buddhist literature (e.g., Shabkar Tsogdruk Rangdrol, The Life of Shabkar: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Yogin, trans. Matthieu Ricard et al. [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994]: 195, 327, 411, 541–542, 582, 585), most Tibetans still eat meat. For a detailed history of vegetarianism in Tibet see Geoffrey Barstow, Food of Sinful Demons: Meat, Vegetarianism and the Limits of Buddhism in Tibet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). On the current promotion of vegetarianism by certain Tibetan “Buddhist fundamentalists,” see Katia Buffetrille, “A Controversy on Vegetarianism,” in Trails of the Tibetan Tradition: Papers for Elliot Sperling, ed. Roberto Vitali, 13–27 (Dharamshala: Amnye Machen Institute, 2014).

2. D. S. Ruegg, “Ahimsa and Vegetarianism in the History of Buddhism,” in Buddhist Studies in Honour of Walpola Rahula, ed. S. Balasoorya et al., 234–241 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1980).

3. As the monastic code explains, monastics are allowed to eat most types of fish and meat provided that “fish and flesh are pure in respect of three points: if they are not seen, heard, or suspected (to have been killed for him)” (I. B. Horner, The Book of Discipline (Vinaya-Pitaka), 5 vols. [London: Luzac & Company, 1949], vol. 1, 298).

4. Quoted in John Stevens, “What Did the Buddha Eat?,” Buddhist Studies Review 4, no. 1 (1987): 25–30.

5. For a nuanced study of Buddhist theories of “intention” (cetanā), especially as it is interpreted in various genres of Buddhist literature, see Maria Heim, The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on Mind, Intention, and Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 1–33, 217–224.

6. The monastic code did eventually come to include certain restrictions, such as the eating of horse and elephant meat; however, this was done because they were considered “royal” animals (and thus invariably owned by the ruling elite). The monastic code also came to forbid the consumption of certain “dangerous” animals—such as lions, snakes, and tigers—because it was believed that the spirits of these animals would come back and haunt the village. C. S. Prasad, “Meat-Eating and the Rule of Tikotiparisuddha,” in Studies in Pāli and Buddhism, ed. A. K. Narain, 289–295 (Delhi: B.R. Publishing, 1979).

7. “Now at that time a certain monk had a non-human affliction. Teachers and preceptors, although nursing him, were unable to get him well. He, having gone to the swine’s slaughter-place, ate raw flesh and drank raw-blood, and his non-human affliction subsided. They told this matter to the Lord. He said, ‘I allow, monks, when one has a non-human affliction, raw flesh and blood.’” Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 4, 27–4.

8. “He [the Buddha] said, ‘I allow you, monks, to make use of tallows as medicines by using them with oil: tallow from bears, tallow from fish, tallow from alligators, tallow from swine, tallow from donkeys, (if each) is accepted at the right time, cooked at the right time, mixed at the right time.” Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 4, 270–271.

9. Jinadasa Liyanaratne, The Casket of Medicine (Bhesajjamañjūsā, Chapters 1–18) (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 2002), 33.

10. Gombojab Tsybikov, Fojiao Xiangke zai Shengdi Xizang, trans. Wang Xianjun (Lhasa: Xizang renmin chubanshe, 1992), 90.

11. Mark Tatz, Buddhism and Healing: Demiéville’s Article “Byō” from Hōbōgirin (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985), 41.

12. John Kieschnick, “Buddhist Vegetarianism in China,” in Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics and Religion in Traditional China, ed. Roel Sterckx, 186–212 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). The link between Chinese Buddhism and vegetarianism has not only been a historical marker of self-identification, vis-à-vis the Tibetans for example, but it continues to be so especially as Buddhism gains popularity in contemporary China. Erik Cohen, The Chinese Vegetarian Festival in Phuket: Religion, Ethnicity and Tourism on a Southern Thai Island (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2001).

13. Christine Mollier, Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face: Scripture, Ritual, and Iconographic Exchange in Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 53.

14. See, for example, the convoluted debate about meat eating in the Korean commentary to Brahma’s Net Sutra. Charles A. Muller, Exposition of the Sutra of Brahma’s Net (Paju: Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, 2012), 350.

15. Richard M. Jaffe, “The Debate over Meat Eating in Japanese Buddhism,” in Going Forth: Visions of Buddhist Vinaya, ed. William M. Bodiford, 255–276 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005). See also Junzo Uchiyama, “San’ei-chō and Meat-Eating in Buddhist Edo,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 19, nos. 2–3 (1992): 299–303.

16. Stephanie Katz, “Western Buddhist Motivations for Vegetarianism,” Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 9, no. 3 (2005): 385–411. The linkage between Buddhism and vegetarianism is also no doubt fostered by the raft of cookbooks and restaurants promoting this idea; see, for example, Cooking with A Gentle Heart: Vegetarian Recipes from the Buddhist Monks and Friends of Shasta Abbey; From the Earth: Chinese Vegetarian Cooking; 3 Bowls: Vegetarian Recipes from an American Zen Buddhist Monastery; Buddha’s Table: Thai Feasting Vegetarian Style; Shojin Cooking: The Buddhist Vegetarian Cook Book; The Enlightened Kitchen: Fresh Vegetable Dishes from the Temples of Japan; Veggiyana: The Dharma of Cooking: With 108 Deliciously Easy Vegetarian Recipes—all of which I found on Amazon.com.

17. On the origin of these historical linkages, especially regarding vegetarianism in relation to Buddhism in the popular imagination, see Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 76; Douglas T. McGetchin, Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India’s Rebirth in Modern Germany (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 138; Urs App, “Arthur Schopenhauer and China: A Sino-Platonic Love Affair,” Sino-Platonic Papers 200 (2010): 24.

18. Giulio Agostini, The Ornament of Lay Followers: A Translation of Ānanda’s Upāsakajanālankāra (Bristol: Pali Text Society, 2015), 182.

19. Stephen A. Murphy, “How Many Monks? Quantitative and Demographic Archaeological Approaches to Buddhism in Northeast Thailand and Central Laos, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries CE,” in Buddhist Dynamics in Early Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia, ed. Christian Lammerts, 80–119 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015). At other times and places the numbers may be different. For example, Xuanzang estimated that in seventh-century Gaochang on the Silk Road 10 percent of the population were monks. Valerie Hansen, “The Path of Buddhism to China: The View from Turfan,” Asia Major 11, no. 2 (1998): 58. And in Tibet it is estimated that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 15 to 25 percent of the male population were monks. Melvyn C. Goldstein, “The Revival of Monastic Life in Drepung Monastery,” in Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity, ed. Melvyn C. Goldstein and Matthew T. Kapstein, 15–52 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 15.

20. On this particular tactic of circumventing Buddhist teachings about karmic consequences see Geoff Childs, Tibetan Diary: From Birth to Death and Beyond in a Himalayan Valley of Nepal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 125–128.

21. Catherine Knight, “The Moon Bear as a Symbol of Yama: Its Significance in the Folklore of Upland Hunting in Japan,” Asian Ethnology 67, no. 1 (2008): 84.

22. Martha Chaiklin, “Exotic–Bird Collecting in Early–Modern Japan,” in JAPANi-mals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life, ed. Gregory M. Pflugfelder and Brett L. Walker, 125–160 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2005).

23. “When Japanese traders were forbidden to take to the seas, they were taking 70,000 to 100,000 skins a year from Cambodia to Japan. Many of the deer would have been shot by Lao or minority hunters higher up the Mekong and its tributaries, and traded downriver. The VOC [Vereenigde Oost–Indische Compagnie] took over the trade, and was still shipping about 100,000 deerskins a year to Nagasaki until troubles in Cambodia forced the Dutch out in the 1640s. With ongoing difficulties in Cambodia the trade tended to shift to Siam.” Anthony Reid, “Humans and Forests in Pre–colonial Southeast Asia,” Environment and History 1 (1995): 123.

24. As Reid has noted, by the 1690s the ability of the Thais to procure deer for the Japanese market was severely constrained (“Humans and Forests,” 107). A similar phenomenon happened in Taiwan, where the VOC also commissioned local hunters to provide deerskins for the Japanese market and venison for the Chinese market. However, unlike in Thailand, where the Buddhist state did not limit the hunt, in Taiwan the VOC prevented the locals from exploiting the herds in order to keep the market viable. Hui–wen Koo, “Deer Hunting and Preserving the Commons in Dutch Colonial Taiwan,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 42, no. 2 (2011): 185–203. See also Thomas O. Höllman, “Formosa and the Trade in Venison and Deer Skins,” in Emporia, Commodities and Entrepeneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c. 1400–1750, ed. R. Ptak and D. Rothermund, 263–290 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991).

25. Although the variety of commodities extracted from Southeast Asia to feed Buddhist demand were many, most of them were lightweight—such as resins, gums, and feathers—on account of the difficulties of shipping heavier material. In some cases, however, even teak trees were exported to Japan, where they were then used to build distinctive Zen monasteries. Patricia J. Graham, “The Importance of Imports: Ingen’s Chinese Material Culture at Manpukuji,” in Zen and Material Culture, ed. Pamela D. Winfield and Steven Heine, 137–163 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 143–144.

CHAPTER 4

Epigraph: F. L. Woodward and E. M. Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, 5 vols. (Bristol: Pali Text Society, 1932–1936), vol. 5, 92–94.

1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 1994 rpt.). The contemporary iterations of Weber’s basic argument in various guises are too long to list here; however, see, for example, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012); and Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).

2. For a reevaluation of Asia and Africa’s historical economic development and its environmental consequences see Gareth Austin, Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

3. Max Weber, Hinduismus und Buddhismus (Tübingen: Mohr, 1921), 330, 340.

4. David N. Gellner, The Anthropology of Buddhism and Hinduism: Weberian Themes (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 19–44.

5. Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 446. Of course, the criticism of Weber was almost immediate, especially regarding the inherent and unique “capitalist” tendencies of Protestantism. Numerous scholars therefore argued that other religions had the same capacities. See, for example, Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. M. Epstein (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001); and Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1979). Similarly, while much has been made of Hinduism’s supposedly antimarket tendencies, recent research suggests that early Hindus were also involved with international trade. Richard H. Davies, Global India Circa 100 CE: South Asia in Early World History (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2009). Moreover, while there is to my knowledge no scholarship looking specifically at the Daoist role in the Chinese market, it has been argued that the “revival of Daoism during the Sung (with its attendant needs for ritual paraphernalia like ivory, scented wood and mother of pearl) was one reason for the influx of goods [from Southeast Asia].” Eric Tagliacozzo, “Onto the Coasts and into the Forests: Ramifications of the China Trade on the Ecological History of Northwest Borneo, 900–1900 CE,” in Histories of the Borneo Environment, ed. Reed L. Wadley, 25–60 (Leiden: KITLV, 2005), 28.

6. See, for example, Heinz Bechert, Buddhismus, Staat und Gesellschaft in den Ländern des Theravada Buddhismus (Frankfurt: A. Metzner [vol. 1, 1966]; Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz [vol. 2, 1967; vol. 3, 1973]); Stanley J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Joan Piggott, Emergence of Japanese Kingship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Charles D. Orzech, Politics and Transcendent Wisdom: The Scripture of the Humane King in the Creation of Chinese Buddhism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Craig J. Reynolds, “Power,” in Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr., 211–228 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Ian Harris, Buddhism, Power and Political Order (New York: Routledge, 2007).

7. Jacques Gernet, Les aspects économiques du bouddhisme dans la société chinoise du V^e au X^e siècle (Saigon: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1956), translated into English by Franciscus Verellen, Buddhism in Chinese Society: An Economic History from the Fifth to the Tenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Other important early works on the link between the Dharma and economics include Lien-sheng Yang, “Buddhist Monasteries and Four Money-Raising Institutions in Chinese History,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 13, nos. 1–2 (1950): 174–191; D. C. Twitchett, “The Monasteries and China’s Economy in Medieval Times,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19, no. 3 (1957): 526–549; Robert J. Miller, “Buddhist Monastic Economy: The Jisa Mechanism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 3, no. 4 (1961): 427–438; Jean C. Darian, “Social and Economic Factors in the Rise of Buddhism,” Sociological Analysis 38, no. 3 (1977): 226–238; R. A. H. L. Gunawardana, Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979); and Martin Collcutt, Five Mountains: The Rinzai Zen Monastic Tradition in Medieval Japan (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1981), 251–253.

