Under the leadership of Genghis Khan, nomadic horsemen burst out of Mongolia in the thirteenth century and began their sweep across Asia, creating the largest empire the world has ever known. Particularly in Iran and China, the results were far-reaching: the Mongols imposed enormous changes but at the same time were profoundly influenced by the highly developed civilization of their new subjects.

While the Ilkhanids retained the nomadic practice of moving from place to place and holding court in elaborate tents, they also commissioned permanent pleasure palaces lined with richly decorated ceramic tiles. Jewelry and finely worked metal objects were produced in abundance, as were textiles woven with gold. Mosques and mausoleums, built on a grand scale, were lavishly furnished. More than two hundred outstanding objects exemplifying all these branches of the arts are illustrated in color and fully described in this catalogue.

Eight distinguished scholars in the field present the historical and political background of the Ilkhanid era and address such subjects as manuscript illustration, religious art, and the transmission of design motifs across Asia. Also included are two technical studies, maps, a genealogical chart, and a complete bibliography.

… declaredly Buddhist rationales, narratives, and textual forms, along with Buddhist clerics and organizations, have shaped how governments, judiciaries, and everyday people understand the nature and purpose of constitutional projects. Moreover, we insist that a rigorous understanding of Buddhism, particularly since the mid-twentieth century, requires an awareness of how the rise of constitution-based national polities have affected and altered how Buddhists conceive their own structures and practices of self-administration.

An edited volume of contributions exploring the relationship between Buddhism and Constitutionalism across Asia.

The essay looks at the Buddhist Association of China (BAC), which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has promoted as an influential actor in Buddhist circles on the global stage, via one of its key instruments for influence in Chinese societies and abroad, the United Front Work Department (UFWD). This chapter argues that Buddhist actors who seek to shape the legal-political framework of their societies according to their values are facing increasing competition from a fellow influential Buddhist association that conveys the positions of its political mentor rather than shared religious values.

Gives a good history of the CCP’s relationship with Buddhism—from antagonism to co-option—and gives some thoughts about the relationship between Buddhism and the state across Asia.

… within and outside Tibet, popular expressions of Tibetan identity rely on religious symbolism. In Tibet, religious idioms are reappearing in completely new contexts, as political expressions of opposition to Chinese rule. In India, Tibetan refugee elites reinterpret these idioms in their own terms while redefining Tibetan identity and culture for the outside world and for refugees themselves.

Unlike in modern Europe, where Christianity was an insufficient basis for national identity, religion in Tibet (and in Asia more broadly) has been an important part of justifying the state. This article explains the role of Buddhism in the Tibetan independence movement both within and outside the PRC and uses it to question the Western assumption that nationalism is a secular ideology.

From the moment they woke up to the moment they went to sleep, the staffers’ and trainees’ days were marked by continuous labor alongside each other. The ultimate goal of this program was to encourage trainees to return to their home villages and become community leaders of sustainable development and environmental efforts—leaders who would know how to live in and for the collective.

Western aid organizations typically attempt to manage dispensation of bureaucratic benefits, often via the free market. Such aid turns both the staff and recipients into neoliberal subjects.

This book discusses how a large, Shinto NGO (The Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement, or “OISCA”) runs a very different kind of international organization in which the goal is not to atomize people but to unite them. Becoming One shows how collectivist, Asian practices offer viable alternatives to Western modes of organizing, acting, and being together in the world.

Some experts think Beijing wants to bring Buddhist holy sites, like Tawang, under its control to cement its authority over Tibet. When the current Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, he reached Tawang first after crossing mountains by foot.

Tawang, home to India’s largest Buddhist monastery, has been claimed by China as part of its ‘Southern Tibet.’ The region remains a hotspot for India-China tensions, with recent clashes near the Line of Actual Control (LAC) underscoring ongoing border disputes

Called เล่นแชร์ (“Sharing Games”) in Thai, a group of neighbors or family members take turns bidding on a communal pot. The resulting game facilitates efficient peer-to-peer loans without bookkeeping or needing to predict when money will be needed, allowing those living on the margins of society to easily pool their risks and navigate precarity together.

the aim of the present book, which is based on the workshop “Wandering Religious Poets” held at Stockholm University in 2017, is to highlight some aspects of the religious poet for whom wandering is a lifestyle, as well as the religious poetry which has wandering as its subject – in a variety of religious traditions, societies and different periods of time. Besides Indian, Tibetan, and Japanese, some Indo-European comparative material is included, but we have not been able to cover certain neighbouring areas, like China, where the phenomenon of wandering poets can be found as well.

Buddhism in Burma is involved in a continuing and intense struggle against a repressive military regime.

