Ocean Of Milk Ocean Of Blood

After the fall of the Qing empire, amid nationalist and socialist upheaval, Buddhist monks in the Mongolian frontiers of the Soviet Union and Republican China faced a chaotic and increasingly uncertain world. In this book, Matthew W. King tells the story of one Mongolian monk’s efforts to defend Buddhist monasticism in revolutionary times, revealing an unexplored landscape of countermodern Buddhisms beyond old imperial formations and the newly invented national subject. Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood takes up the perspective of the polymath Zava Damdin (1867–1937): a historian, mystic, logician, and pilgrim whose life and works straddled the Qing and its socialist aftermath, between the monastery and the party scientific academy. Drawing on contacts with figures as diverse as the Dalai Lama, mystic monks in China, European scholars inventing the field of Buddhist studies, and a member of the Bakhtin Circle, Zava Damdin labored for thirty years to protect Buddhist tradition against what he called the “bloody tides” of science, social mobility, and socialist party antagonism. Through a rich reading of his works, King reveals that modernity in Asia was not always shaped by epochal contact with Europe and that new models of Buddhist life, neither imperial nor national, unfolded in the post-Qing ruins. The first book to explore countermodern Buddhist monastic thought and practice along the Inner Asian frontiers during these tumultuous years, Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood illuminates previously unknown religious and intellectual legacies of the Qing and offers an unparalleled view of Buddhist life in the revolutionary period.

"Eurasia's multiethnic empires began to crumble in the early twentieth century. In the ruins of the Qing, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, hundreds of ethnic groups sought to secure their newly found sovereignty and to participate in the global economy. They did so most regularly by adopting the representative politics of nationalism and by seeking to join the world system of nation-states. Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood tells a new transnational story about historiography, Buddhism, community, and sovereignty through the first-person narrative of a remarkable monk working at the Tibetan-Mongolian frontiers of Russia and China, the polymath Zawa Damdin (1867-1937): a historian, mystic, logician, and pilgrim whose life and works uniquely straddled the Qing and its socialist aftermath, the monastery and the scientific academy, and regional monastic networks and traditions. Matthew King shows the centrality of Buddhism in revolutionary projects to modernize Inner Asia, especially through Euro-Russian discourses of international civil society. Zawa Damdin and his milieu used new concepts such as "Asia," "Mongolia," and even "Buddhism" (a newly minted world religion) to strategically reinvent their classical traditions. Braiding European impulses and imperatives with a Buddhism made to travel, Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood presents a deeply personal history of Buddhism in Asia, one that connects the necessary nodes of the collapse of the Qing, the mass purge of monastics in 1937, and the global diaspora of Mongolian and Tibetan refugees in the wake of state violence"--

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 France, becoming in translation the first scholarly book about “Buddhist Asia,” a recent invention of Europe. This text fascinated European academic Orientalists and was avidly studied by Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The book went on to make a return journey east: it was reintroduced to Inner Asia in an 1850s translation into Mongolian, after which it was rendered into Tibetan in 1917. Amid decades of upheaval, the text was read and reinterpreted by Siberian, Mongolian, and Tibetan scholars and Buddhist monks. Matthew W. King offers a groundbreaking account of the transnational literary, social, and political history of the circulation, translation, and interpretation of Faxian’s Record. He reads its many journeys at multiple levels, contrasting the textual and interpretative traditions of the European academy and the Inner Asian monastery. King shows how the text provided Inner Asian readers with new historical resources to make sense of their histories as well as their own times, in the process developing an Asian historiography independently of Western influence. Reconstructing this circulatory history and featuring annotated translations, In the Forest of the Blind models decolonizing methods and approaches for Buddhist studies and Asian humanities.

"An important, provocative and original work, of great interest to Indian scholars, historians of religions, psychologists and historians of ideas, but accessible also to the cultivated reader. Even if one does not always agree with the author's interpretation, one cannot but admire her vast and precise learning, her splendid translations and exegesis of so many, and so different, Sanskrit texts, and her uninhibited, brilliant, and witty prose."—Mircea Eliade, University of Chicago "This is . . . a book which is as rich in detail as the carvings of the great Hindu temples. It shares with them a delight in the interplay of myth and mundane experience, and above all an empathy with the Hindu preoccupation with the meaning of human existence in all its complexity."—G. M. Carstairs, Times Literary Supplement

South India is a land of many temples and shrines, each of which has preserved a local tradition of myth, folklore, and ritual. As one of the first Western scholars to explore this tradition in detail, David Shulman brings together the stories associated with these sacred sites and places them in the context of the greater Hindu religious tradition. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

HH Rabbi Nachman's birth already set the stage for the modern era, e.g. a mere few years after he was born in 1772, America declared independence. Many of his teachings speak more directly to the man of our present time and society than to the shtetel (small town) Jews who were his followers. E.g. Rabbi Nachman revealed that everyone has an aspect of monarchy even if it is only over his family, or on a subliminal paradigm, this teaching was readily understood by his followers, but it was somewhat theoretical being that they were so destitute they could barely have seen real manifestation of this principle. Today, even the less well off, can clearly see how they wield various privileges and amenities that would have been special even for a monarch of those times. With the changing times, also came changing attitudes, social climate, and personal truths, convictions, ideas, and prerogatives. Rabbi Nachman had to prepare the world for this transition, and he did so by revealing the highest and deepest teachings which are the root of everything that plays out in the world. Anyone that looks at a lesson from Rabbi Nachman will see reflections of what is going on that very moment in his own life. Yet, even still, Rabbi Nachman saw that his followers were not adjusting properly and sufficiently. He saw their struggles and how they grappled with forces far superior than them. Even his awesome teachings were not providing his followers with the necessary perspective and life knowledge that they needed so desperately in order to transcend the narrow confines of ideology that were trapping them and leaving them helpless to the wanton desires of the helpless. As a final last resort Rabbi Nachman found the solution, he would reveal timeless stories, stories that would recreate the perception of the workings of the world, the listener would be reborn into new consciousness and awareness, and would be impassioned to forever seek renewal and true vitality. These stories are called Stories of Ancient Years, corresponding to the Divine Countenance of Attik Yoamin (see book of Daniel), the countenance of the Ancient of Years, which subliminally transcends all of the ordinary chain of events manifested in the Divine Providence, a bridge to cognizance of what is utterly beyond. On the one hand, these legendary tales are completely unfathomable in their scope and import, they are allusions to the most deep and esoteric Divine secrets, and yet on the other hand, they are filled with practical morals and life lessons which any reader can easily glean and gain. To this day no one has merited to completely understand the root and intrinsic meaning of the stories in their rightful context, yet multitudes of people have gained phenomenal new insights through these stories, the stories literally open up gates to greater perspicacity and cognizance. The stories have captured the attention and fascination of even the most secular scholars, they have been translated into different languages, and they are studied in universities throughout the world. Rabbi Nachman said that even the minutest detail of the stories is extremely critical, and unfortunately most of the translations are fraught with the literary license an author has to set down his own perspective, which in this case is undoubtedly very damaging. This translation was done painstakingly to capture as best as possible the exact translation and nuance, even following the order of the original verbiage, and often favoring the original Yiddish in which Rabbi Nachman delivered the stories. In more recent times, one of Rabbi Nachman's followers, Rabbi Yisroel Dov Odesser, underwent a phenomenal course of events which themselves proved to be the mechanism of transition and development of Breslov, and are understood to be a clear aspect of Stories of Ancient Times, and thus some of his stories are fittingly included in this volume as well as are many other stories from Na Nach Nachma Nachman MeUman.