8. James Heitzman, “Early Buddhism, Trade, and Empire,” in Studies in the Archaeology and Paleoanthropology of South Asia, ed. Kenneth A. R. Kennedy and Gregory L. Possehl, 121–137 (New Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publishing/American Institute of Indian Studies, 1984); H. P. Ray, The Winds of Change, 121–161; and Neelis, Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks.

9. Pierfrancesco Callieri, “The Archaeological Basis,” in Gandhara: The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Legends, Monasteries and Paradise, ed. ed. Dorothee von Drachenfels and Christian Luczanits, 58–63 (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2008), 58. On the three phases of Taxila’s urban development, especially during its Buddhist phase under the Kushans, see F. Raymond Allchin, “The Urban Position of Taxila and Its Place in Northwest India-Pakistan,” in Urban Form and Meaning in South Asia: The Shaping of Cities from Prehistoric to Precolonial Times, ed. Howard Spodek and Doris Meth Srinivasan, 69–81 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993).

10. Sree Padma, “Material Culture and the Emergence of Urban Buddhism,” in Buddhism in the Krishna River Valley ofAndhra, ed. Sree Padma and A. W. Barber, 11–40 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 20–21.

11. Tansen Sen, “Maritime Interactions Between China and India: Coastal India and the Ascendancy of Chinese Maritime Power in the Indian Ocean,” Journal of Central Eurasian Studies 2 (2011): 45.

12. “At the thought: wealth is mine acquired by energetic striving … lawfully gotten, bliss comes to him, satisfaction comes to him. This householder, is called bliss of ownership…. At the thought: By means of wealth acquired … I both enjoy my wealth and do meritorious deeds, bliss comes to him, satisfaction comes to him. This, householder, is called “the bliss of wealth…. At the thought: I owe no debt, great or small, to anyone bliss comes to him, satisfaction comes to him. This, householder, is called ‘bliss of debtlessness.’” Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 2, 77.

13. On some of the ethical issues related to such wealth production see, for example, Frank E. Reynolds, “Ethics and Wealth in Theravada Buddhism: A Study in Comparative Ethics,” in Ethics, Wealth, and Salvation: A Study in Buddhist Ethics, ed. R. F. Sizemore and D. K. Swearer, 59–76 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990); and John S. Strong, “Rich Man, Poor Man, Bhikku, King: Asoka’s Great Quinquennial Festival and the Nature of Dāna,” in Ethics, Wealth, and Salvation: A Study in Buddhist Ethics, ed. R. F. Sizemore and D. K. Swearer, 107–123 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990).

14. Thus, as Michael Walshe has shown in the case of China, it was precisely “those Buddhist monasteries in the Chinese empire that sought to accumulate wealth [that increased] their chances of institutional longevity.” Michael J. Walshe, Sacred Economies: Buddhist Monasticism and Territoriality in Medieval China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 6–8.

15. On monastic involvement in a range of such economic activities, see the collected articles in Gregory Schopen, Buddhist Matters and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004).

16. Gregory Schopen, “On Monks and Menial Laborers: Some Monastic Accounts of Building Buddhist Monasteries,” in Architetti, Capomastri, Artigiani: L’organizzazione dei cantieri e della produzione artistica nell’Asia ellnistica, ed. Pierfrancesco Callieri, 225–245 (Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2006).

17. Walshe, Sacred Economies, 6.

18. Erla Zwingle, “A World Together,” National Geographic 196, no. 2 (August 1999): 17 (photograph by Joe McNally). On this photo and its implications regarding Buddhism in the West see Douglas M. Padgett, “The Translating Temple: Diasporic Buddhism in Florida,” in Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, ed. Charles S. Prebish and Martin Baumann, 201–217 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 213–214.

19. As a measure of the importance of this episode in Western media see also Jonathan DeHart, “Thai Monks Living Large: Private Jets and Bling,” The Diplomat, June 13, 2013 (http://thediplomat.com/2013/06/thai-monks-living-large-private-jets-and-bling/); “What Bling-Loving Buddhist Monks Reveal About Thailand’s Economy,” Quartz, June 17, 2013 (http://qz.com/94903/what-bling-loving-buddhist-monks-reveal-about-thailands-economy/). On the question of Buddhism and wealth in contemporary Thailand see Rachelle M. Scott, Nirvana for Sale? Buddhism, Wealth, and the Dhammakāya Temple in Contemporary Thailand (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009).

20. Oskar von Hinüber, “Everyday Life in an Ancient Indian Buddhist Monastery,” Annual Report of the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology 9 (2006): 23.

21. On the issue of monastic wealth and its problems see, for example, von Hinüber, “Everyday Life,” 18; Hans-Dieter Evers, “Kinship and Property Rights in a Buddhist Monastery in Central Ceylon,” American Anthropologist 69, no. 6 (1967): 703–710; Gregory Schopen, “Deaths, Funerals, and the Division of Property in a Monastic Code,” in Buddhism in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr., 473–502 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Gregory Schopen, “Monastic Law Meets the Real World: A Monk’s Continuing Right to Inherit Family Property in Classical India,” History of Religions 35, no. 2 (1995): 101–123.

22. Yang Hsüan-chih, A Record of Buddhist Monasteries in Lo-yang, trans. Yi-t’ung Wang (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 5.

23. See, for example, Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Chris Lehman, The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (New York: Melville House, 2016).

24. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.

25. Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

26. Jason Neelis, “Localizing the Buddha’s Presence at Wayside Shrines in Northern Pakistan,” in Religion and Trade: Religious Formation, Transformation and Cultural Exchange Between East and West, ed. Peter Wick and Volker Raben, 43–64 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 48. On these medieval Christian developments see Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York: Zone Books, 1988).

27. Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

28. It is also possible to compare this process of marketization with the other great cultural transformation that coincided with increased global trade, namely the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe when Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality were replaced by an “instrumental reasoning or cost-benefit analysis” based on self-interest. David Wooton, Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2018).

29. Jens Schleiter, “Checking the Heavenly ‘Bank Account of Karma’: Cognitive Metaphors for Karma in Western Perception and Early Theravada Buddhism,” Religion 43, no. 4 (2013), 463–486.

30. For a discussion of Buddhist theories on debt and karma see Ulrich Timme Kragh, Early Buddhist Theories of Action and Result: A Study of Karmaphalasambandha—Candrakirti’s Prasannapada, Verses 17.1–20 (Vienna: Wiener Studies zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde, 2006), 305–357.

31. As Dilip K. Chakrabarti has put it based on archaeological evidence: “the short donors’ inscriptions which they left behind in their hundreds demonstrate with great clarity how the spread of Buddhism in this phase was associated with the burgeoning inland commerce and economically secure laity.” Dilip K. Chakrabarti, “Buddhist Sites Across South Asia as Influenced by Political and Economic Forces,” World Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1995): 198.

32. André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, Vol. 1, Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam 7th-11th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 73. In Falk’s study of economic policy and expansion in early India he similarly argues that when Central Asians ruled India there was trade expansion, but when Indians ruled, and followed Brahmanical law, the economy suffered. Harry Falk, “The Tidal Waves of History: Between the Empires and Beyond,” in Between the Empires: Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE, ed. Patrick Olivelle, 145–166 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

33. In traditional scholarship it has been assumed that Buddhism was responding to developments in “Hinduism”; however, more recently it has been suggested that it was actually the other way around. To wit, the idea of karma and all its various ramifications as found in Buddhism, Jainism, and Ajivikism arose first in eastern India and only later was adopted and reinterpreted by Brahmanism. Johannes Bronkhorst, Greater Magadha: Studies in the Culture of Early India (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

34. The following presentation of the anatman theory is based largely on Steven Collins’s Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Peter Harvey, The Selfless Mind: Personality, Consciousness, and Nirvana in Early Buddhism (London: Routledge Curzon, 1995).

35. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchichus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

36. For a convenient overview of karma theory in early India see Johannes Bronkhorst, Karma (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011); or for greater detail, Wilhelm Halbfass, Karma und Wiedergeburt im indischen Denken (Kreuzlingen–Münich: Hugendubel, 2000).

37. Paul Dundas, The Jains (New York: Routledge, 2002), 97–105.

38. Contrary to early colonial scholarship, which posited that the Buddha was a critic of the caste system (much like the scholars themselves), the fact of the matter is that the Buddha never mentioned caste. In fact, Buddhists only took up the question of caste about a thousand years after the Buddha, between 600 and 800 CE, when Buddhist scholars had to rebut Hindu thinkers who had begun to argue not only that caste was a natural state of affairs, but also that caste differences were perceptible. Or in other words, one could tell someone’s caste simply by their appearance. Such a notion was obviously built on atman theory, and the idea of something permanent transmitting from life to life. It was, of course, this very notion that Buddhist thought rejected in its entirety. Since, on account of there being no inherent, eternal self, the very idea that caste was natural, much less perceptible, was for the Buddhists ridiculous. Vincent Eltschinger, Caste and Buddhist Philosophy: Continuity of Some Buddhist Arguments against the Realist Interpretation of Social Denominations (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2012).

39. As Bailey and Mabbett have argued: “This would explain why he [the Buddha] was so inimical towards status based on birth, for him a sure cause of indolence, corruption, and arrogance. And this, as has been frequently observed by scholars, was consistent with the kind of ideology the new economic elites in society would have needed in order to have retained whatever privilege they had acquired through their wealth. There is certainly evidence of the Buddha taking up with real gusto the task of providing appropriate ethics for the new ‘secular’ elite classes. That he was successful in it—judging from the continuous stream of lay followers he attracted—is a testimony both to his own marketing skills and to the deep need in the people to have their desire for upward mobility legitimated.” [italics in original] Bailey and Mabbett, The Sociology of Early Buddhism, 52.2.

40. For an example of such a critique see Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha, 114.

41. “Then it occurred to this descendant of the ancient family which had come down in the world: ‘Now, I am delicately nurtured, I am not able to acquire wealth not (already) acquired, nor to increase the wealth (already) acquired. Now by what means could I live at ease and not be in want?’” Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 4, 109.

42. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 3, 10.

43. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 1, 26.

44. Nakamura Hajime has even argued that the Soto Zen monk Suzuki Shozan developed a proto-capitalist ethic of work and business. Nakamura Hajime, “Suzuki Shézan 1579–1655, and the Spirit of Capitalism in Japanese Buddhism,” Monumenta Nipponica 22 (1967): 1–14.

45. Gregory P. A. Levine, “Zen Sells Zen Things: Meditation Supply, Right Livelihood, and Buddhist Ritual,” in Zen and Material Culture, ed. Pamela D. Winfield and Steven Heine, 257–288 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 271.

CHAPTER 5

Epigraph: Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 4, 65.

1. See, for example, Ian Harris, “Buddhist Environmental Ethics and Detraditionalisation: The Case of EcoBuddhism,” Religion 25 (1995): 199–211; Ian Harris, “Ecological Buddhism?” in Worldviews, Religion, and the Environment: A Global Anthology, ed. Richard C. Foltz, 171–181 (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2003); Christopher Ives, “In Search of a Green Dharma: Philosophical Issues in Buddhist Environmental Ethics,” in Destroying Mara Forever: Buddhist Ethics Essays in Honor of Damien Keown, ed. John Powers and Charles S. Prebish, 165–185 (Ithaca: Snow Lion, 2009).

2. “Householder, suppose a man dreamt of lovely parks, lovely groves, lovely meadows, and lovely lakes, and on waking he saw nothing of it. So too, householder, a noble disciple considers this: ‘Sensual pleasures have been compared to a dream by the Blessed One; they provide much suffering and much despair, while the danger in them is great.’” Ñanamoli and Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 470–471.

3. As Yi-fu Tuan succinctly put it, “topophilia has no part in Buddhist doctrine.” Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 114.

