Michael Como, Shôtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist TraditionShôtoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition by MichaelComo, Review by: Kevin Gray CarrThe Journal of Religion, Vol. 90, No. 1 (January 2010), pp. 98-100Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/649989 .

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Even granted a strong link between Foucauldian virtue ethics and the worksof the authors discussed, this represents only one strand of the Islamic tradi-tion—a highly contested one, as the author herself notes (29, 107). Yet despitethis acknowledgment, Haj at times generalizes from the writings of �Abduhand ibn �Abdul Wahhab to “Islamic tradition” writ large (e.g., “Muslims like�Abduh”; “Muslims in general, and ibn �Abdul Wahhab in particular” [73, 36]).Such a direct move from particular historical texts to “Islam” or “Muslims”does not pay sufficient attention to the multiple ways that such texts may havebeen received, contested, and translated into practice (see Abdellah Ham-moudi, “Textualism in Anthropology,” in Being There: The Fieldwork Encounterand the Making of Truth, ed. John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi [Berke-ley, 2009]). Furthermore, it seems to suggest that the strand of thought asso-ciated with �Abduh or ibn �Abdul Wahhab is somehow more representative ofIslamic tradition than its rivals (e.g., the Sufis or the ulama at the Azhar).

By emphasizing this strand within Islam, Haj seeks to create a certain “con-trast effect” with Western categories (e.g., “belief”), thereby highlighting theinadequacy of the latter (David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, eds., Powers ofthe Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors [Stanford, CA, 2006], 287).She writes, “We need to recognize that forms of reasoning different from thoseof the Enlightenment govern Islamic discourses and that Muslims like �Abduhcan make reasonable claims only within the confines of this tradition-informedrationality” (73). Despite Haj’s stated desire to acknowledge the “porous bor-ders” between Islamic tradition and Western liberalism, there remains a dangerof juxtaposing the two too rigidly and particularly of portraying the latter as afait accompli. For instance, in describing European secularization, she writesthat “religion and morality were banished from the public sphere and, con-comitantly, individual interests were enshrined as the fundamental social de-terminant” (28). The historical reality is clearly more contested and diversifiedthan this suggests, but Haj’s focus on the contrast between the intellectual andhistorical experiences of “the West” and “Islam” tends to elide such complex-ities. The approach thus lies vulnerable to criticism by scholars who provide amore variegated picture of Islamic tradition as well as those who argue thatsecular liberalism is itself crucially contested and incomplete (e.g., JeffreyStout, Democracy and Tradition [Princeton, NJ, 2004]).

Haj clearly wants to proceed beyond the “oppositional construction” of theWest versus Islam (1). At its best, the book moves us positively in this directionand shows “tradition” to be an apposite conceptual framework for such a proj-ect. But binaries—even ones that have been thoroughly picked apart—are stub-born. “Islamic tradition” and “secular liberalism,” belief and embodiment,meaning and practice, still challenge us to read more widely and to adopt amore tentative approach to the complex connectedness between historicaltexts and the social life that they seek to reflect or reform.BRIDGET PURCELL, Princeton University.

COMO, MICHAEL. Shotoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese BuddhistTradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. viii�225 pp. $45.00(cloth).

Why should anyone care about a largely legendary prince who lived in Japanin the seventh century? Although the name Shotoku (573?–622?) is unfamiliar

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to most people outside of the country, his prominence there over the lastthirteen centuries is difficult to overstate. Politicians, religious leaders, andscholars have been representing him continually since he died, so it is no smallachievement that Michael Como’s study of Shotoku manages to say somethingtruly new about the prince and his significance in Japanese cultural history.

Como is clear that he is not trying to recover the “real” Shotoku. Instead,he treats the prince as a cultural emblem, focusing on the role of ethnicity inShotoku mythology from the seventh to the ninth centuries. Confidently guid-ing the reader through the bewildering forest of political and social relationsthat were both the source and the product of Shotoku’s early cult, the authordemonstrates that immigrants to Japan played a central role in shaping thelocal and transregional identities that coalesced around the prince. This studyoffers engaging case studies that range across issues surrounding millenari-anism, paradise, ancestors and propitiation of the dead, sacred kingship, vio-lence and vengeful spirits, and hagiography. All of these aspects are markedby a central irony: the paradigms of “native” royal power and prestige thatwere established by the eighth century were primarily shaped by immigrantgroups, yet in subsequent ages, the cultural prominence of those same lineageswas effectively erased from collective memory, and their representatives werereinstalled at the conceptual margins of Japanese society.

