Brill's Encyclopedia of Buddhism (BEB) is an ambitious undertaking, aiming to describe the full range of classical Buddhism in a topical fashion. The volume under review is the second of a planned six volumes, with a special focus on Buddhist lives, both historical and ahistorical. The structure of this volume is quite simple. Section 1 consists of the lives of just two figures: Śākyamuni Buddha, who quite naturally receives a large entry with a very rich bibliography; and less obviously, Barlaam and Josaphat, two mythical saints whose legends were based on the life of the Buddha, known to Greco-Roman and Islamic sources among others. This is an unexpected pairing of entries, though one could argue that the latter do not fit elsewhere and are derivative of the Buddha himself. Section 2 is divided geographically: South and Southeast Asia, East Asia (generically), China, Korea, Japan, and the Tibetan Cultural Sphere. Coverage among these areas is somewhat uneven, with the lives of Tibetan saints and masters particularly sparse.

When we turn to the entries within each geographical section, there are some surprises, with regard to both unexpected gems and shocking omissions. The South Asian biographies seem the most comprehensive. There are entries for many of the major figures, intellectuals, and exegetes, from Āryaśūra, Asaṅga, Bhāviveka, and Buddhaghosa at the beginning of the alphabet to Śāriputra, Sthiramati, and Vasubandhu towards the end. But there are other welcome contributions off the beaten path. For example, a variety of celestial figures receive entries for their functions within Buddhist literature and art. Thus Brahmā, Śakra, and Māra have an entry; there's also an entry for Ḍākiṇī (lest one fear Tantric traditions were ignored), Hayagrīva, Mārīcī, and Yama and Hell Beings in Indian Buddhism among others. Buddhas of the Past in South Asia are covered as is the future Buddha Maitreya. Vairocana is not covered in this volume but will be included in the volume on Doctrines, Silk tells us, since he is a figure who functions in a more abstract realm without any discernible hagiography. Personages from Southeast Asia receive somewhat less coverage, but this is consonant with the current concentrations of Buddhist studies scholarship. Most of these entries were written by immediately recognizable scholars and provide bibliographic references of immense scope.

When we turn to East Asia, however, the coverage appears a bit more idiosyncratic. For China, we have a few categories of individuals represented: translators like Paramārtha, school founders such as Mazu Daoyi, scholar-exegetes like Falin, and pilgrims such as Faxian. There's even coverage for modern figures such as Ouyang Jingwu from the Republican era and Nenghai, a Chan monk who became a student of the Tibetan Dge lugs pa tradition in the early twentieth century. But there are still some surprising omissions. Among the early translators, for example, we see erudite entries on An Shigao by Stefano Zacchetti, who was sadly taken from us recently all too prematurely; Lokakṣema by Paul Harrison, who has spent his scholarly career focused on this translator's corpus of Mahāyāna sūtras; and Zhi Qian by Jan Nattier, who offers what is easily the most authoritative overview of an often neglected yet influential translator. But it is unexpected to say the least to see no entry on Dharmarakṣa, whose oeuvre is larger than that of the previous three translators combined. The editor-in-chief has acknowledged gaps in coverage in his introduction, noting that it was simply impossible to find qualified scholars to produce entries on certain figures, however important. Yet for Dharmarakṣa, I find this a bit difficult to accept. There are a fair number of contemporary scholars who have done substantial work on this Yuezhi translator, including people directly involved with this encyclopaedia project. I myself have worked and published extensively on Dharmarakṣa yet received no request by the editors. And if it is surprising to see no entry on Dharmarakṣa, it is positively shocking to see no entries for translators like Kumārajīva and Xuanzang, who could hardly be more important to the history of translation and exegesis in China. Again, Max Deeg is currently working on a new translation of Xuanzang's travel account and might have been asked to provide such an entry to complement his contribution on Faxian.

Presumably many of these omissions will be filled in subsequent volumes, as we see in the appendix to this volume where three entries not completed in time for Volume 1 are here added. Such gaps will become even easier to fill in the planned online version of this encyclopaedia. But these omissions do raise a relevant question: just how encyclopaedic is this encyclopaedia? In my review in this journal of the first volume of BEB, I compared this undertaking with two previous encyclopaedias of Buddhism and found that the coverage in BEB, while not always as broad, was certainly greater in depth. But how might BEB compare to encyclopaedias for other prominent religious traditions, such as the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World (Oxford, 2009), which is available both in print and online? I make this comparison because Silk himself invoked this six-volume reference work on Islam as his inspiration for proposing a parallel work for Buddhism in an address he gave at the Congress for the International Association of Buddhist Studies in 2011. A quick perusal of the encyclopaedia of Islam reveals that it indeed attempts extremely broad coverage of not just people, doctrines, and schools, but also significant places, material culture and art, Islamic jurisprudence, etc. In other words, it truly attempts to be encyclopaedic. Many of the gaps in the BEB will surely be realized in subsequent volumes. What stands out for me, however, is what appears to be the generally greater depth for most entries in the BEB compared to the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World. And this is especially true when one examines the bibliographies offered in each, arguably one of the most important resources for a scholar who wants to learn more about a topic he or she is unfamiliar with – the very reason one might consult an encyclopaedia in the first place. So on the whole, I must once again commend the editors for producing a reference work of extremely high quality and utility. It won't have everything one might be looking for, even for prominent Buddhist figures, and some omissions are especially egregious. But the entries it does contain are likely to remain authoritative for a very long time.