Like the best detective novels, some academic works are impossible to put down before the denouement. Beyond the legal niceties typical of the genre, they deliver authentic sociological analyses of the “milieus” with which they deal. Time seems to stand still, the plot develops slowly, and the ending always comes as a surprise, with the previously confusing chain of events attaining a marvellous clarity.
Christine Mollier approaches Buddhism and Taoism in Medieval China by comparing literary works, rituals, and iconography. But here it is not a question of theft and murder but, at worst, of cases of plagiarism and piracy, and, at best, of adaptation. If, as the author points out in her introduction, Taoism's debt to Buddhism has long been recognised, the reverse process—Buddhism's borrowings from Taoism—has been neglected. To address this issue, Mollier examines three cases, three inquests in which Buddhism is very definitely in the frame: the...