Matthew W. King. Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. xiv + 281 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-19106-7.
Reviewed by Brenton Sullivan (Colgate University)
Published on H-Buddhism (December, 2020)
Commissioned by Jessica Zu (USC Dornsife, School of Religion)
The “ocean of milk” and “ocean of blood” that make up the title of Matthew W. King’s new book refer to the tides of dharma and bloodshed, respectively, that have swept across Inner Asia. The focus of the book is the intertidal period of 1911-37, a period too often overshadowed by what came before it, the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), and what followed, the bloody purges of “counter-revolutionary elements” in 1937 and the Soviet era. The book traces the life and especially the ouevre of Dava Damdin (1867-1937), whose nine thousand folios of output “is the only collection of scholarly writing of equal scope and purpose to have survived the state-inflicted terror of the late 1930s” (p. 10). Damdin’s works continue to influence Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism today on topics as diverse as Madhyamaka philosophy, the cultic devotion to the Géluk protector deity Shukden, and Mongolian history. But Damdin’s story is more a story of sadness, of someone “struggling to make sense of the world in real time” (p. 170).
The world that made sense to Damdin was that of the Qing, in which bodhisattva emperors and authentic lamas gave order to the cosmos and mediated the interaction between the “empty” time of eternal dharma with the world of “real” mean (p. 73). This world was “enchanted”—in it the human and the enlightened came together seamlessly—and it was epitomized by the former Géluk luminaries from the Sino-Tibeto-Mongol frontier, such as Sumpa Khenpo (1704-88), who likewise thought of his own immediate past as an enchanted one, as one that “rivalled the lands and inhabitants of the gods’ pure realms.”[1]
The first part of the book—chapters 1-3—as well as the first part of chapter 4, describes that enchanted world, the world of “milk,” as it occurred to Damdin and appears in his numerous historical writings. The second part of the book, chapters 4-6, describes the disenchantment that followed the fall of the Qing and the coming tide of blood, and it is these chapters that are really the heart of King’s moving book.
Chapter 1 covers Damdin’s earliest years, his education, and his early travels. One of the most interesting observations King makes in this chapter is that “all Zava Damdin’s descriptions of his mystical experiences and encounters, and of his religious formation through personal contact with enlightened beings and holy sites more generally, are written as ‘inner’ and even ‘secret’ biographical narratives of events that took place before the 1911 collapse of the Qing, at sites associated with imperial sovereignty and the Qing-Géluk formation specifically. By contrast, all personal events between 1911 and 1937 are narrated crisply in the style of ‘outer’ biography” (p. 40). King’s close attention to literary style and to the “chronotopes” active in the different layers of Damdin’s corpus reveals the impact on the historical subject of social forces unleashed in the early twentieth century and the compulsion that subject felt to reconstruct itself.
Chapter 2, titled “Felt,” demonstrates Damdin’s effort to find in the past “more ‘Mongols,’ by more names, in more places ... than had any other monastic or professional historian before or since” (p. 72). Those were “the peoples of the felt tent,” whose “shared history” Damdin “recovers” by means of a “poaching” of contemporary Euro-Russian histories, ethnographies, archaeological reports, and literature (pp. 83, 148). This past that Damdin imagined “was neither the Qing nor the nation, but a hybrid third time and space” (p. 84).
Chapter 3, aptly titled “Milk,” after that nourishing substance of pastoral life, is the last chapter dedicated in its entirety to Damdin’s enchanted world, where the timeless (“empty”) and the historical (the “real”), the enlightened and the human come together (pp. 73, 91). Here King makes an interesting contribution to Inner Asian historiography, observing that the “logics of contiguity” to sacred places, objects, and beings, which are widely understood to characterize Tibetan notions of space and pilgrimage, are also operative in “the Two Systems [of spiritual and temporal authority] as an object of monastic historical analysis and prose” (p. 98). “Contiguity with the enlightened was the primary event of history,” King writes (p. 100). “Incarnations curated civilization and self-emancipation, both the sought-after objects of the historian’s craft” (p. 100).
Chapter 4 brings the reader into Damdin’s disenchanted world following the collapse of the Qing and the end of the Eighth Jebtsundamba’s khaɣanate in 1919 that marked the break of the Géluk Buddhist order’s tie to imperial patronage.[2] The first half of this chapter recounts Damdin’s visions of and close contacts with the enlightened presences of Mount Wutai and the Qing imperial court. Following his return to Mongolia in 1907 and the collapse of the Qing, however, King notes a stylistic shift. Enlightened presences no longer populate Damdin’s writing, and the “crisp” and more “sober mode of outer biography” takes over (p. 133). This chapter and the previous chapter bring to life and make clear the significance of the “Two Systems” model of society and culture in traditional Inner Asia and would therefore make excellent reading for an advanced undergraduate course on Tibetan Buddhism or Inner Asian history.
