3 Review(s)

Amid the Ruins of the Silk Road: In Search of the Long-Lost Footprints of Śākyaputra Faxian is an insightful piece of original scholarship under the genre of intellectual and religious history. The volume attempts to shed new light upon the evolutionary phases of Chinese Buddhist monasticism, with special focus upon the state of Buddhist monastic disciplinary codes (vinaya) in premodern China by navigating through unexplored domains of cross-civilizational interactions, as has been intricately portrayed in the fascicles of Śākyaputra Faxian’s most celebrated fifth century travel memoir, Fo Guo Ji. The book offers a critical inquiry into the chain of events which not only defined the final contours of Chinese Buddhist monastic tradition, but also proved to have been instrumental in shaping Chinese Buddhism into its region-specific Sinified mould. This seminal academic work, by drawing upon primary source documents from Buddhist and secular literature, brings to the fore, the significance of the historic trans-continental Silk Road as a crucial interface, having stood witness through the vicissitudes of time, to some of the most unprecedented of cultural, intellectual and philosophical borrowings across variegated socio-cultural spaces.