Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire

Matthew King's Book Launch

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Lecture at 4pm and reception at 6pm. Please register for the reception https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/book-launch-matt-king-ocean-of-milk-ocean-of-blood-tickets-56954547585

After the fall of the Qing and Tsarist empires, amid nationalist and socialist upheaval, Siberian, Mongolian, and Tibetan Buddhist monks in the frontiers of the Soviet Union and Republican China faced a chaotic and increasingly uncertain world. Drawing on ten years of research into otherwise lost Buddhist monastic writing produced during Asia’s first socialist revolution, Matthew King reveals an unexplored landscape of countermodern Buddhisms that briefly flourished in Asia’s heartland before a wave of state violence arrived in 1937. Who, King asks, were made invisible in the invention of national peoples, territories, histories, and religions that directed such violence? How does contemporary scholarship on modernization in Asia and on transnational Asian religions reproduce such erasures? Attending to hybrid, countermodern movements, King shows, displaces contact with European tradition as the primary trope for understanding twentieth-century Asian religiosity.

For more details about the book, visit: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/ocean-of-milk-ocean-of-blood/9780231191067