Read Ocean of Milk Ocean of Blood A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire Matthew W King 9780231191067 Books

Product details Hardcover 304 pages Publisher Columbia University Press (April 2, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 0231191065

Ocean of Milk Ocean of Blood A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire Matthew W King 9780231191067 Books Reviews

• Zava Damdin was a Mongolian Buddhist monk and chronicler who lived from 1867 to 1937, thus seeing the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the coming of Mongolian independence, the takeover by USSR-backed communists, and the beginnings of the holocaust when extremists on the left almost exterminated the monks and traditional Buddhists of Mongolia--5% of the population. Zava Damdin wrote thousands of pages recording the history of the Mongols and of Buddhism as he saw these. His conclusion that essentially all early East-Central Asians were Mongols (or at least close) has not stood the test of time, nor has his dismissal of the spherical earth and other scientific findings contrary to traditional Buddhist cosmology. On the other hand, his scholarship and creative writing and his records of what he himself saw are vivid and fascinating. He wrote in literary Tibetan, which filled the role in Qing Mongolia that Latin filled in medieval Europe. He met many scholars Tibetans, Russians, Chinese, and of course other Mongols. In a turn that disoriented me a bit, he even met a member of the circle of Mikhail Bakhtin, one of my favorite thinkers and one I never expected to find on the early 20th century Mongolian frontier.
  Matthew King provides Zava Damdin's biography and attendant history, but the book is really a many-sided exploration of ideas and encounters in Zava's world. Dr. King handles modern literary, cultural, and historical theory with ease and style. The book is notably well written--an enjoyable read though challenging and thought-provoking. It is not only an excellent work; it is important beyond the confines of Mongolia. Countless such thinkers in traditional cultural settings had to confront sudden, disruptive modernity at that point in time, and few did it with as much reflection and diligence. One can say of Damdin what economists sometimes say of Marx "He may have gotten some wrong answers, but he asked all the right questions."