Matthew King

This chapter translates a selection from a 1965 Tibetan-language work by the Buryat luminary Agvaannyam (Tib. Ngag dbang nyi ma, 1907–1990). As a youth, Agvaannyam was selected to study in the great Géluk monastic colleges of Central Tibet, leaving Buryatia for first Khalkha Mongolia and the Lhasa region just before successive waves of revolutionary upheaval. In time, Agvaannyam became a prominent figure in the Tibetan and Mongolian diaspora and refugee community based in India and Europe. His six-volume work contains an untranslated autobiography and the 285-folio Lamp of Scripture and Reasoning, written in c. 1965, from which the current selection is drawn. In this translated section we see the author’s vision of a continuity of Buddhist transmission that could offset the bloody ruptures to tradition in Buryatia, Mongolia, and Tibet during its author’s lifetime.

This chapter translates two liturgies representative of one of the great transmutations of Inner Asian history: Chinggis Khan’s transition from brilliant conqueror to wrathful manifestation of a Buddha. As wrathful Buddha, Chinggis Khan acts as a hybrid protector—at once a Cakravartin Wheel-Turning King, a pious Buddhist laymen, a supramundane dharmapāla, and still a special envoy of Tngri’s supreme power as he was known from pre-Buddhist days. He appears in rituals such as the text that follows as both the man who historically conquered much of Eurasia in order to clear obstacles for the Dharma to arrive in Mongol lands, and as a Buddha for ritual actors invoking his blessing, purification, and protection required to complete the path to enlightenment. The first text is an eighteenth-century incense offering associated with the Inner Mongolian monastic tradition of Mergen Gegeen, while the second is a offering to Chinggis Khan traditionally written and recited in Tibetan but recent...

This chapter presents a unique devotional biography from Khalkha by Zava Damdin Luvsandamdin (1867–1937) about his beloved guru Sanjaa (1837–1906). Completed in the late summer of 1914, some three years after the collapse of the Qing and the formation of a perilous Mongolian autonomous theocracy in 1911, Beautifying Ornament provides rare details about the life of an otherwise little-known Mongolian luminary from the late imperial period. Written in Tibetan and employing literary genres shared by that time across the Tibeto-Mongolian cultural interface, Beautifying Ornament sets narrative details proper to an “outer biography” (Tib. phyi rnam) into devotional verse (Tib. bstod) joined with a concluding “seven-limb prayer” liturgy directed to the departed Sanjaa for regular recitation by his disciples. Beautifying Ornament also illuminates the understudied globalisms of nineteenth-century Mongolian Buddhist life that sustained zones of contact and exchange between Mongol, Chinese, Ti...

This chapter presents selections from the vast oeuvre of the eighteenth-century polymath Čaqar Gebši Luvsančültem (1740–1810). Among Mongolian, Siberian, and Tibetan Buddhists to this day, the Čaqar Gebši is honored as an authoritative, genre-fixing translator, philosopher, astronomer, physician, pilgrim, and biographer who helped mediate the Qing imperial formation in Mongol lands. Translated in this chapter are selections from his miscellaneous writings focused on producing a Buddhism fit for Čaqar (only relatively recently and brutally incorporated into the Qing) by extolling topics such as the routinization of daily life for Buddhist scholastics, hair-splitting philosophical distinctions important for the Géluk tradition, and synthetic (as well as revisionist) histories of Tibetan and Chinggisid royal lineages, warlords, and eminent monks who collectively brought the Dharma to Čaqar lands. Also included is a brief but fascinating set of meditative and liturgical exercises meant ...

This article examines previously unstudied historical sources from seventeenth–twentieth century Khalkha, Mongolia concerning the controversial Dorjé Shukden tradition (Tib. Rdo rje shugs ldan; Kh. Mong. Dorjshüg). In the last quarter-century, the current Dalai Lama has imposed a controversial global ban on the practice that has cleaved Tibetan and Mongolian communities from one another, led to much bloodshed, and the splitting of the institutional base of the transnational Géluk (Tib. Dge lugs) tradition. Anti-Shukden polemicists and the small body of contemporary secondary scholarship on the schism attribute the rise of Shukden traditions to a hyper-conservative faction of monks based in Lhasa during the early twentieth century. They are credited with elevating Shukden, a violent regional spirit, to the high position of an enlightened protector of the Dharma. This article troubles that historical position, showing how developed Shukden traditions existed in Khalkha a century befor...

This chapter presents a 1931 survey of Buddhist institutional life in Outer and Inner Mongolia and in Buryatia. It is a ground-level view by a Buddhist author writing from within the increasingly embattled monastic worlds of socialist Mongolia, soon to be erased by state purges. Like a few other chapters in this volume, it is drawn from the writings of the Khalkha polymath of the revolutionary era, Zava Damdin Luvsandamdin (1867–1937). This survey is embedded in his famous 1931 history of the Dharma in Mongol lands, The Golden Book (Tib. Gser kyi deb ther), the last history of such scope and purpose by a Khalkha monk prior to the devastating socialist state violence of the late 1930s. The survey comes after synthetic presentations of the early, middle, and later spread of the Dharma into Mongol lands, the latter tied inextricably to the Géluk school and the Qing formation that had collapsed in 1911/1912. The survey translated here is a final statement about the translocalism that de...