4. “This Tapoda [boiling hell] flows from this: this lake of beautiful water, of cool water, of sweet water, of pure water, with lively and charming fords, with an abundance of fishes and turtles, and lotuses bloom.” Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 1, 188.

5. Which is not to say that one cannot find some “pro-nature” passages in the early Buddhist canon. For an eco-Buddhist interpretation of passages about nature from the early Therigāthā see Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 154–155.

6. Ñanamoli and Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 328.

7. On the negative view of animals in early Buddhism see the descriptions of the animal realm in Frank E. Reynolds and Mani B. Reynolds, Three Worlds According to King Ruang: A Thai Buddhist Cosmology (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1982).

8. Gregory Schopen, “The Buddhist ‘Monastery’ and the Indian Garden: Aesthetics, Assimilations, and the Siting of Monastic Establishments,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 126, no. 4 (2006): 487–505; Ian Harris, “Landscape Aesthetics and Environmentalism: Some Observations on the Representation of Nature in Buddhist and Western Art,” Contemporary Buddhism 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–168.

9. Harris, “‘A Vast Unsupervised Recycling Plant,’” 212.

10. Huaiyu Chen, “A Buddhist Classification of Plants and Animals in Early Tang China,” Journal of Asian History 43, no. 1 (2009): 31–51. For similar, generally negative views about animals in the early Buddhist tradition, see Reiko Ohnuma, Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5–23.

11. William R. La Fleur, “Saigyé and the Buddhist Value of Nature, Part 1,” History of Religions 13, no. 2 (1973): 93–128; William R. La Fleur, “Saigyé and the Buddhist Value of Nature, Part 2,” History of Religions 13, no. 3 (1973): 227–248. For early Buddhism, see also Ellison Banks Findly, “Borderline Beings: Plant Possibilities in Early Buddhism,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 122, no. 2 (2002): 252–263.

12. Fabio Rambelli, Vegetal Buddhas: Ideological Effects of Japanese Buddhist Doctrines on the Salvation of Inanimate Beings (Kyoto: Scuola Italiana di Studi sull’Asia Orientale, 2001).

13. Lewis Lancaster, “Buddhism and Ecology: Collective Cultural Perceptions,” in Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds, ed. M. E. Tucker and D. R. Williams, 3–20 (Cambridge: Harvard University Center for Study of World Religions, 1997).

14. Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 215.

15. On “secondary nature” and the aestheticization of nature in the urban environment of Japan see Haruo Shirane, Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 1–24.

16. Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (London: Reaktion Books, 2004).

17. J. D. Frodsham, The Murmuring Stream: The Life and Works of the Chinese Nature Poet Hsieh Ling-yün (385–433), Duke of K’ang-Lo (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1967).

18. Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 333–360.

19. Lewis Mayo, “The Order of Birds in Guiyi Jun Dunhuang,” East Asian History 20 (2000): 6.

20. Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004).

21. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 5, 60.

22. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 3, 30.

23. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 5, 29.

24. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 4, 188–189.

25. Daud Ali, “Gardens in Early Indian Court Life,” Studies in History 19, no. 2 (2003): 224.

26. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 4, 20.

27. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 4, 236.

28. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 5, 43.

29. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 2, 104.

30. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 3, 279; vol. 5, 17.

31. “Now, your reverences, suppose a man arriving at sound timber, searching for sound timber, ranging about in his quest for sound timber, should neglect the root, the trunk of a great upstanding tree of sound timber, and think he must search for sound timber in the branches and foliage.” Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 5, 157.

32. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 5, 332–337.

33. Bhikku Ñanamoli, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 879.

34. Lambert Schmithausen, The Problem of the Sentience of Plants in Earliest Buddhism (Tokyo: International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 1991), 75.

35. Jonathan A. Silk, Managing Monks: Administrators and Administrative Roles in Indian Buddhist Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 80–81.

36. “In the first year of the Sung Emperor T’ai-tsung (AD 976) an edict decreed that the ‘companions of meditation living in seclusion in the Wu-t’ai deep forest and great valley should be entirely released from taxation.’ It appears that by about this time monasteries on the mountain had had considerable land presented to them, on the cultivation of which the priests depended for a living. Three hundred ching [4874 acres] of good fields are reported to have been taken from ten of these monasteries later in the Sung dynasty for the support of the soldiery, and returned by edict of Emperor Che-tsung, who reigned AD 1086–1100. To secure good agricultural land of any such extent would, it seems, have involved the removal of a considerable area of forest, if we can depend on the statements previously quoted as to the forest cover of the region.” W. C. Lowdermilk and Dean R. Wickes, History of Soil Use in the Wu T’ai Shan Area (Beijing: North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1938), 3.

37. “The gazetteer of the Tiantong monastery near Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, provides a rare description of the way in which one plantation was used over a period of about a century, which supports this proposition. During the late fourteenth century, the monks planted pines along 20 li of road approaching the monastery. By the early fifteenth century, the trees were being harvested selectively to be used for beams and for shafts for agricultural tools.” Nicholas K. Menzies, Forest and Land Management in Imperial China (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 68.

38. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 5, 193.

39. N. A. Nikam and Richard McKeon, The Edicts of Asoka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 56.

40. Reynolds and Reynolds, Three Worlds According to King Ruang, 88.

41. Scholars who study and theorize material culture have pointed out that “in every society the possession of rare objects is so fundamental as a mark of distinction, their enticement so strong, that it is natural that objects are incorporated into the art and ritual even of religions that embrace the ultimate transcendence of such values.” Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture, 8. Moreover, “the greater the emphasis upon immateriality, the more finessed becomes the exploitation of the specificities of the form of materiality by which that immateriality is expressed.” Daniel Miller, Materiality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 25.

42. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 4, 239.

43. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 4, 247, 252. The same dynamic plays out with all the limited possessions that a monk is allowed to have. Thus regarding the begging bowl, before the Buddha finally allows bowls made of iron and clay, he rejects ones made of gold, silver, pearls, beryl, crystal, bronze, glass, tin, lead, and copper. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 5, 152.

44. Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha, 287.

45. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 4, 256–257.

46. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 4, 91.

47. Although the difference between these lower quality hides and those in the city—the tiger, panther, etc.—is on one level clearly a marker of status, it is also important to note that it may also be a consequence of actual Buddhist agro-development because many of the big cats actually live in symbiosis with human development. Thus Peter Boomgaard has argued “that during the earlier phases of population growth, the activities of humans, far from leading to lower animal densities, stimulated the proliferation of various species of game.” Peter Boomgaard, “Hunting and Trapping in the Indonesian Archipelago, 1500–1950,” in Paper Landscapes: Explorations in the Environmental History of Indonesia, ed. Peter Boomgaard et al., 185–213 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997), 188.

48. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 4, 267.

49. Silvio A. Bedini, The Trail of Time: Time Measurement with Incense in East Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 37.

50. The purification of mind through meditation is thus compared to refining gold: “By means of a furnace, salt-earth, red chalk, a blow-pipe, tongs and the appropriate effort of a person. That is how the refining of sterling gold that is impure is done by a proper process. Just so, Visakha, the purification of a soiled mind is done by a proper process.” Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 1, 190.

51. The Buddha continually references the ability to evaluate valuable commodities, such as a “fine beryl gem of purest water, eight-faceted, well-cut, lying on red brocade, glows, radiates, and shines, so the Brahma of the Ten Thousand abides.” Ñanamoli and Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 961. Or else the Buddha uses various commodities to compare the various stages of Buddhahood: “Just as, monks, of all root scents, black gum is reckoned chief, even so whatsoever good states there be…. Just as of all wood scents, red sandalwood is reckoned chief.” Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 5, 17.

52. Quoted in James McHugh, Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 192.

CHAPTER 6

Epigraph: Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha, 237–238.

1. Pollock, “Axialism and Empire,” 400. Some of this failure can no doubt be attributed to the fact that the Buddha, or at least the early corpus of Buddhist texts, does not engage with any of the political theories that animated Axial Age India. George Erdosy, “City States of North India and Pakistan at the Time of the Buddha,” in The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia: The Emergence of Cities and States, ed. F. R. Allchin, 99–122 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 116.

2. On the non-Buddhist orientation of the Sungas, Satavahanas, and Kushans see Kathleen D. Morrison, “Trade, Urbanism, and Agricultural Expansion: Buddhist Monastic Institutions and the State in Early Historic Western Deccan,” World Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1995): 203–221; and Gérard Fussman, “Kushan Power and the Expansion of Buddhism Beyond the Soleiman Mountains,” in Kushan Histories: Literary Sources and Selected Papers from a Symposium at Berlin, December 5 to 7, 2013, ed. Harry Falk, 153–202 (Bremen: Hempen Verlag, 2015). Moreover, on the important question of whether the legendary “cakravartin” Asoka was even a Buddhist, see Patrick Olivelle, “Asoka’s Inscriptions as Text and Ideology,” in Reimagining Asoka: Memory and History, ed. P. Olivelle, J. Leoshko, and H. P. Ray, 157183 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012). For a different take—namely, that Asoka did actually convert to Buddhism—see Nayanjot Lahiri, Ashoka in Ancient India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 132–140.

3. Johannes Bronkhorst, How the Brahmins Won: From Alexander to the Guptas (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

4. Kate Crosby, Theravada Buddhism: Continuity, Diversity, and Identity (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 43–68; Strong, Relics of the Buddha.

5. A. L. Dallapiccola and S. Zingel-Avé Lallemont, eds., The Stupa: Its Religious, Historical, and Architectural Significance (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1980).

6. Robert Knox, Amaravati: Buddhist Sculpture from the Great Stupa (London: British Museum, 1992).

7. Holt and Padma, “Buddhism in Andhra and Its Influence on Buddhism in Sri Lanka.”

8. John Clifford Holt, Buddha in the Crown: Avalokitesvara in the Buddhist Traditions of Sri Lanka (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

9. Stephen C. Berkwitz, South Asian Buddhism: A Survey (New York: Routledge, 2010), 142–155.

10. Donald K. Swearer, The Buddhist World of Southeast Asia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 63–95.

11. M. L. Pattaratorn Chirapravati, “Development of Buddhist Traditions in Peninsular Thailand: A Study Based on Votive Tablets (Seventh to Eleventh Centuries),” in Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’Connor, ed. Nora A. Taylor, 172–193 (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, 2000).

12. Janice Stargardt, Tracing Thought Through Things: The Oldest Pali Texts and the Early Buddhist Archaeology of India and Burma (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2000), 9.

13. Kate Crosby, “Tantric Theravada: A Bibliographic Essay on the Writings of François Bizot and Others on the Yogavacara Tradition,” Contemporary Buddhism: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1, no. 2 (2000): 141–198.

14. On the history of Buddhism in Cambodia and Vietnam see, for example, Hiram Woodward, “Aspects of Buddhism in Tenth-Century Cambodia,” in Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia, ed. D. Christian Lammerts, 218–260 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2016); Ian Mabbett, “Buddhism in Champa,” in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, ed. D. G. Marr and A. C. Milner, 289–313 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986); John K. Whitmore, “Building a Buddhist Monarchy in Dai Viet: Temples and Texts Under Ly Nhan-tong (r. 1072–1127),” in Buddhist Dynamics in Premodern and Early Modern Southeast Asia, ed. D. Christian Lammerts, 283–306 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2016); Cuong Tu Nguyen, Zen in Medieval Vietnam: A Study and Translation of the Thien Uyen Tap Anh (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998).

15. Tom Harrison, “Recent Archaeological Discoveries in East Malaysia and Brunei,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 40 (1967): 142; John Miksic, “Archaeological Evidence for Esoteric Buddhism in Sumatra, 7th to 13th Century,” in Esoteric Buddhism in Medieval Maritime Asia: Networks of Masters, Texts, Icons, ed. Andrea Acri, 253–274 (Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2016).

16. Jan Wisseman Christie, “Javanese Markets and the Asian Sea Trade Boom of the Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries AD,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, no. 3 (1998): 344–381.

