Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood

"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"--

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.