This chapter translates a 1924 letter exchange between two luminaries of the final years of prepurge Buddhism in Mongol and Buryat lands: the Khalkha polymath Zava Damdin Luvsandamdin (1867–1937) and the diplomat, reformer, and abbot Agvan Dorjiev (1854–1938). Both figures were deeply engaged with revolutionary intellectual currents circulating between China, the British Raj, Russia, Siberia, Tibet, Japan, and Mongolia in the early decades of the twentieth century. Both sought an advantage for Buddhist monastic life in competing models of revolutionary development and emancipation being debated in the Soviet Union and Mongolian People’s Republic. In the exchange translated here, these two tragic figures debate topics as diverse as the prehistory of the Mongolian community, the whereabouts of the fabled “land of Li,” and how best to counter the threat of scientific empiricism.

The late-nineteenth century was a time of Protestant missionary enthusiasm for the “great closed land” of Tibet. Their prodigious, oftentimes proto-ethnographic, writings continue to provide scholars with archives that document missionary perspectives on Inner Asian society and religion, but few sources have yet emerged that allow for these to be read alongside Tibetan accounts of Christian-Buddhist encounters. This article undertakes such a parallel reading of four accounts of an unsuccessful attempt by the British missionary Cecil Polhill to convert an eastern Tibetan Buddhist abbot, Māyang Paṇḍita, in late 1889. Understanding these texts as conflicting sacred historiographies, we note that these Christian and Buddhist writers shared a commitment to writing and to particular modes of emotional, material, and logical mediation as the “correct” path to religious certainty. Differences in genre, however, lead more to mockery and misunderstanding than to each side’s desired transformation of the other..

This article introduces the life and medical histories of the luminary Khalkha Mongolian monk, Lungrik Tendar (Tib. Lung rigs bstan dar; Mon. Lungrigdandar, c. 1842–1915). Well known for his exegesis of received medical works from Central Tibet, Lungrik Tendar was also a historian of the Four Tantras (Tib. Rgyud bzhi; Mon. Dörben ündüsü). In 1911, just as Khalkha Mongolia began separating from a flailing Qing Empire, Lungrik Tendar set out to append the story of Mongolia and of Mongolian medicine, political formation, and religious life to the Four Tantra’s well-known global histories. In addition, he provided an illuminating summary of how to present the Four Tantras to a popular audience in the twilight of the imperial period. This article introduces the life of Lungrik Tendar and analyzes his previously unstudied medical history from 1911, The Stainless Vaiḍūrya Mirror. On the basis of this understudied text, this article explores ways that monastic medicine in the frontier schol...

We report measurements of the polarization of W bosons from top-quark decays using 2.7 fb À1 of p" p collisions collected by the CDF II detector. Assuming a top-quark mass of 175 GeV= c 2, three measurements are performed. A simultaneous measurement of the fraction of longitudinal (f0) and right-handed (fþ) W bosons yields the model-independent results f0 ¼ 0: 88 Æ 0: 11ðstatÞ Æ 0: 06ðsystÞ and fþ ¼ À0: 15 Æ 0: 07ðstatÞ Æ 0: 06ðsystÞ with a correlation coefficient of À0: 59. A measurement of f0 [fþ] constraining fþ [f0] to its standard ...

This article introduces and translates a Tibetan language record of Trashi Thösam Ling (Tib. Bkra shis thos bsam gling; Mon. Dashitoisamlin), the twenty-sixth regional house (T. kham tshan, khang tshan; Mon. ayimaġ, khamtsan) of the great Khalkha monastic city of Yeke-yin Küriye (present day Ulaanbaatar). This undated work was prepared and edited by the great polymath of the post-Qing era Lubsangdamdin (1867–1937), a resident of that monastic house, based on an antiquated record of uncertain origin housed in its archives. The history of monastic institutions in Khalkha from the early twentieth century are of tremendous interest to historians of Inner Asian Buddhism in light of the erasure of socialist state violence that began in earnest in Khalkha and Siberia in the late 1930s. Beyond the narrow interests of specialists in revolutionary-era Buddhist life, however, records such as these reveal the largely unstudied networks of exchange that united sites of self-and community formation between the Himalayan foothills of the British Raj, the high Tibetan plateau, north China during the Qing and Republican periods, all Mongol lands, Siberia, and even St. Petersburg. In the short historical record of Trashi Thösam Ling we are thus provided a glimpse of trans-regional circuits of material culture, wealth, and human bodies that productively challenge the territorial fixities of the Asia concept in the late-and post-imperial period and which help materialize the history of Buddhist formation along the Khalkha crossroads.

