Temples in the Cliffside: Buddhist Art in Sichuan By Sonya S. Lee. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. 296 pp. $65.00 (cloth)

Abstract

Sonya Lee ’ s Temples in the Cliffside: Buddhist Art in Sichuan is a welcome addition to studies of the religious cliff sculpture of southwestern China. The book provides accounts of several of the major cliff sculpture sites in the region of the Sichuan Basin within what is now the administrative areas of Sichuan Province and the municipality of Chongqing. The numerous and widely dispersed cliff sculptures of the region provide an important repository of Buddhist and Daoist art (though this book does not consider the latter), which is of great value for the study of medieval Chinese religion and artistic trends. Over the years, the study of these materials has itself become a growing specialized field of Chinese art historical research, as many researchers in the study of medieval Chinese history and religion draw upon the rich corpus of in situ iconographical and epi-graphical materials found within the region. Temples in the Cliffside is a well-researched book, based primarily on the author ’ s prior publications. It contributes to this field of knowledge, especially with regard to the transformation of rupestral sites, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from active religious sites to cultural heritage sites. The book tries to break new ground in approaching the subject matter from an ecological perspec-tive: one that raises many questions for this reader. Sonya Lee