Much of Como’s book is a close reading of passages from Nihon shoki of 720and other related documents. This is not a deficit since the text represents theculmination of a century of cultural negotiation, and it became one of themost influential “histories” in Japan. Again and again, the author points outelements of texts that only make sense in terms of local kinship concernsmapped onto elite agendas. He successfully plots a course between scholarlyextremes of treating the text as a transparent historical source or as a muddledconcatenation of myth; in this way, the book provides a great model for schol-ars in a variety of fields, who struggle with how to take “historical myth” seri-ously.

Despite the title of the book, Shotoku often disappears for pages at a time,only to reemerge in surprising ways. Como frequently reminds the reader ofthe genealogy of a certain god and his or her relation to an ancestor of animmigrant lineage that he argues played a key role in imagining Shotoku. Attimes, one may wonder about the effectiveness of these myths for communi-cating the subtleties that Como describes. For example, what readers wouldhave known that the wrathful deity of Chisakobe Shrine who struck down apagoda (135–36) was the same figure who was taken as the ancestor of animmigrant group that opposed the claims to Shotoku that were made by thelineage that built the temple? Doubtless some people would be able to makethese connections, but one is sometimes left wanting to know more about theintended audience and reception of the fascinating texts the study considers.

In the later chapters, the immigrant groups sometimes fade to the back-ground as Shotoku comes to the fore. In some of these sections, the readerwould have benefited from more extended interpretations of the materialbased on Como’s textured understanding of the conflicts between competingkinship groups. Furthermore, the book’s subtitle is somewhat misleading:Como explicitly states (7, 158) that his study delves into a much more diversehistorical and historiographical space than “the Japanese Buddhist tradition”alone. He deftly integrates materials from many other traditions such asDaoism and those of local gods of the Korean Peninsula and Japan. The di-

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versity and depth of his sources should be highlighted in the title. On balance,however, the author’s clear argument and lively sense of story provide a strongwarp for the weft of hagiography and ethnicity he weaves through the work.

Como’s text is at times quite dense with details, but the appendix on primarysources and the extensive glossary are a great boon to the reader. Yet there issome small room for improvement: terms such as tenno (4), hokai (124), andkokubunji (152) ought to be added to the appendix or index. Given that somuch of the book’s argument hinges on kinship relations, an additional ap-pendix of abbreviated family trees would be welcome. The book also wouldhave benefited by some illustrations and diagrams, especially maps of keyplaces that are discussed in the text. Nevertheless, these are not serious defi-cits. However, the publisher included no Sino-Japanese characters anywhere.Their omission is inexcusable given current technology, and Como’s study re-quires them: even some specialists may not know how to write personal namesand key terms such as fube no shi and okimi, which are written in differentˆ ˆO Oways in different texts. Scholars in Korean or Chinese studies who wouldgreatly benefit from a close reading of Como’s study would likely be at a lossto make sense of the sea of unfamiliar terms.

Given the nature of the time period and sources Como considers, he is notalways able to provide conclusive evidence for individual points of historicalor literary interpretation. However, the book presents a cogent and powerfulcumulative case for the thoroughgoing influence of immigrant groups in theconceptual formation of the Shotoku cult. Its speculative leaps, alwaysgrounded in close attention to historical particulars, richly reward the readerwith a compelling picture of cultural politics in early Japan. Yet far from beinga narrow study of an isolated cultural moment, Como’s book provides a com-pelling model of how historians can navigate hagiography, myth, and nation-alist discourse to understand the ways that identity is imagined through eth-nicity, politics, and religion.KEVIN GRAY CARR, University of Michigan.

GRAY, DAVID B. The Cakrasamvara Tantra (The Discourse of Srı Heruka): A Studyand Annotated Translation. Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences Series. NewYork: American Institute of Buddhist Studies and Columbia University Press,2007. xvii�472 pp. $49.00 (cloth).

The world of Buddhist scholarship has long awaited a translation of the elusiveand cryptic Cakrasamvara Tantra (CS). This eighth-century text was one of theparamount scriptures of the Vajrayana movement of late Indian Buddhism(eighth to twelfth centuries) and remains significant for three of the four ma-jor schools of Tibetan Buddhism. As a Yoginı Tantra of the Unexcelled YogaTantra class, the work features female imagery and allusions to sexual practices.By virtue of its historical location at the cusp of the emerging Tantric move-ment, the CS sheds light on the formative phase of Tantric thought and prac-tice. It also lies at the heart of a vast commentarial enterprise; a diverse arrayof meditative, ritual, and yogic practices; and an extensive body of artisticworks (paintings, statuary, textiles, and ritual implements). The absence of aWestern language translation of this historically and religiously significant workhas long been a major gap in Buddhist and Tantric studies and allied fields ofinquiry.

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