17. On these different polities and their support of the Dharma see O. W. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce: A Study of the Origins of Srivijaya (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967); Jan Wisseman Christie, “Revisiting Early Mataram,” in Fruits of Inspiration: Studies in Honour of Prof. J. G. de Casparis, ed. M. J. Klokke and K. R. van Kooij, 22–55 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2001); John Miksic, The Legacy of Majaphit (Singapore: National Heritage Board, 1995).

18. Luis Gómez and Hiram W. Woodward Jr., Barabudur: History and Significance of a Buddhist Monument (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1981).

19. Takakusu Junjiro, A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practiced in India and the Malay Archipelago (A.D. 671–695) by I-Tsing (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896); Yijing, Buddhist Monastic Traditions of Southern Asia: A Record of the Inner Law Sent Home from the South Seas, trans. Li Rongxi (Berkeley: Numata Center, 2000).

20. Alaka Chattopadhyaya, Atisa and Tibet (Calcutta: Indian Studies Past and Present, 1967).

21. Gérard Fussman, “Upaya-kausalya: L’implantation du bouddhisme au Gandhara,” in Bouddhisme et cultures locales: Quelques cas de réciproques adaptations, ed. Fukui Fumimasa and Gérard Fussman (Paris: École française d’Extrême Orient, 1994); Pierfrancesco Callieri, “Buddhist Presence in the Urban Settlements of Swāt, Second Century BCE to Fourth Century CE,” in Gandhāran Buddhism: Archaeology, Art, Texts, ed. Pia Brancaccio and Kurt Behrendt, 60–82 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006); Siglinde Dietz, “Buddhism in Gandhara,” in The Spread of Buddhism, ed. Ann Heirman and Stephan Peter Bumbacher, 49–74 (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

22. Boris A. Litvinsky, Die Geschichte des Buddhismus in Ostturkestan (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999).

23. Boris Stavisky, “The Fate of Buddhism in Middle Asia,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 3 (1993–1994): 113–142; Antonino Forte, “An Ancient Monastery Excavated in Kirgiziya,” Central Asiatic Journal 38 (1994): 41–57.

24. Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 25–55.

25. Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History, trans. James Ward (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

26. Xavier Tremblay, “The Spread of Buddhism in Serindia–Buddhism Among Iranians, Tocharians and Turks before the 13th Century,” in The Spread of Buddhism, ed. Ann Heirman and Stephan Peter Bumbacher, 75–130 (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

27. Elisabeth Pinks, Die Uiguren von Kan-chou in der frühen Sung-Zeit (960–1028) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1968); Lilla Russell-Smith, Uygur Patronage in Dunhuang: Regional Art Centres on the Northern Silk Road in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

28. Johan Elverskog, Uygur Buddhist Literature (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997).

29. Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1959).

30. Wendy Swartz, Robert F. Campany, Yang Lu, and Jessey J. C. Choo, Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

31. Amy McNair, Donors of Longmen: Faith, Politics, and Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007); John Lagerway and Lü Pengzhi, Early Chinese Religion: Part Two: The Period of Division (220–589 AD) (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

32. Peter N. Gregory, Tsung-mi and the Sinification of Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

33. Stanley Weinstein, Buddhism Under the T’ang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994).

34. Lewis R. Lancaster and Chai-shin Yu, Introduction of Buddhism to Korea: New Cultural Patterns (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1989).

35. Lewis R. Lancaster and Chai-shin Yu, Assimilation of Buddhism in Korea: Religious Maturity and Innovation in the Silla Dynasty (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1991).

36. Sem Vermeersch, The Power of the Buddhas: The Politics of Buddhism During the Koryo Dynasty (918–1392) (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008).

37. Strong, The Experience of Buddhism, 297–299.

38. Jacqueline I. Stone, Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999).

39. Christopher I. Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power Among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese During the Early Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).

40. Sam van Schaik, Tibet: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 21–60.

41. Jacob P. Dalton, Taming the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

42. Matthew T. Kapstein, The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism: Conversion, Contestation, and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Ronald M. Davidson, Tibetan Renaissance: Tantric Buddhism in the Rebirth of Tibetan Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

43. Dora C.Y. Ching, “Tibetan Buddhism and the Creation of the Imperial Image,” in Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368–1644), ed. David M. Robinson, 321–364 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008); Patricia Berger, Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003); Johan Elverskog, Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism and the State in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006); Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

44. P. S. Jaini, “The Disappearance of Buddhism and the Survival of Jainism: A Study in Contrast,” in Studies in the History of Buddhism, ed. A. K. Narain, 81–91 (Delhi: B.R. Publishing, 1980); Kanai Lal Hazra, The Rise and Decline of Buddhism in India (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1995); Giovanni Verardi, Hardships and Downfall of Buddhism in India (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011).

45. On the Western discovery of Buddhism see, for example, Urs App, The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy (Kyoto: UniversityMedia, 2012); Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); and Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol: An Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

CHAPTER 7

Epigraph: Donald Keene, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenké (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 101.

1. On this historiography and its implications for the conceptualization of south Asian states see Carla M. Sinopoli, The Political Economy of Craft Production: Crafting Empire in South India, c. 1350–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 38–62.

2. See Gerard Fussman, “Central and Provincial Administration in Ancient India: The Problem of the Mauryan Empire,” Indian Historical Review 14, no. 1–2 (1987): 43–72; James Heitzman, Gifts of Power: Lordship in an Early Indian State (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15–19; N. Sughandi, “Context, Content, and Composition: Questions of Intended Meaning and the Asokan Edicts,” Asian Perspectives 42, no. 2 (2003): 224–246; and Lars Fogelin, Archaeology of Early Buddhism (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2006), 21, 32. The same observation has also been made about modern empires: “Nevertheless, the fundamental problem with both ‘apocalyptism’ and ‘Neo-Whiggism’ is that, in their different ways, they ascribe too much power to empire. The British Empire, vast and apparently despotic as it seemed, was in reality a ramshackle conglomerate, very far from the all-seeing, all-powerful monolith envisaged by Edward Said and his followers among the discourse theorists. It was decentralized and highly heterogeneous, bearing within it many different types of rule as well as social, economic and racial systems.” John M. MacKenzie, “Empire and the Ecological Apocalypse: The Historiography of the Imperial Environment,” in Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, ed. Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin, 215–228 (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997), 222.

3. Ranabir Chakravarti, “The Creation and Expansion of Settlements and Management of Hydraulic Resources in Ancient India,” in Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, ed. Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan, 87–105 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 94.

4. See, for example, Thapar, From Lineage to State, 75; Morrison, “Trade, Urbanism, and Agricultural Expansion,” 212; H. P. Ray, “Archaeology and Asoka: Defining the Empire,” in Reimagining Asoka: Memory and History, ed. P. Olivelle, J. Leoshko, and H. P. Ray, 65–92 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 67.

5. Peter Vandergeest, “Hierarchy and Power in Pre-national Buddhist States,” Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 4 (1993): 864.

6. A good example of this weaving together of Asia is the tradition of Buddhist bridge building, which helped link communities together both religiously and economically. The meritorious value of such Buddhist infrastructure projects is found in early Buddhism. Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism, 72. Moreover, in Tibet, there was Tangtong Gyalpo, who famously built iron bridges across the roof of the world in order to extract resources from the frontier. Cyrus Stearns, trans., King of the Empty Plain: The Tibetan Iron-Bridge Builder Tangtong Gyalpo (Ithaca: Snow Lion, 2007). Similarly, in Japan there was Gyoki, who “organized lay believers into sodalities for the purpose of performing such meritorious tasks as building bridges, canals and temples.” Michael I. Como, Shotoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 112. And in China the list of Buddhist bridge builders is very long. Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late Ming China (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1994); Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture, 201 ff.

7. Herman Kulke, “The Historical Background of India’s Axial Age,” in The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt, 374–392 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 386. On the Buddhist intensification of the economy at Bharhut see Jason Hawkes, “The Wider Archaeological Contexts of the Buddhist Stūpa Site of Bharhut,” in Buddhist Stupas in South Asia, ed. Jason Hawkes and Akira Shimada, 146–175 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 170.

8. Ethan Isaac Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 93.

9. A good case in point is Tibet, where monasteries were the major driving force not only in banking but also as facilitators of trade. See, for example, C. Patterson Giersch, “Across Zomia with Merchants, Monks, and Musk: Process Geographies, Trade Networks, and the Inner-East–Southeast Asian Borderlands,” Journal of Global History 5, no. 2 (2010): 215–239. On the early history of monks and nuns lending money with interest see Gregory Schopen, “On the Legal and Economic Activities of Buddhist Nuns: Two Examples from Early India,” in Buddhism and Law: An Introduction, ed. Rebecca R. French and Mark A. Nathan, 91–114 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

10. As environmental historian Conrad Totman has pointed out: “primary resource exploitation is normatively both a horizontal (spatial) and vertical (social) transaction. Horizontally it moves goods from an economic hinterland to an economic center. Vertically the predominant direction of movement is from the weak and poor to the rich and strong, moving organic and inorganic materials through the hands of menial laborers via expediting entrepreneurs and/or officials to those consumers with the wish and wealth to pay the costs of the transaction.” Conrad Totman, “Forest Products Trade in Pre-industrial Japan,” in Changing Pacific Forests: Historical Perspectives on the Forest Economy of the Pacific Basin, ed. R.P. Tucker and John Dargavel, 19–25 (Durham: Forest History Society, 1992), 19.

11. Vandergeest, “Hierarchy and Power in Pre-national Buddhist States,” 847.

12. James C. Scott, “Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition,” Theory and Society 4, no. 1 (1977): 17.

13. Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 4, 221.

14. Nancy E. Falk, “Wilderness and Kingship in Ancient South Asia,” History of Religions 13, no. 1 (1973): 1.

15. This passage from Avalokitavrata’s seventh-century commentary on Nagarjuna’s famous Treatise on the Middle Way is quoted in Lopez, Buddhism and Science, 103.

16. McHugh, Sandalwood and Carrion, 167.

17. Pollock, “Axialism and Empire,” 402–403.

18. David L. Gosling, Religion and Ecology in India and Southeast Asia (New York: Routledge, 2001), 155–168.

19. Olivelle, “Asoka’s Inscriptions as Text and Ideology,” and “Power of Words: The Ascetic Appropriation and the Semantic Evolution of *dharma,” in Language, Texts, and Society: Explorations in Ancient Indian Culture and Religion, ed. Patrick Olivelle, 121–135 (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 131–132.

20. Klaus Vollmer, “Buddhism and the Killing of Animals in Premodern Japan,” in Buddhism and Violence, ed. Michael Zimmermann, 195–212 (Bhairahawa: Lumbini International Research Institute, 2006), 202–203.

21. Hoyt Long, “Grateful Animal or Spiritual Being? Buddhist Gratitude Tales and Changing Conceptions of Deer in Early Japan,” in JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life, ed. Gregory M. Pflugfelder and Brett L. Walker, 21–58 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2005), 49.

22. Ray, Winds of Change, 41–44, 116.

23. Bennett Bronson, “Patterns in the Early Southeast Asian Metals Trade,” in Early Metallurgy, Trade and Urban Centres in Thailand and Southeast Asia, ed. Ian Glover at al., 63–114 (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1992), 83–84.

24. As H. P. Ray has noted, “the search for mineral resources may have led to the commercial exploitation of the peninsula for gems and gold. Pali texts and the Arthasastra show greater familiarity with gems and semi-precious stones than early Sanskrit literature, and the probable source of some of these must have been the Deccan. Once the peninsula, notably the gold mines around Maski in the Raichur district and the diamond mines at Yerragudi in the district of Kurnool, was opened up, the strategic location of the western Deccan offered immense possibilities of exercising control along the routes used for commercial traffic.” H. P. Ray, Monastery and Guild: Commerce Under the Satavahanas (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 203. On the Buddhist involvement with gems, especially the so-called seven jewels, see Xinru Liu’s Ancient India and Ancient China.

