French sinology has a long and illustrious history of contributions to the field that is increasingly overlooked in North America. Whereas a generation or two ago, almost any stateside sinologist worked with a toolkit of European languages and Japanese in addition to literary and modern Chinese, polyglot scholars of that order are in short supply nowadays. French and German sinologists—formerly the guard dogs of longtime bastions of linguistic protectionism—have laudably taken initiative in countering this balkanizing trend; in an effort to integrate globalized academia, they now routinely produce books and articles in English. But every once in a while, a small gem is published in a language other than English, thereby running the risk of being ignored by a large segment of its potential readership. Vincent Durand-Dastès's edited volume, Empreintes du Tantrisme en Chine et Asie Orientale (Traces of Tantrism in China and East Asia), is one such gem.
The...