Chapter 5 details Damdin’s diagnosis of the crisis affecting Mongolia in the 1920s and ’30s. Similar to the commentary of Buddhist reformers elsewhere in Asia (such as Taixu in China), blame was laid at the feet of disorderly monks who no longer observed discipline. Dissolute lamas who abused the system of divine incarnation were also to blame, as was the inobservance of social and political hierarchy. In short, the coalescence of divine intentions and the “real” world, epitomized by the monastic bodies, bodhisattva emperors, and ruling lamas of the High Qing, had “unwound” (p. 167).
Finally, in chapter 6, “Blood,” King describes the medium by which Damdin spoke about, albeit elliptically, his current social and political moment: prophecy. Prophecies of the decline of the dharma by Drakpa Gyeltsen (1619-56) and others refer for Damdin to the growing persecution of Buddhism and associated sociopolitical institutions by modernizers and especially communists. Damdin distinguishes himself from Buddhist reformers who sought to “update” Buddhism so that it might fit better with the needs and expectations of the modern state by rejecting such proposals as the creation of common schools for monks and laity. Doing so, Damdin says, is like “giving milk to a snake,” or accommodating the enemy (p. 185).
I am not completely convinced by King’s argument that Damdin has created a “third space” or a “third register beyond the Qing and the national subject” (p. 205). King himself repeatedly explains how Damdin attempted to “extend” the logic of the Qing world into the post-Qing period but “never exceeded the Qing-Géluk narrative” (pp. 71, 92; although, on p. 147 King suggests that Damdin did sometimes exceed it). Damdin regularly comes across instead as one “out of step with political reality,” who “stubbornly remained a Géluk scholar of the Qing long past its political endings,” who “retreated” from meaningful engagement with his present and the future, who “failed” in his effort to resurrect a narrative that made sense of his present, and who clambered onto monastic thrones to speak of bygone days to an audience that was not interested in listening (pp. 6, 148, 84, 170). Hence the sadness mentioned above. Damdin chose not to speak about current events, referring to such as “foolish chatter” and choosing instead to “pray” (pp. 137, 189).
And yet Damdin’s efforts did not amount to nothing. King describes Damdin’s significant institution building through the 1920s and ’30s, which no doubt contributed significantly to what the socialist regime identified as the enduring “lama problem” (p. 16). King also shows how Damdin’s histories “were not simply carbon copies of imperial narratives,” that Damdin effectively brought the past Buddhist narratives of proper rulership and the unfolding of the dharma into historical time through his selective mining of European, Chinese, Manchu, and Indic sources (p. 71). Through his prolific output, Damdin forged the components of an alternate future (such as a Mongolian deep past and a Mongol “people”), even if those components were to be picked up and used by others to different (especially nationalist) ends following his death (p. 88). Damdin represents a time between time that was characterized by heterogeneity and possibility. Even if he himself could not quite articulate what Buddhism and society might look like after the Qing, he, like the many Buddhist reformers with whom he shared that time, made up a dynamic world of competing ideas and possibilities.
King urges historians of Inner Asia to move beyond the “well-worn story about the marginalization and then suppression of religious life in a post-Qing world” (p. 18). Scholars of Buddhist modernism more generally should heed King’s call. He draws our attention to the “‘countermodern’ Buddhist formations across late- and post-imperial and colonial Asia” and to the “otherwise histories” that are not “already legible” and appealing to our Western gaze (pp. 204-5). Beyond King’s theoretical contributions in Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood, his elegant prose (for example, “And my long-dead protagonist has been reborn and will read these pages”; “Certain monks still climbed on thrones”; and “crumple before firing squads” [pp. 8, 17, 32]) and beautifully rendered translations from Damdin’s writings make this an enjoyable read, accessible to advanced undergraduates as well as scholars of Inner Asia and Buddhism.
Notes
[1]. Sumpa Khenpo, “Mkhan po erte ni paN+Di tar grags pa’i spyod tshul brjod pa sgra ’dzin bcud len” (Autobiography of Sumpa Khenpo Yeshé Peljor), in Gsung ’bum (Collected works), vol. 8, Śata-piṭaka series 221 (New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture, 1975). The autobiography was initially composed in 1788 and added to and completed in 1794.
[2]. The common spelling is khanate but King uses the more philologically accurate spelling, khaɣanate.
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Citation:
Brenton Sullivan. Review of King, Matthew W., Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire.
H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55519
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