Matteo Nicolini-Zani, The Luminous Way to the East: Texts and History of the First Encounter of Christianity with China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. xviii, 399 pp. Illustrations, Bibliography, Index. US$ 99 (HB). ISBN 978-0-19-760964-4

Abstract

deserves a special mention: they are full of an incredible amount of bibliographical suggestions, data, and scientific discussion about the translated text. The translation itself is consistently accurate, considering that Youyang zazu is a rather obscure and difficult text. Chiara Bocci’s English translations are extremely well executed, always giving very convincing explanations in the footnotes to support her translation ideas, often reconstructing the numerous quotations contained in the original text. A text like the Youyang zazu cannot always be translated without a certain degree of doubt. But the author clearly discusses each point of the text and gives good interpretations, and considering the translatability and, sometimes, the untranslatability of this book, her work is very accurate. A note concerning a passage in the translation (p. 28): the sentence shi jie ying jie sheng hua 石劫應節生花 is translated “after a period of destruction (kalpa), a time of blossoming must follow.” Then, in the footnote, another translation is suggested “in the joints (or rather cracks) between stones, flowers must grow.” The term jie 劫 in Tang times could have the Buddhist meaning of kalpa, era, but maybe a less strict translation could be used. Moreover, the two terms ying jie 應節 could also have the meaning of “according to seasons, according to seasonal changes” Thus, I would perhaps suggest considering the translation of this passage in “[The Raven Head (the root of theAconitum) presents hair], since long time ago his plant blooms according to seasonal change,” or, alternatively, considering the given option in the footnote: “In the cracks between stones this plant blooms, according to the change of the seasons.” If one was to find a flaw in the work of Chiara Bocci, the only thing would be that the introduction could have been longer, presenting the book’s history and the author’s biography in more detail, and more in general the book’s genre, giving some account of the encyclopaedic collection in Chinese classical literature, on the history and description of Youyang zazu etc., but these and other aspects, in fact, have already been described in detail in many other researches, such as that of Carrie Elizabeth Reed, Edward Schafer and Berthold Laufer. Other scholars have produced valuable works about the Tang dynasty, which are consistently cited in the text and footnotes by Chiara Bocci. Therefore, I cannot find any other issues in this book, which is indeed a solid philological work, adding precious knowledge to some special aspects of Youyang zazu and giving us a great deal of information and inspiration about the vision of reality in Tang times.