25. McHugh, Sandalwood and Carrion, 212–214.

26. E. Edwards McKinnon, “Continuity and Change in South Indian Involvement in Northern Sumatra: The Inferences of Archaeological Evidence from Kota Cina and Lamreh,” in Early Interactions Between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange, ed. P. Y. Manguin, A. Mani, and G. Wade, 137–160 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 138–139.

27. Such tactics were advocated by the Arthasastra, an early Indian manual of how to acquire wealth and power, which “describes the methods of the breaking up of free, powerful, armed tribes of food-producers organized as samghas. The main technique was to soften them up for disintegration from within so as to convert the tribesmen into members of a class society based upon individual private property. Dissension was sown by spies and active tribal elements were sought to be corrupted. The internal working of the tribal community was disturbed in every conceivable way.” Aloka Parasher-Sen, “Of Tribes, Hunters and Barbarians: Forest Dwellers in the Mauryan Period,” in Environmental History of Early India, ed. Nandini Sinha Kapur, 3–16 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9.

28. Ray, Monastery and Guild: Commerce Under the Satavahanas.

29. Herman Kulke, “From Asoka to Jayavarman VII: Some Reflections on the Relationship Between Buddhism and the State in India and Southeast Asia,” in Buddhism Across Asia: Networks of Material, Intellectual and Cultural Exchange, ed. Tansen Sen, 327–345 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014), 341.

30. DeCaroli, Haunting the Buddha, 33. See also Gregory Schopen, “Immigrant Monks and the Proto-Historical Dead: The Buddhist Occupation of Early Burial Sites in India,” in Festschrift für Dieter Schlingloff, ed. F. Wilhelm, 215–238 (Munich: Reinbek, 1996); and Robert DeCaroli, “Text Versus Image: The Implications of Physical Evidence for Buddhist History,” in Belief in the Past: Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Religion, ed. David S. Whitley and Kelley Hays-Gilpin, 119–128 (Walnut Creek: Left Coast, 2008). Janice Stargardt and Sree Padma have each noted the same dynamic of Buddhist sites on top of earlier sacred sites in Burma and the Krishna Valley. Stargardt, Tracing Thought Through Things, 13–14; Padma, “Material Culture and the Emergence of Urban Buddhism,” 22–23.

31. “The city of Taxila is situated in a beautiful and fertile plain protected to the northeast by the Murree hills and to the north and south by two spurs that finally peter out at this point. The northern spur, known as Sarda hills, divides the Taxila valley from the Chach plain on the left bank of the Indus, and the southern or Mārgalā hills divide it from the modern city of Islamabad. The site is distinguished both by its natural beauty (now unhappily under threat from the great pressure from human activities) and by its agricultural productivity…. Taxila’s situation and its fertility were noticed by several early writers, including Arian, Pliny and Strabo. Throughout the historical period Taxila has been distinguished by its position on the Grand Trunk road and its ancient predecessor, the Uttarapatha, which linked Gangetic India to the northwest, and so, through Afghanistan to Central Asia.… We are struck by a series of remarkable facts: that Taxila has first of all a geographical setting which essentially links it with the mountain valleys of the northwest of Pakistan, ancient Gandhara; second that it has geographically open movements into the Peshawar area, to the northeast Kashmir, and thence through the mountains to Kashgar and China and to the southeast toward Punjab and the Ganges valley.” Allchin, “The Urban Position of Taxila,” 70.

32. Neelis, Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks, 261. On the importance of maintaining control of this trade by military force see Gérard Fussman, “Taxila: The Central Asian Connection,” in Urban Form and Meaning in South Asia: The Shaping of Cities from Prehistoric to Precolonial Times, ed. Howard Spodek and Doris Meth Srinivasan, 83–100 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993); and Saifur Rahman Dar, “Pathways Between Gandhara and North India During the Second Century B.C.–Second Century A.D.,” in On the Cusp of an Era: Art in the Pre-Kuṣāṇa World, ed. D. M. Srinivasan, 29–54 (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

33. R. S. Sharma, “Trends in the Economic History of Mathurā (c. 300 B.C.–A.D. 300),” in Mathurā: The Cultural Heritage, ed. D. M. Srinivasan, 31–38 (New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 1989), 34.

34. Hannah Bloch, “Mega Copper Deal in Afghanistan Fuels Rush to Save Ancient Treasures,” National Geographic, September 2015 (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/mes-aynak/bloch-text).

35. In his study of early urbanization, George Erdosy, for example, has noted that Kausambi and Rajagrha were distinguished from other settlements by functioning as nodes for “procurement, processing and exchange of raw materials absent in the alluvial plain.” George Erdosy, “The Prelude to Urbanization: Ethnicity and the Rise of Late Vedic Chiefdoms,” in The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia: The Emergence of Cities and States, ed. F. R. Allchin, 75–98 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 82.

36. Yeshe Tsogyal, The Life and Liberation of Padmasambhava, 2 vols., trans. Kenneth Douglas and Gwendolyn Bays (Emeryville: Dharma Publishing, 1978), 353. Moreover, as Sam van Schaik has pointed out, the key to the Tibetan renaissance in the eleventh century was their mining of gold. Van Schaik, Tibet: A History, 67. On gold mining in Tibet see also E. Lo Bue, “Statuary Metals in Tibet and the Himalayas: History, Tradition and Modern Use,” in Aspects of Tibetan Metallurgy, ed. W. A. Oddy and W. Zwalf, 7–41 (London: British Museum Occasional Paper, 1981), 14; Luce Boilnois, “Gold, Wool, and Musk: Trade in Lhasa in the Seventeenth Century,” in Lhasa in the Seventeenth Century: The Capital of the Dalai Lamas, ed. Françoise Pommaret, 133–156 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 143–144.

37. E. Edwards McKinnon, “Buddhism and the Pre-Islamic Archaeology of Kutei in the Mahakam Valley of East Kalimantan,” in Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’Connor, ed. Nora A. Taylor, 216–240 (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, 2000), 238. On the role this extractive economy played in developing all Southeast Asian Buddhist civilizations see Kathirithamby-Wells, “Socio-Political Structures and the Southeast Asian Ecosystem: An Historical Perspective up to the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Asian Perceptions of Nature: A Critical Approach, ed. Ole Bruun and Arne Kalland, 25–46 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1995) and Peter Grave, “Beyond the Mandala: Buddhist Landscapes and Upland-Lowland Interaction in North-West Thailand AD 1200–1650,” World Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1995): 243–265.

38. Ray, “South and Southeast Asia: The Commencement of a Lasting Relationship,” 408.

39. On the symbiotic relationship between South and Southeast Asia fostered by these trading networks see Tilman Frasch, “A Buddhist Network in the Bay of Bengal: Relations Between Bodhgaya, Burma and Sri Lanka, c. 300–1300,” in From the Mediterranean to the China Sea: Miscellaneous Notes, ed. C. Guillot, D. Lombard, and R. Ptak, 69–92 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998).

40. Peter Boomgaard, “Economic Growth in Indonesia, 500–1990,” in Explaining Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Angus Maddison, ed. A. Szirmai, B. van Ark, and D. Pilat, 195–216 (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1993).

41. Carla M. Sinopoli, “On the Edge of Empire: Form and Substance in the Satavahana Dynasty,” in Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, ed. S. E. Alcock et al., 155–178 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 159.

42. F. R. Allchin, “Upon the Antiquity and Methods of Gold Mining in Ancient India,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 5, no. 2 (1962): 208–209.

43. M. L. Pattaratorn Chirapravati, “Development of Buddhist Traditions in Peninsular Thailand: A Study Based on Votive Tablets (Seventh to Eleventh Centuries),” in Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’Connor, ed. Nora A. Taylor, 172–193 (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, 2000).

44. Kenneth R. Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100–1500 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 111.

45. Roderich Ptak, “Possible Chinese References to the Barus Area (Tang to Ming),” in Histoire de Barus Sumatra: Le site de Lobu Tua, ed. Claude Guillot, 119–147 (Paris: Cahier d’Archipel, 1998), 143.

46. Janice Stargardt, “Behind the Shadows: Archaeological Data on Two-Way Sea-Trade Between Quanzhou and Satingpra, South Thailand, 10th–14th Century,” in The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000–1400, ed. Angela Schottenhammer, 309–393 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 357–366.

47. Bue, “Statuary Metals in Tibet and the Himalayas,” 19.

48. On the founding of the Buddhist Pyu Kingdom see Janice Stargardt, “The Great Silver Reliquary from Śrī Kṣetra: The Oldest Buddhist Art in Burma and One of the World’s Oldest Pali Inscriptions,” in Fruits of Inspiration: Studies in Honour of Prof. J. G. de Casparis, ed. Marijke J. Klokke and Karel R. van Kooij, 487–517 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2001).

49. Janice Stargardt, “Burma’s Economic and Diplomatic Relations with India and China from the Early Medieval Sources,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 14, no. 1 (1971): 47.

50. Robert Vicat Turrell, “Conquest and Concession: The Case of the Burma Ruby Mines,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (1988): 141–163.

51. Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

52. Sun Laichen, “Shan Gems, Chinese Silver and the Rise of Shan Principalities in Northern Burma, c. 1450–1527,” in Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor, ed. Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen, 169–196 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2010).

53. Volker Grabowsky, “The Northern Tai Polity of Lan Na (Ba-bai Da-dian) in the 14th and 15th Centuries: The Ming Factor,” in Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor, ed. Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen, 197–245 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2010), 219.

54. Edward Schafer, The Vermillion Bird: T’ang Images of the South (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 77.

55. Roderich Ptak, “China and the Trade in Tortoise-Shell (Sung to Ming Periods),” in Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c. 1400–1750, ed. R. Ptak and D. Rothermund, 195–229 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991), 203.

56. Denis Twitchett and Janice Stargardt, “Chinese Silver Bullion in a Tenth-Century Indonesian Wreck,” Asia Major, 3rd series, 15, no. 1 (2002): 25, 69.

57. On this trade see, for example, M. P. Fitzpatrick, “Provincializing Rome: The Indian Ocean Trade Network and Roman Imperialism,” Journal of World History 22 (2011): 27–54; Federico De Romanis and Marco Maiuro, Across the Ocean: Nine Essays on Indo-Mediterranean Trade (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

58. Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 16. See also Neelis, Early Buddhist transmission and Trade Networks, 220–229.

59. Lionel Casson, “New Light on Maritime Loans: P. Vindob G 40822,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 84 (1990): 201.

60. Lionel Casson, Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 172.

61. Harry Falk, “Money Can Buy Me Heaven: Religious Donations in Late and Post-Kushan India,” Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan 40 (2008): 143.

62. Beinart and Hughes, Environment and Empire, 1.

CHAPTER 8

Epigraph: David K. Wyatt, The Crystal Sands: The Chronicles of Nagara Śrī Dharmarāja (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, 1975), 104–106.

1. John R. McNeill, “The First Hundred Thousand Years,” in The Turning Points of Environmental History, ed. Frank Uekoetter, 13–28 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 22.

2. See, for example, Heitzman, Gifts of Power; Chakravarti, “The Creation and Expansion of Settlements and Management of Hydraulic Resources in Ancient India,” 94; Callieri, “The Archaeological Basis,” 60.

3. Schopen, “The Buddhist ‘Monastery’ and the Indian Garden,” 502–503.

4. Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha, 366.

5. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 4, 161.

6. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 1, 209.

7. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 4, 116.

8. Peter Boomgaard, Southeast Asia: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 72.

9. Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha, 351.

10. Morrison, “Trade, Urbanism, and Agricultural Expansion,” 210.

11. Craig J. Reynolds, “Monastery Lands and Labour Endowments in Thailand: Some Effects of Social and Economic Change, 1868–1910,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 22, no. 2 (1979): 190–227.

12. Wyatt, The Crystal Sands, 135–136.

13. Andrew Hardy, “Eaglewood and the Economic History of Champa and Central Vietnam,” in Champa and the Archaeology of My Son (Vietnam), ed. Andrew Hardy et al., 107–126 (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2009), 108.

14. Leon Hurwitz, Wei Shou: Treatise on Buddhism and Taoism. An English Translation of the Original Chinese Text of Wei-Shu CXIV and the Japanese Annotation of Tsukamoto Zenryū (Kyoto: Jimbunkagaku Kenkyusho, 1956), 73.

