Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India byGregory SchopenReview by: Hubert DurtJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 126, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 2006), p. 295Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20064500 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 02:04

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

American Oriental Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal ofthe American Oriental Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.31 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 02:04:06 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Brief Reviews 295

Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More

Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India. By Gregory Schopen. Honolulu: University of

Hawai'i Press, 2004. Pp. xvii + 422. $29.

Buddhist Monks and Business Matters, a selection

of Schopen's papers from the period 1994-2001, finds

the reader at the exit of Bones, Stones, and Buddhist

Monks, published by the same press in 1997, which

collected some of his papers of the period 1984-1992.

The present book will bring the reader to the gate of

Figments and Fragments of a Mah?y?na Buddhism in

India, announced here as a forthcoming publication. We

may guess that this third collection of articles will bring

together papers going back to Schopen's first and

groundbreaking approach of thirty years ago and his

latest findings of the new millennium. Long ago,

Gregory Schopen confessed to me his preference for

a certain type of canvas. He enjoys the limited space allotted for a contribution to a journal or to a Festschrift.

I have not lost the hope that he will give us one day a

brilliant synthesis in book form. Nevertheless in these

contributions, modest in format, sometimes miniaturist

in treatment, but radical in their content, we can follow

a thread, a continuous throwing of light on the nature of

Buddhist monasticism, dissipating at the same time some

of the opacity still attaching to what seems to be one of

the most contradictory "religious movements" in history: the Mah?y?na.

Although in the twelve papers collected here, we are

almost constantly faced with the epigraphical and ar

cheological evidence of the Indian subcontinent during the few centuries around the transition from the ancient

era to the common era, Schopen keeps always in the

background and often puts in the forefront his beloved

Vinaya of the M?lasarv?stiv?dins. Although this was

the first sectarian discipline introduced to the West by

Csoma, Schiefner, and W. W. Rockhill, the abundance

of this compilation, extant in Tibetan, in Chinese, and,

last but not least, in Sanskrit since the Gilgit discoveries

in the nineteen thirties, has often been somewhat dis

criminated against by the customers of the "puritan" Mah?vih?rin Viyaya in Pali.

Schopen makes much use of the Uttaragrantha, a

rather neglected section of the Vinaya of the M?lasar

v?stiv?dins which is close to the Chinese Nid?nam?trk?.

The value of this section was rather recently perceived

by Schopen, who has introduced a few short addenda in

order to update his collected papers. Another work much

used and recently made more easily available is the Vi

nayas?tra and its auto-commentary by Gunaprabha. As is inevitable in different papers where the same

texts or inscriptions have often to be analyzed with

distinct focuses, there are overlappings. They are not

repetitive and the didactic talent of Schopen succeeds

in making the reader feel that each new reading in a dif

ferent context brings an enrichment by comparison with

the previous one. I will only deplore that the author has

not been more detailed in his index of texts.

With much brio, the author leads his reader in an

"intelligent" reading of numerous inscriptions and

canonical or commentarial Buddhist texts. The last

chapters conduct us with modesty and authority into

the worlds of archaeology, onomastics, and (mythical)

topography. The reader unfamiliar with Indian asceti

cism and Buddhist monasticism will be helped by the

discreet but well-informed references to Christian mo

nastic life, whose vicissitudes have often been strangely

parallel to some aspects of the Buddhist evolution.

What is probably the most seminal aspect common

to several of the studies is how much the Vinaya of the

M?lasarv?stiv?dins may sometimes be close to Indian

secular law, as known from the Dharmas?stra literature.

By contrast, Schopen sees the lack of reference to sec

ular law in the Pali Vinaya as a consequence of the

absence of a secular legislation in ancient Sri Lanka. It

seems to me that there is a place for the king's justice in the rules about stealing and murdering in the Pali

Vinaya. Even in case of a pregnant bhikkhun?, the king is consulted, as mentioned in the prologue of J?taka

no. 12.

For a work giving much satisfaction, my last and

minuscule objection concerns the French quotations

given in Schopen's publications. They are frequent and

accurate but they would be still more enjoyed by a

French reviewer if they could avoid the excision of so

many capital letters. Although French style is less prof

ligate in the use of the upper case than English or

German, capitals are still needed for the names of

persons, places, the titles of books, etc.

H. D.

The Avest?: A Lexico-Statistical Analysis (Direct and

Reverse Indexes, Hapax Legomena and Frequency

Counts). By Raiomund Doctor. Acta Iranica,

vol. 41. Louvain: Peeters, 2004. Pp. 666. 105;

$116.

The aim of this book, as stated in the introduction

(p. 1), is to provide a tool that, like Bloomfield's Vedic

Concordance (1906), "would permit the user to exhaus

tively locate all and every occurrence of a given word

within the major Avestan texts," as well as a reverse

index that "would allow the scholar to identify each and

every word in the Avest? by its ending." In practice, it is

"an Index ... of the Geldnerian version of the Avest? .. .

which is still considered to be the normative version."

In addition, the book contains "computer-generated lexicostatistical data as to the frequencies of individual

words, length-wise sorts of all Avestan words and

minimal pairs." The corpus that has been indexed is Geldner's text,

and the alphabetical order is that of Bartholomae's Alt

iranisches W?rterbuch. This means, for instance, that

This content downloaded from 185.44.78.31 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 02:04:06 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions