Preface

Summary

The Early 20th Century Resurgence of the Tibetan Buddhist World: Studies in Central Asian Buddhism is concerned with events and processes during the late nineteenth and particularly the early twentieth centuries. In a series of articles set primarily in the final days of the Qing Empire when the Russian and British Empires were expanding into Central Asia, this work examines the interplay of religio-social, economic, and political power among peoples who acknowledged the religious authority of Tibet's Dalai Lamas. It focuses on diplomatic initiatives involving the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and other Tibetan Buddhist hierarchs during and after his 1904–1909 exile in Mongolia and China, as well as his relations with Mongols and with Russian Buryat and Kalmyk Buddhists. Particularly notable among the Buryat Buddhists is the Dalai Lama's emissary to Russia, the renowned Agvan Dorzhiev. Deploying many previously unexplored Russian, Mongolian, and Tibetan sources, this work demonstrates how these events and processes shaped the historical trajectory of the region, not least the reformulation of both group identity and political consciousness, and sheds light on the development of national identities and the regional responses of Buddhism to the encounter with colonial forms of Western (in which we include Russian) modernity.

To contextualize the articles that follow, the Introduction outlines their historical background, points out the salient features of the different groups involved, and discusses aspects of the encounter between Buddhism and colonial modernity in Central Asia in the wider context of contemporary Buddhist reform.

We should note that in the face of numerous transcription systems both in the original sources and in the academic world we have not attempted to standardize the English spelling of Asian languages.

This work was arranged by Ishihama Yumiko of the International Association for Tibetan Studies in Paris in 2019. We also wish to acknowledge the assistance of Rolf Giebel for translation from Japanese, Nikolay Tsyrempilov and Daichi Wada for their assistance with the Asian-language bibliographies, and Saskia Gieling, Irene van Rossum, Jaap Wagenaar, and Julie Benschop-Plokker at the Amsterdam University Press for their role in bringing this work to publication, as well as the two anonymous reviewers whose comments were a valuable contribution to the final form of this work.