15. Jacob P. Dalton, “Power and Compassion: Negotiating Buddhist Kingship in Tenth-Century Tibet,” in The Illuminating Mirror: Tibetan Studies in Honour of Per K. Sørensen, ed. Olaf Czaja and Guntram Hazod, 101–118 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2015), 114.

16. On Buddhist justifications for slavery see Gregory Schopen, “Liberation Is Only for Those Already Free: Reflections on Debts to Slavery and Enslavement to Debt in Early Indian Buddhist Monasticism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 3 (2014): 606–635; and R. Lingat, L’esclavage privé dans le vieux droit siamois (avec une traduction des anciennes lois siamoises sur l’esclavage) (Paris: Les Éditions Domat-Montchrestien, 1931). The most incisive study on the impact of Buddhist slavery is James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). On the slavery trade as a means of population control on the islands of Indonesia see Peter Boomgaard, “Introducing Environmental Histories of Indonesia,” in Paper Landscapes: Explorations in the Environmental History of Indonesia, ed. Peter Boomgaard et al., 1–26 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997).

17. James L. Watson, “Transactions in People: The Chinese Market in Slaves, Servants, and Heirs,” in Asian and African Systems of Slavery, ed. James L. Watson, 223–250 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 223. For more on the actual numbers involved see Magnus Fiskesjö, “Slavery as the Commodification of People: Wa ‘Slaves’ and Their Chinese ‘Sisters,’” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 59 (2011): 3–18.

18. Yi-fu Tuan, A Historical Geography of China (New Brunswick: AldineTransaction, 2008), 91.

19. Vermeersch, The Power of the Buddhas, 273.

20. On the question of how much land was actually granted to the samgha, based on the question of what the measurement “pay” actually meant at that time, see Aye Chan, “The Nature of Land and Labour Endowments to Sasana in Medieval Burmese History: Review of the Theory of ‘Merit-path-to-salvation,’” Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 1 (1988): 86–95.

21. Walshe, Sacred Economies, 83.

22. Billy K. L. So, Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien Pattern, 946–1368 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000), 97; Hugh R. Clark, Community, Trade, and Networks: Southern Fujian Province from the Third to the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 142.

23. See, for example, Christian Daniels. “Agricultural Technology and the Consolidation of Tay Polities in Northern Continental Southeast Asia During the 15th Century,” in Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor, ed. Geoff Wade and Sun Laichen, 246–270 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2010).

24. Grabowsky, “The Northern Tai Polity of Lan Na (Ba-bai Da-dian) in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: The Ming Factor,” 222.

25. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The World: A History (New York: Pearson Prentice-Hall, 2007), 313.

26. Sunil Sen Sarma, “Contemporaneity of the Perception on Environment in Kautilya’s Arthasastra” Indian Journal of History of Science 33, no. 1 (1998): 38–40.

27. Fernandez-Armesto, The World: A History, 316.

28. For a convenient summary of these debates see Jan Wisseman Christie, “Water from the Ancestors: Irrigation in Early Java and Bali,” in The Gift of Water: Water Management, Cosmology and the State in Southeast Asia, ed. Jonathan Rigg, 7–25 (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992).

29. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

30. On the intellectual, specifically Marxist, genealogy of Wittfogel’s theory and its lingering legacy see J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 80–86.

31. As Judith Shapiro has noted, “the relationship between humans and nature under Mao is so transparent and extreme that it clearly indicates a link between abuse of people and abuse of the natural environment.” Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xii. See also Paul Josephson et al., An Environmental History of Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

32. For two opposing views see, for example, H. P. Ray, “Archaeology and Asoka: Defining the Empire,” in Reimagining Asoka: Memory and History, ed. P. Olivelle, J. Leoshko, and H. P. Ray, 65–92 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 67; and Eva Myrdal, “Water Harvesting and Water Management: A Discussion of the Implications of Scale in Artificial Irrigation, the Sri Lankan Example,” Current Swedish Archaeology 11 (2003): 65–96.

33. For a summation of their argument see Julia Shaw, Buddhist Landscapes in Central India: Sanchi Hill and Archaeologies of Religious and Social Change, c. Third Century BC to Fifth Century AD (London: British Association for South Asian Studies, 2007), 259–262. For a counterargument see Fogelin, Archaeology of Early Buddhism, 178.

34. Julia Shaw, “Naga Sculptures in Sanchi’s Archaeological Landscape: Buddhism, Vaisnavism, and Local Agricultural Cults in Central India, First Century BCE to Fifth Century CE,” Artibus Asiae 64, no. 1 (2004): 51.

35. See the notices collected in P. Mittal and G. Dua, Archaeological and Epigraphical Sources on Buddhism (Collections of Articles from the Indian Antiquary) (Delhi: Originals, 2008).

36. Ray, “The Archaeology of Sacred Space: Introduction,” in Archaeology as History in Early South Asia, ed. H.P. Ray and C.M. Sinopoli, 350–375 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research, 2004), 356.

37. Nasiruddin Mobin, “The Pre-Muslim Landscape of Savar and Nature of Buddhist Settlement in Bangladesh,” in Hakim Habibur Rahman Khan Commemoration Volume: A Collection of Essays on History, Art, Archaeology, Numismatics, Epigraphy, and Literature of Bangladesh, 249–266 (Dhaka: International Centre for Study of History, 2001), 260.

38. John Brough, “A Kharoṣṭhī Inscription from China,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 24, no. 3 (1961): 517–530. Indeed, the “interaction between Buddhist monks and the public in Gandhara with regard to wells is the topic of an episode in the Vinaya of the Mūlasarvāstivādins: The story tells how some monks at Sravasti ran out of water. The layman Anāthapiṇḍada has a well (kūpa) made for them, and has a cart-load of peppers and myrobalan fruits dropped in, obviously to disinfect it and to remedy any sort of pollution. People in town hear about this tasty new supply and approach the monastery in flocks. The Buddha has to give directions about how to deal with the male citizens, and above all how to deal with women who tend to develop feelings towards handsome young monks while being served at the well. In one case the serving monk kept pouring water into the mouth of a hopeful lady for so long that she receives too much of it and dies. This leads to a rule prescribing that that stream of water has to be interrupted from time to time … imply[ing] the use of a bucket or earthen pot.” Harry Falk, “The Pious Donation of Wells in Gandhara,” in Prajñādhara: Essays on Asian, History, Epigraphy and Culture in Honour of Gouriswar Bhattacha-rya, ed. Gerd Mevissen and Arundhati Banerji, 23–36 (New Delhi: Kaveri Books 2009), 23.

39. Arnaud Bertrand, “Water Management in the Jingjue 精絕 Kingdom: The Transfer of a Water Tank System from Gandhara to Southern Xinjiang in the Third and Fourth Centuries C.E.,” Sino-Platonic Papers 223 (2012): 1–81.

40. Janice Stargardt, “Social and Religious Aspects of Royal Power in Medieval Burma: From Inscriptions of Kyansittha’s Reign, 1084–1112,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 13, no. 3 (1970): 306–307.

41. Janice Stargardt, “Thai Waterways: Archaeological Evidence on Agriculture, Shipping and Trade in the Srivijayan Period,” Man 8, no. 1 (1973): 7.

42. Stargardt, “Burma’s Economic and Diplomatic Relations with India and China from the Early Medieval Sources,” 57–58.

43. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, “Cistern Sluices and Piston Sluices: Some Observations on the Types of Sluices and Methods of Water Distribution in Pre-Colonial Sri Lanka,” Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 10 (1984/1987): 87–104.

44. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, “Irrigation and Hydraulic Society in Early Medieval Ceylon,” Past and Present 53 (1971): 6.

45. R. A. L. H. Gunawardana, “Intersocietal Transfer of Hydraulic Technology in Precolonial South Asia: Some Reflections Based on a Preliminary Investigation,” Southeast Asian Studies 22, no. 2 (1984): 119.

46. Luca Maria Olivieri, “The Swat Case Study: Barikot and Its Environs,” in Gandhara: The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Legends, Monasteries and Paradise, ed. Dorothee von Drachenfels and Christian Luczanits, 294–297 (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2008), 295–296.

47. Matthew T. Kapstein, The Tibetans (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 3–4.

48. In regard to the Yarlung dynasty, for example, Sørensen has noted that the “heart of Yar-lung has always been Lower Yar; it is the bread basket of the country, where a complex canal system diverts the water of the ‘Phyong-po and Yar-lung rivers, which join here, and makes intensive agriculture possible. The techniques of canalization (yur ba) and pond construction (lo rdzing) are ascribed to lHa-bu ‘Go-dkar, one of the seven wise ministers (‘dzangs pa mi bdun), who is variously mentioned in the sources as minister of I-sho-legs or of Khri gNyan-bzung-btsan, the latter the son of lHa Tho-tho-ri gnyan-bstan.” Per K. Sørensen and Guntram Hazod, Thundering Falcon: An Inquiry into the History and Cult of Khra-’brug Tibet’s First Buddhist Temple (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005), 227–228.

49. Anne Marie Blondeau, “Analysis of the Biographies of Padmasambhava According to Tibetan Tradition: Classification of Sources,” in Tibetan Studies in Honour of Hugh Richardson, ed. Michael Aris and Aung San Suu Kyi, 45–51 (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1980); Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer, “Representations of Padmasambhava in Early Post-Imperial Tibet,” in Tibet After Empire: Culture, Society and Religion Between 850–1000, ed. C. Cüppers, R. Mayer, and M. Walter, 19–50 (Lumbini: Lumbini International Research Institute, 2013).

50. Pasang Wangdu and Hildegard Diemberger, dBa’ bzhed: The Royal Narrative Concerning the Bringing of the Buddha’s Doctrine to Tibet (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2000), 57–58.

51. Wangdu and Diemberger, dBa’ bzhed, 14.

52. “As the Mani bka’ ‘bum tells the story, the Srin-mo is perceived by the Srong btsan’s betrothed, the Chinese princess Kong jo. The princess is consulting her geomantical charts to determine why she is encountering so much difficulty in transporting a statue of Sakyamuni to the Tibetan court. Dramatically, the magnitude of the problem and its implications, not only for the importation of the Buddha image but also for the very fate of Buddhism in Tibet, dawns on Kong jo as she interprets the results of her calculations … the anthropomorphic vision of the country of Tibet-as-demoness…. What finally emerges as that which will conclusively bring the demoness-Tibetan-land into submission is the construction of edifices, specifically Buddhist chapels, at certain key spots (me-btsa) in the country. The king, perceiving that the demoness is waving her arms and legs, determines that by placing edifices on her land-body, she will be physically pressed down (gnon) and pinned, with her arms and legs immobilized. The buildings on her shoulders and hips will suppress the four main sectors (ru-chen-po bzhi); those on her hands and feet, the four further borders (yang-‘dul). Thus is articulated an elaborate scheme of thirteen Buddhist temples, with the Jo-khang poised on her heart, and with three concentric squares encompassing the Tibetan map: the center, the inner realm, the borders, and the borders beyond.” Janet Gyatso, “Down with the Demoness: Reflections on a Feminine Ground in Tibet,” in Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet, ed. Janice Dean Willis, 33–51 (Ithaca: Snow Lion, 1987), 37–38.

53. For various interpretations see, for example, Charlene Makley, The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 53–54; and Martin A. Mills, “Re-assessing the Supine Demoness: Royal Buddhist Geomancy in the Srong btsan sgam po Mythology,” Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies 3 (2007): 1–47.

54. “If we see the rtsangs pa in this larger historical-geographic context, this leads us to the picture of the great demoness, the image of the Tibetan soil, which was later reinterpreted in the form of the srin mo gan rkyal border temples. The formulation of ‘suppress on’ (gnon pa) is a sumable description for holding down a (leaping) animal, with the place of fixation/perforation at the same time being the point that leads to water, the source of life distributed in the arteries (rtsa/rtsang) in the bodies of the animal and the earth. (The stories of the temples in Tibet are therefore basically ‘water stories’ (and not just here), which concern the formulation of access to and control of this element.)” Sørensen and Hazod, Thundering Falcon, 295–296.

