Going by the title and the cover illustration depicting the legendary sixth-century Chan patriarch Bodhidharma, cataloguers may be tempted to place this work in the Buddhism section of their libraries. In fact, however, it will find more congenial company on the shelves devoted to “pre-modern Chinese literature” or even to “cultural history, late Imperial China”. Its subject matter is a novel that appeared in 1635, only a few years before the downfall of the Ming dynasty. Its full title is (adapting Vincent Durand-Dastès' translation) “The Cleansing of the Demons and Restoration of Proper Human Relationships, or The Record of the Conversion of the East” (Saomei dunlun Dongdu ji 掃魅敦倫東度記) – for short, Dongdu ji. While Bodhidharma and his disciples do act as the story's protagonists, they are not primarily concerned with spreading the dharma in the narrow sense but with battling the demons arising from human sinfulness and restoring a morality that is more indebted to the teachings of Confucius and his followers than to Buddhist, let alone Chan, ethics. Located mostly in a fictional Indian setting, the story extols filial piety, loyalty to the state and harmony in the family, and seeks to counter the demonic manifestations of lust, greed, anger and drunkenness. In the framework setting of a sort of pilgrim's progress, which clearly takes the more famous sixteenth-century novel “The Journey to the West” (Xiyou ji 西遊記) as its model, Bodhidharma and his companions encounter an episodically arranged panoply of individuals representing all kinds of human failings. The latter are the ultimate source of all manner of demonic beings, which therefore can only be dispelled by meritorious action and self-cultivation on the part of the humans currently suffering the consequences of their own delusions and immorality. The novel is strongly didactic in tone and espouses the ecumenical ethics characteristic of the “morality books” (shanshu 善書) of the age. Yet in spite of the shared ground with the shanshu literature, Durand-Dastès rightly insists on analysing the work as a novel, i.e. as a member of that genre of long prose narratives in the vernacular language that is the Ming dynasty's most significant contribution to Chinese literature. While Durand-Dastès recognizes the work's many literary failings (such as simplistic plot structure and frequently ponderous style), he insists that only by placing it in the setting of late-Ming literary production can we uncover the cultural world represented in and through this admittedly minor representative of the Ming novel. And he clearly excels in this effort, submitting the Dongdu ji to a thorough analysis within its late-Ming sociocultural context, uncovering for us a cultural sphere where the then widely proclaimed “harmony of the three teachings” (sanjiao heyi 三教合一 or sanjiao guiyi 三教歸一) crystallized around a shared concern about social decay and moral decline. The moral medicine prescribed by the novel for its sick age is indeed heavily indebted to a “generic” or “popularized” Confucianism, but also shot through with primarily Buddhist concerns such as vegetarianism and the prohibition of killing sentient beings. Vincent Durand-Dastès' meticulous analysis of the Dongdu ji fills his book with well-founded insights into the cultural climate of the Ming dynasty's twilight years. The cultural historian interested in this time period will find this work a veritable treasure-trove of information.

The author's insistence on taking the Dongdu ji seriously as a novel, i.e. as a deliberately designed work of literature within the framework of the by then fairly well established standards and requirements of that genre, assures that the student of traditional Chinese literature will not be disappointed either. Durand-Dastès makes innovative contributions to our understanding of religious novels as texts placed in a field of tension created by the conflicting demands of entertainment, aesthetic expectations, hagiography and didacticism. Few of the works in this subgenre called “novels of gods and demons” (shenmo xiaoshuo 神魔小說) by the famous literary historian and writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) balance these allegiances nearly as well as the masterwork Journey to West, and (as already mentioned) the Dongdu ji certainly does not attain that work's sophistication. However, by pursuing the intertextual linkages and the question of the authorship of this work of second (or even third) rank, Durand-Dastès discovers a network of authors of religious novels that provides important insights into the social organization of literary production during the first half of the seventeenth century. The demonstrable links of the Dongdu ji with the earlier “Romance of the three teachings dispelling confusion and leading back to orthodoxy” (Sanjiao kaimi guizheng yanyi 三教開迷歸正演義) allows Durand-Dastès to question the Dongdu ji's conventional attribution to Fang Ruhao 方汝浩, who authored two other, better known, novels of a religious bent: the Chan Zhen yishi 禪真逸史 and the Chan Zhen houshi 禪真後史. The much more polished style of these works already makes it unlikely that Fang Ruhao also authored the Dongdu ji, but Durand-Dastès presents further convincing arguments against Fang's authorship while pointing to the possibility that the author of the Romance of the Three Teachings may in fact also have been directly or indirectly involved in the writing of the Dongdu ji.

Vincent Durand-Dastès presents us with the most thorough study to date of this late-Ming novel, clearly surpassing the existing scholarship in any language in the degree to which he penetrates the text and its contexts. In addition to delivering what is likely to stand as the definitive study of the Dongdu ji for the foreseeable future, Durand-Dastès makes important contributions to our knowledge of the cultural history of late-Ming China and to our understanding of the social and cultural framework of literary production in that age. This erudite and carefully edited and presented tome (including substantial appendixes containing three translated chapters of the Dongdu ji and a magisterial overview of its editorial history) is recommended to all scholars interested in the mentioned fields.