While much continues to unfold, the struggle between the Burmese military and its Buddhist subjects has, regrettably, only deepened in the decades since this article was first published.

Organized flaking techniques to obtain predetermined stone tools have been traced back to the early Acheulean in Africa and are seen as indicative of the emergence of advanced technical abilities and in-depth planning skills among early humans. Here, we report one of the earliest known examples of prepared core technology in the archaeological record, at the Cenjiawan site in the Nihewan basin of China, dated 1.1 Mya.

Evidence that Homo Erectus was intentionally crafting stone tools over a million years ago in China.

After they migrated into the oasis cities on the Silk Route in the latter half of the ninth century, some remained Manichaeans. Some aristocratic Uigurs converted to Christianity when they encountered Nestorian missionaries. However, the majority of Uigurs, including common people, became Buddhists.

At some point in its evolution, Homo sapiens spread out of Africa into Eurasia, replacing or partially absorbing local populations of other hominin forms.

About 70 thousand years ago.

Rather than “total prohibition”, [the Tongan word “taboo”’s] original denotation had to do with sacredness and uniqueness.

Many of [Hoi An’s new restaurants] specialized in fish and seafood, but others served expensive animal flesh attributed with virility, strength, and sexual potency, such as he-goat or wild animals. The virility and potency embedded in the flesh of these animals was further exacerbated by the hot, libido-enhancing spices such as chili, lemongrass, ginger, and rau răm. […] these venues were practically brothels.

… as valuable as the familiar theoretical and conceptual languages of Euro-American landscape geography are, they also risk concealing a range of different aesthetics, social formations, and experiences that unfold in the non-Euro-American landscape. They risk dissimulating the politics of places as they are produced and lived contextually.

In the paper I work this argument through a critical engagement of the landscape architecture of Sri Lanka’s most famous tropical—modernist architect, Geoffrey Bawa; I specifically focus on his favorite, intensely choreographed, view at the estate Lunuganga on Sri Lanka’s south coast. As I show, while tools from the new cultural geography and beyond can help us to read this view as a classically modernist and apolitical landscape, a work of ‘art for art’s sake’, it is only a radically contextual familiarization with Sri Lankan society, politics, and history that can also reveal the landscape’s more subtle instantiation of a spatializing Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony.

In 2009, an [anonymous] RFA cameraman followed the Mekong River from its source in Tibet to Vietnam and the South China Sea. Traveling more than 2,700 miles through six nations, they gathered stories from the local people as the river faced radical change.

Each year, Ma collects more and more superstitions

… when the Japanese kept insisting that Buddhism was a specific religion that originated in north India, westerners were puzzled. There was no cult of Buddha in India, and northern India in particular was largely Muslim.

On the early modern encounters between Europeans and Japanese Buddhists and how they shaped each other’s understanding of Asia.

… tourism is a highly political phenomenon, the implications of which have been only rarely perceived and almost nowhere fully understood. […] If tourism policy does not integrate or anticipate its political component, then policies and the people affected by them will suffer.

A monograph to help tourism development planners to avoid disasters like Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s 2012 “Maitreya” debacle. If only he had read this book!

… there was nothing “private” about either the king’s support of Buddhist communities, or the claims and requests that Buddhist intellectuals made of the king.

[Nāgārjuna] justifies his condescension to the king by his personal affection for him, as well as his compassion for the world, which would presumably be affected by the king’s policies

… the land granted by Gautamīputra Śrī Sātakarṇi did not produce the revenue it was intended to produce, because “the land is not cultivated and the village is not inhabited.” In exchange, another plot of land was granted, this time measuring 100 nivartanas

… a grant was made by Vāsiṣṭhīputra Śrī Puḷumāvi at Nāsik, but this land, too, had to be exchanged for a more productive village three years after the original gift. […] In all of these cases, the land appears to have been intended to provide Buddhist communities with rents

… the edicts [also] reserve the exclusive right to consume the natural produce of a “religious wilderness” to the ascetics who live there. In one of them a prohibition can be read: “…a non-ascetic is not to stay”

Buddhist structures were a major and conspicuous presence in almost all of the major Sātavāhana towns

… precisely because it was not the religion of the state, it took on some of the roles that are associated with civil society

… this kind of cultural hegemony might have been one of the main reasons why rulers, even those who might have been personally hostile to Buddhism, supported them.

… building spectacular ecumenical leisure sites often runs into problems

A clear-eyed but sympathetic analysis of the pervasive construction of Buddhist tourist attractions in Asia, what they accomplish and don’t.

… in the past two decades, as the Chinese economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the People’s Republic of China has begun to play an increasingly assertive role in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia

A country-by-country profile of Southeast Asia and its relations with the PRC.