55. Julia Shaw and John Sutcliffe, “Water Management, Patronage Networks and Religious Change: New Evidence from the Sanchi Dam Complex and Counterparts in Gujarat and Sri Lanka,” South Asian Studies 19 (2003): 95.

56. Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 49.

57. Julia Shaw and John Sutcliffe, “Ancient Dams and Buddhist Landscapes in the Sanchi Area: New Evidence on Irrigation, Land Use and Monasticism in Central India,” South Asian Studies 21 (2005): 18.

58. Janice Stargardt, “Earth, Rice, Water: ‘Reading the Landscape’ as a Record of the History of Satingpra, South Thailand AD 300–1400,” in Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia, ed. Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran, and Satpal Sangwan, 127–183 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 168, 176–179.

59. Rice is “a plant converter superior to other cereals such as wheat or corn, particularly because of the quality of its proteins and its richness in essential amino acids. Most importantly, of all food plants, it was the one adapted to the most diverse habitats, the only one to give acceptable yields on poor lands, if provided with enough humidity, and whose cultivation could be pursued uninterruptedly on the same soil year after year (albeit with major inputs of organic fertilizers) without a collapse of fertility and yields. The water input is more important than the quality of soil. Rice enhances the fixation of nitrogen in flooded soils, through its roots, algae, bacteria and aquatic ferns living in symbiosis with it; as a result, fallow periods could be abandoned.” Jean-Claude Debier, Jean-Paul Deléage, and Daniel Hémery, In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilisation Through the Ages, trans. John Barzman (London: Zed Books, 1991), 47.

60. Stargardt, Tracing Thought Through Things, 11–12.

61. Stargardt, “Thai Waterways,” 28.

62. Stargardt, “Earth, Rice, Water,” 180.

63. Erik Zürcher, “Han Buddhism and the Western Region,” in Thought and Law in Qin and Han China: Studies Dedicated to Anthony Hulsewé on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, ed. W. L. Idema and E. Zürcher, 158–182 (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 178–179.

64. Edmund Burke III, “The Big Story: Human History, Energy Regimes, and the Environment,” in The Environment and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, 33–53 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 38–39.

65. As pointed out by Vaclav Smil, population levels are dependent on available energy resources, and “only rising inputs of fossil fuels into cropping … could support both larger population and higher, and better, average food supply.” Vaclav Smil, Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the Biosphere and Civilization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 112.

66. On the role of sugar in the modern world see, for example, S. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985); S. B. Schwartz, Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); M. Ouerfelli, Le Sucre: Production, commercialisation et usages dans la Méditerranée médiévale (Leiden: Brill, 2008). And on the role of cotton in the modern world see, for example, Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), and Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

67. Julia Shaw, Buddhist Landscapes in Central India, 213.

68. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 4, 185.

69. Stanley J. Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-East Thailand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 356.

70. Julia Shaw, Buddhist Landscapes in Central India, 213.

71. Schopen, “Art, Beauty, and the Business of Running a Buddhist Monastery in Early Northwest India,” 314.

72. Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture, 249–262.

73. Sucheta Mazumdar, “The Discovery of Crystallized Sugar,” in Hawai’i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture, ed. V. Mair, N. Steinhardt, and P. Goldin, 399–404 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 400.

74. On the role of Buddhists in spreading sugar and other foodstuffs, including rice, across Asia see Sucheta Mazumdar, Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the World Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1998), 20–23; Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 102–131.

75. D. Schlingloff, “Cotton Manufacture in Ancient India,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17 (1974): 81–90.

76. Schopen, “Art, Beauty, and the Business of Running a Buddhist Monastery in Early Northwest India,” in On the Cusp of an Era: Art in the Pre-Kuṣāṇa World, ed. D.M. Srinivasan, 287–317 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 314.

77. Richard W. Bulliet, Cotton, Climate and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 6–8.

78. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 4, 178–179.

79. James A. Benn, Tea in China: A Religious and Cultural History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), 21–71.

80. On the Columbian Exchange see Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of1492 (Westport: Greenwood, 1972); William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Alfred W. Crosby Jr., Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Vintage, 2012). On the earlier Islamic exchange see Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

81. William Beinart, “Beyond the Colonial Paradigm: African History and Environmental History in Large-Scale Perspective,” in The Environment and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, 211–228 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 211.

CHAPTER 9

Epigraph: Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 1, 142.

1. See, for example, Dilip K. Chakrabarti, “Relating History to the Land: Urban Centers, Geographical Units, and Trade Routes in the Gangetic and Central India of circa 200 BCE,” in Between the Empires: Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE, ed. Patrick Olivelle, 5–31 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Akira Shimada, “Amaravati and Dhanyakataka: Topology of Monastic Spaces in Ancient Indian Cities,” in Buddhist Stupas in South Asia, ed. Jason Hawkes and Akira Shimada, 216–234 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009); Padma, “Material Culture and the Emergence of Urban Buddhism,” 20–21.

2. Callieri, “The Archaeological Basis,” 58. On the three phases of Taxila’s urban development, especially during its Buddhist phase under the Kushans, see Allchin, “The Urban Position of Taxila.”

3. Shufen Liu, “Jiankang and the Commercial Empire of the Southern Dynasties: Change and Continuity in Medieval Chinese Economic History,” in Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the Chinese Realm, 200–600, ed. Scott Pearce, Audrey Spiro, and Patricia Ebrey, 35–52 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 41.

4. The glorification of the city is well captured in the story of the Buddha’s final days when he goes to Kusinagar to die, and Ananda complains about him dying in such a horrible place: “‘Lord, may the Blessed Lord not pass away in this miserable little town of wattle-and-daub, right in the jungle in the back of beyond! Lord, there are other great cities such as Campa, Rajagaha, Savatthi, Saketa, Kosambi or Varanasi. In those places there are wealthy Khattiyas, Brahmins and householders who are devoted to the Tathagata, and they will provide for the Tathagata’s funeral in proper style.’” This complaint leads the Buddha to explain that in the past it used to be a great city: “At that time even the sewers and rubbish-heaps of Kusinara were covered knee-high with coral-tree flowers.” Walshe, The Long Discourses, 266, 273.

5. Chakrabarti, “Buddhist Sites Across South Asia as Influenced by Political and Economic Forces,” 194. See also K. T. S. Sarao, Urban Centres and Urbanisation as Reflected in the Pāli Vinaya and Sutta Piṭakas (Delhi: Vidhyanidhi Oriental Publishers and Booksellers, 1990).

6. Walshe, The Long Discourses of the Buddha, 403.

7. Schmithausen, Buddhism and Nature, 14.

8. Burton Watson, trans., The Vimalakirti Sutra (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 33–34.

9. Richard Salomon, “Daily Life in Mathurā,” in Mathurā: The Cultural Heritage, ed. D. M. Srinivasan, 31–48 (New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 1989), 41–42.

10. Horner, Milinda’s Questions, 46.

11. In the Samyutta Nikāya, for example, there appears a new trope about the flourishing of the Dharma in relation to a city that grows and prospers: “Then the king or the royal minister would renovate the city, and some time later that city would become successful and prosperous, well populated, filled with people, attained to growth and expansion.” Bhikku Bodhi, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003), vol. 1, 603–604.

12. Romila Thapar, “Early Mediterranean Contacts with India: An Overview,” in Crossings: Early Mediterranean Contacts with India, ed. F. de Romanis and A. Tchernia, 11–40 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997), 37.

13. Hughes, An Environmental History of the World, 34. “It is as if the barrier of city walls and the rectilinear pattern of canals had divided human beings from wild nature and substituted an attitude of confrontation for the earlier feeling of cooperation…. Literature … often use[s] the image of battle to describe the new relationship with nature.” J. D. Hughes, Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 33.

14. Michael Jansen, “Town and Monastery,” in Gandhara: The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Legends, Monasteries and Paradise, ed. ed. Dorothee von Drachenfels and Christian Luczanits, 282–293 (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2008), 283.

15. “An average adult produces about 150 grams of feces and 1 to 1.5 liters of urine a day.” Richard C. Hoffman, “Footprint Metaphor and Metabolic Realities: Environmental Impacts of Medieval European Cities,” in Natures Past: The Environment and Human History, ed. Paolo Squatriti, 288–325 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 309.

16. David Christian, “World Environmental History,” in The Oxford Handbook of World History, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, 125–142 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 138.

17. Another important factor in the development of urban centers in Southeast Asia was the Chinese demand for natural resources from the interior, which were, of course, largely handled by the Buddhist elite in these new cities. Charles Higham, Early Cultures of Mainland Southeast Asia (Chicago: River Books, 2002), 244.

18. Pierre-Yves Manguin and Agustijanto Indradjaja, “The Batujaya Site: New Evidence of Early Indian Influence in West Java,” in Early Interactions Between South and Southeast Asia: Reflections on Cross-Cultural Exchange, ed. P. Y. Manguin, A. Mani, G. Wade, 113–136 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011).

19. Pierre Dupont, The Archaeology of the Mons of Dvāravatī, Volume 1: Text, translated with updates, additional figures and plans by Joyanto K. Sen (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2006), C-3.

20. Phasook Indrawooth, “The Archaeology of the Early Buddhist Kingdoms of Thailand,” in Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History, ed. Ian Glover and Peter Bellwood, 120–148 (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004).

21. Hardy, “Eaglewood and the Economic History of Champa and Central Vietnam,” 108.

22. See, for example, Susan B. Hanley, “Urban Sanitation in Preindustrial Japan,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 1 (1987): 1–26.

23. “The 80,000–100,000 inhabitants of London in about 1300 are thought by researchers … to have consumed an annual 34,000–35,000 metric tons of grain for food drink and animal feed. Given production techniques in the surrounding ten-county area, this quantity represented a yield, after deduction for seed, of 43,000–65,000 hectares (106,000 170,000 acres) or some ten to fifteen percent of the land growing grain in that region each year…. Most of London’s grain came to market through efforts of corn mongers in an extended but largely contiguous hinterland. Price data, known contacts of corn mongers, and records of sales from demesne farms identify a grainshed of some 4,000 square miles.” Hoffman, “Footprint Metaphor and Metabolic Realities,” 296.

24. Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 92.

25. On the environmental impact on the surrounding countryside caused by the building of temples see, for example, Susan Naquin, “Temples, Technology, and Material Culture in Shouzhou 壽州, Anhui,” in Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History, ed. Dagmar Schäfer, 185–207 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 203.

26. Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture, 227.

27. One exception is Daniel F. Doeppers’s work on the fuel demands of Manila. He estimates that in 1862, with a population of two hundred thousand, Manila needed three hundred million pieces of wood (a raja, a split log about a meter long), based on the assumption that four such sticks were required per person per day. Daniel F. Doeppers, “Lighting a Fire: Home Fuel in Manila, 1850–1945,” Philippine Studies 55, no. 4 (2007): 419–447.

28. Per K. Sørensen and Guntram Hazod, Rulers on the Celestial Plain: Ecclesiastic and Secular Hegemony in Medieval Tibet, A Study of Tshal Gung Thang (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2007), 458 n. 103.

29. Carl S. Yamamoto, Vision and Violence: Lama Zhang and the Politics of Charisma in Twelfth-Century Tibet (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 222–223.