Mongol lands were bastions of Mahāyāna (Mon. yeke kölgen) and Vajrayāna (Mon. vačir kölgen) Buddhist life from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, vast territories of the Buddhadharma deeply twinned with Tibetan traditions but always of local variation and distinct cultural content and purpose. Mongol contact with the Dharma reached its apex in the early decades of the 20th century, a flourishing of Buddhist knowledge, craft, and institutionalism that would soon face the blunt tool of brutal state violence. As the great Eurasian Empires came undone with tectonic force and consequence, Mongol lands along the frontiers of the Qing and Tsarist formations had the highest per capita rate of monastic ordination in the history of Buddhism (up to one in three adult men holding some monastic affiliation). Decades into the revolutionary aftermath of imperial collapse, at the interface of Republican China and Soviet Russia, Mongolian monastic complexes were hubs of cultural, economic, and intellectual life that continued to circulate and shape anew classical Indian and Tibetan fields of knowledge like medicine and astrology, esoteric and exoteric exegesis, material culture, and performance traditions between the Western Himalaya; the northern foothills of the British Raj; the Tibetan plateau; North China; Beijing; all Mongol regions; and Siberia, right to St. Petersburg.

Historically significant civilizations dotted the heart of Eurasia already by the first centuries of the Common Era. Then, Indic Buddhist traditions began to arrive along merchant routes and find local patronage. Central Asia, like Buddhism, is hardly a fixed or consensual category: it takes quite different shape depending on the subfield and the historical period. Scholars of Buddhism (as opposed to scholars of Islam, for example) generally use “Central Asia” in reference to networks of oasis towns, such as Khotan and Turfan, that made up the ancient Silk Road between eastern Iran and Dunhuang during the first millennia CE. Transported by merchants and monks, and according to the ebb and flow of conquest and regional political fragmentation, Buddhism flowed from the Indian subcontinent into and through these city-states. Out of complex multilingual and multicultural encounters leading to Islamic hegemony in the 7th century CE, Indian, Greek, Persian, Turkic, and Chinese
civilizations were twined here in new and significant ways. The Buddhisms that formed in the contact zones of Central Asia found material expression in diverse artistic and architectural styles, and they were intoned and expounded upon in some twenty-four languages and written on page and stele in at least seventeen scripts. The Central Asian melting pot provided the foundations for later, more enduring Buddhist traditions in China and Tibet, and proceeding from there to Korea, Japan, Mongolia, and Siberia. Recent scholarship is charting the extent to which Buddhist traditions in Central Asia developed in
transformative dialogue with Islam and gave shape to medieval European scholasticism. Despite its formative place in Eurasian history, however, scholarship on Central Asian Buddhism remains remote for nonspecialist Buddhologists and general readers. Much of this scarcity is due to the paucity of primary sources: the archaeological and material record remains fragmentary; the agents of transmission, translation, and innovation are too often nameless or otherwise untraceable; and
primary languages have been long dead. Few general overviews are available of the rich scholarship on Central Asian Buddhism to help fill this gap. To compound matters, vast bodies of contemporary secondary scholarship in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Tibetan, and Mongolian remain inaccessible to nonspecialists in Europe and North America.
While a comprehensive guide to that enormous, global scholarly literature would be a worthwhile contribution, it is well beyond
the purview of this article (and of the Oxford Bibliographies in Buddhism series more generally). What follows is a necessarily
partial bibliography aimed at providing accessible scholarship for nonspecialists, undergraduate educators, and general
readers. As such, its linguistic bias is with European-language scholarship. Even so, the sources described below will quickly
lead interested readers to key, non-European-language specialist studies, relevant scholarly journals, and databases of
primary sources according to interest and linguistic ability.

In addition to summarizing key concerns in Theravāda Buddhist Economics by scholars such as E. F. Schumacher and the Thai monk Payutto, this essay explores how descriptions of the West, Western development, and the “science” of economics serves in that literature to construct Occidentalist versions of Southeast Asian traditionalism and
religious orthodoxy. It then introduces the previously unstudied work of Shérab Tendar, a prominent Tibetan Buddhist scholar in the contemporary People’s Republic of China who has written prodigiously on what he considers to be a scripturally based Mahāyāna and Tantric Buddhist Economics. Comparing these three influential iterations of Buddhist Economics, this essay argues that this movement has less to do with economics proper than with what I call trans-Buddhist “scales of value”: site-specific desires and measures of sought after outcomes that here privilege the economy and economic behavior as a technique for individual, social, and environmental well-being and emancipation.

The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms is a classic travelogue that records the Chinese monk Faxian's journey in the early fifth century CE to Buddhist sites in Central and South Asia in search of sacred texts. In the nineteenth century, it traveled west to