30. Sørensen and Hazod, Rulers on the Celestial Plain, 462.

31. Totman, “Forest Products Trade in Pre-industrial Japan, 19.

32. Smil, Energies, 51.

33. Kathirithamby-Wells, “Socio-Political Structures and the Southeast Asian Ecosystem,” 33–34.

34. “Mathura’s fortunes were largely determined by the evolving patterns of transregional and international power and commerce. The reasons for their decisive impact derived from her nodal functions of interregional trade rather than from her central place position. Regionally specialized economies and transregional mechanisms of exchange subsumed under the systems of cities and marts were much in evidence during the Sunga-Kusana age. Increasingly the long distance trade diminished the self-sufficiency of local economies and became instrumental in the growth of urbanization and the transformation of cities and their regions…. The predominant feature of northwestern trade routes was the blending of war and commerce into a single process accomplished by the initiative and active role of the powers and peoples of the region. Political expansion of the Indo-Greeks, Sakas, and Kusanas into the Mathura region can be seen as a rationalization of long distance trade through diplomacy and war in order to secure needed resources for the augmentation of power and prosperity. Limitations of agricultural and industrial resources constituted crucial factors in the development of extensive exchange systems.” Shiva G. Bajpai, “Mathurā: Trade Routes, Commerce, and Communication Patterns, from the Post-Mauryan Period to the End of the Kusana Period,” in Mathurā: The Cultural Heritage, ed. D. M. Srinivasan, 46–58 (New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 1989), 51.

35. Sharma, “Trends in the Economic History of Mathura (c. 300 B.C.–A.D. 300),” 31. Even the Buddha saw the city as a problem: “Monks, there are five disadvantages in Madhura. What five? The ground is uneven; there is much dust; there are fierce dogs; bestial yakkhas; and alms are got with difficulty.” The passage is from the Anguttara Nikaya, quoted in Padmanah S. Jaini, “Political and Cultural Data in References to Mathura in the Buddhist Literature,” in Mathurā: The Cultural Heritage, ed. D. M. Srinivasan, 214–222 (New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 1989), 216.

36. J. Donald Hughes, “Medieval Florence and the Barriers to Growth,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 7, no.1 (1996): 63–68.

37. Hoffman, “Footprint Metaphor and Metabolic Realities,” 300.

38. In the case of early modern south China, for example, Robert B. Marks has shown that the silk industry, with its need for mulberry trees, made it so that rice had to be brought in from Hunan in central China. Robert B. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and “Maritime Trade and Agro-Ecology of South China, 1685–1850,” in Pacific Centuries: Pacific and Pacific Rim History Since the Sixteenth Century, ed. D. O. Flynn and A. J. H. Latham, 85–109 (London: Routledge, 1999).

CHAPTER 10

1. James S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17.

2. Anne M. Blackburn, “Writing Buddhist Histories from Landscape and Architecture: Sukhothai and Chiang Mai,” Buddhist Studies Review 24, no. 2 (2007): 220–221.

3. Duncan, The City as Text, 38. In earlier periods this Buddhist landscape transformation involved the creation of cave temples, 1,200 of which were made during the first centuries of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Robin A. E. Comingham, “Monks, Caves and Kings: A Reassessment of the Nature of Early Buddhism in Sri Lanka,” World Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1995): 222–242.

4. Fabio Rambelli, Buddhist Materiality: A Cultural History of Objects in Japanese Buddhism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1.

5. Michael Como, Weaving and Binding: Immigrant Gods and Female Immortals in Ancient Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 10.

6. H. P. Ray, “Inscribed Pots, Emerging Identities: The Social Milieu of Trade,” in Between the Empires: Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE, ed. Patrick Olivelle, 113–143 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 126.

7. Karen Laura Thornber, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 473.

8. Paul Gleason, “Works and Woods: Architecture and Ecology in Japan,” Harvard Magazine (September-October 2008): 47.

9. Conrad Totman, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 25.

10. Yamamoto Tadanao and Walter Edwards, “Early Buddhist Temples in Japan: Roof-Tile Manufacture and the Social Basis of Temple Construction,” World Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1995): 347.

11. Williams, Deforesting the Earth, 90.

12. Erdosy, “The Prelude to Urbanization,” 10.

13. Vidula Jayaswal, “Mauryan Pillars of the Middle Ganga Plain: Archaeological Discoveries of Sarnath-Varanasi and Chunar,” in Reimagining Asoka: Memory and History, ed. P. Olivelle, J. Leoshko, and H. P. Ray, 229–257 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 246.

14. Birenda Nath Prasad, “Monarchs, Monasteries and Trade on the ‘Agrarian Frontier’: Early Medieval Samataṭa-Harikela Region, Bengal (6th to 13th Centuries AD),” South and Southeast Asia Culture and Religion 2 (2008): 162.

15. Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Liao Architecture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 8.

16. Wei-cheng Lin, Building a Sacred Mountain: The Buddhist Architecture of China’s Mount Wutai (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).

17. Antonino Forte, Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias in the History of the Astronomical Clock: The Tower, Statue and Armillary Sphere Constructed by Empress Wu (Roma: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1988), 79, 253–254.

18. Duncan, The City as Text, 28.

19. Roland Fletcher, “Tropical Forest Urbanism and the Significance of Angkor,” unpublished paper presented at the conference “Patterns of Early Asian Urbanism,” Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, November 11, 2015.

20. In this regard a good point of reference, at least in terms of size, is the admittedly imaginary vision of the original Jetavana Monastery found in the work of Daoxuan, which was to provide a model for Chinese monasteries. Puay-penh Ho, “The Ideal Monastery: Daoxuan’s Description of the Central Indian Jetavana Vihara,” East Asian History 10 (1995): 1–18; Teiser, Reinventing the Wheel, 136–145.

21. Justin T. McDaniel, “Transformative History: Nihon Ryōiki and Jinakālamālī pakaraṇam,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 25, no. 1–2 (2002): 175.

22. Michael Jansen, “The Cultural Geography of Gandhara,” in Gandhara: The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Legends, Monasteries and Paradise, ed. ed. Dorothee von Drachenfels and Christian Luczanits, 27–35 (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2008).

23. Yamamoto and Edwards, “Early Buddhist Temples in Japan,” 336.

24. Gray Tuttle, “Tibetan Buddhist Institutions of Higher Education: Modeled on Lhasa, Supported by Qing Beijing,” Unpublished paper presented at the conference “Tibetan Buddhism and the World,” University of California, Los Angeles, May 10, 2012.

25. Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society, 4.

26. It is possible that in East Asia the impulse to build monasteries was advanced by new apocryphal sutras, such as the Brahma Net Sutra, which promoted the building of monasteries as a part of one’s religious duties: “My disciples, you should always teach all sentient beings to build monastic dwellings. In the forests and fields they erect Buddha stupas. For the winter and summer meditation retreats they should set up places for meditation, and should set up all kinds of facilities for the cultivation of the Way.” A. Charles Muller, ed. and trans., Exposition of the Sutra of Brahma’s Net (Paju: Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, 2012), 399.

27. Tuan, A Historical Geography of China, 91.

28. Jiang Wu, Daoqin Tong, and Karl Ryavec, “Spatial Analysis and GIS Modeling of Regional Religious Systems in China: Conceptualization and Initial Experiments,” in Chinese History in Geographical Perspective, ed. Yongtao Du and Jeff Kyong-McClain, 179–196 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013), 185.

29. W. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition: From Earliest Times to 1600 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 586.

30. Michael Aung-Thwin, Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1985), 176, 177.

31. See, for example, Elizabeth Moore and San Win, “The Gold Coast: Suvannabhumi? Lower Myanmar Walled Sites of the First Millennium A.D.,” Asian Perspectives 46, no. 1 (2007): 202–232.

32. On the “enormous weight of them on man” and the “sheer material effort involved in the production of” English churches see Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (Thetford: Lowe and Brydone, 1979), 309, 140.

33. Quoted in Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society, 20.

34. Bert de Vries and Johan Goudsblom, “Introduction: Towards a Historical View of Humanity and the Biosphere,” in Mappae Mundi: Humans and Their Habitats in a Long-Term Socio-Ecological Perspective, Myths, Maps and Models, 15–46 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), 41.

CONCLUSION

Epigraph: Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974), 47.

1. As Arne Kalland has noted, this view of the Japanese living in tune with nature on account of Buddhism or Shintoism before the coming of modernity is a common trope. Arne Kalland, “Anthropology and the Concept of ‘Sustainability’: Some Reflections,” in Imagining Nature: Practices of Cosmology and Identity, ed. Andreas Roepstorff, Nils Bubandt, and Kalevi Kull, 161–176 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2003), 166.

2. Arne Kalland and Pamela Asquith, “Japanese Perceptions of Nature: Ideals and Illusions,” in Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives, ed. Pamela Asquith and Arne Kalland, 1–35 (Richmond: Curzon, 1997), 7.

3. On the ecological devastation of contemporary Japan see Gavan McCormick, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1996); and Brett L. Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010).

4. Beinart and Hughes, Environment and Empire, 2.

5. Williams, Deforesting the Earth, 101.

6. Such work has already begun as evidenced in Stuart Young’s project on the intersection of Buddhism with sericulture in China, “The Fabric of Monasticism: Buddhism in the Silk Cultures of Medieval China;” see his lecture on the topic at http://www.cbs.ugent.be/node/680.

7. On the role of Buddhism and trade on the Silk Road as a vector in spreading disease see William H. McNeill, Plagues and People (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1976), 77–149. On the linkage between the Buddhist conversion of Japan and epidemic disease see W. G. Aston, Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697 (Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972), vol. 2, 67. On the specific role of smallpox, which killed a third of the Japanese population in the eighth century, see William Wayne Farris, Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan, 645–900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1985), 53–69. On the link between the Tibetan conversion to Buddhism and an outbreak of bubonic plague see Matthew T. Kapstein, The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism: Conversion, Contestation, and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 41–42. Finally, on the link between Buddhism and Japanese encephalitis in the early twentieth century see Walker, Toxic Archipelago, 34–38.

8. Barbara R. Ambros, Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012).

9. Anthony Reid, “Low Population Growth and Its Causes in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Death and Disease in Southeast Asia: Explorations in Social, Medical and Demographic History, ed. Norman G. Owen, 33–47 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987); W. S. At-well, “Volcanism and Short-Term Climatic Change in East Asian and World History, c. 1200–1699,” Journal of World History 12 (2001): 29–98; D. D. Zhang et al., “Climate Change and War Frequency in Eastern China over the Last Millennium,” Human Ecology 35, no. 4 (2007): 403–414; T. H. Barrett, “Climate Change and Religious Response: The Case of Early Medieval China,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 17, no. 2 (2007): 139–156; Guiseppe Tucci, “Preliminary Report on an Archaeological Survey in Swat,” East and West 9, no. 4 (1958): 279–328; B. M. Buckley, K. J. Anchukaitis, D. Penny, R. Fletcher, E. R. Cook, M. Sano, L. C. Nam, A. Wichienkeeo, T. T. Minh, and T. M. Hong, “Climate as a Contributing Factor in the Demise of Angkor, Cambodia,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 15 (2010): 6748–6752.

10. Cho, “From Ascetic to Activist.” On the possible influence of Miyazawa Kenji and his Buddhist environmentalism on Japanese education see Helen Kilpatrick, Miyazawa Kenji and His Illustrations: Images of Nature and Buddhism in Japanese Children’s Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2013). On new reevaluations of economic development see also the work of the Japanese thinker Kato Norihiro, who argues for a post-growth “maturity”: “The rest of the world’s population is still exploding, and we are coming to see the limits of our resources. The age of ‘right shoulder up’ is over. Japan doesn’t need to be No. 2 in the world, or No. 5 or 10. It’s time to look to more important things, to think more about the environment and about people less lucky than ourselves. To learn about organic farming. Or not. Maybe you’re busy enough just living your life. That, the new maturity says, is still cooler than right shoulder up.” Quoted in Pankaj Mishra, “A Nation’s State: Japan’s Tormented Relationship with Its Modernity,” The Caravan: A Journal of Politics and Culture, October 1, 201 See also Clair Brown, Buddhist Economics: An Enlightened Approach to the Dismal Science (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2017).

11. Of course, ever since the famous bet between Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich and libertarian economist Julian Simon about the future price of several precious metals (which Ehrlich lost), many have rejected this doomsday scenario. Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). For two recent works in this regard—one from the left and another from the right—see Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry, and Stuff (London: Zero Books, 2015); and Ronald Bailey, The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015).

12. Damian Carrington, “Humanity Has Wiped Out 60% of Animal Populations Since 1970, Report Finds,” Guardian, October 30, 2018 (theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds).

13. Walker, Toxic Archipelago, 223–224.