Matthew W. King's second book came out just three years after the publication of his first prize-winning monograph. This book continues the idea that was central to Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood Footnote ¹—that Asian modernity was necessarily determined and dictated by Western influences. Although the main plot of In the Forest of the Blind is a curious episode of interaction between Western scholarship and Inner Asian intellectual traditions, King remains true to his idea and fundamentally refuses to consider this case in the Western terms of hierarchy, patronage, objectification, linearity, and priority. As he puts it in the introduction, the texts and discourses he analyzes in this book are “not bequeathed by the West to the East, nor plotted by movement from tradition to the modern, Buddhism to Buddhist studies, legend to fact, chronicle to history, cosmology to geography, doctrine to philosophy” (p. 15). Instead, King applies a poststructuralist rhizome model, a centerless ramifying system with its elements interlinked in a nonhierarchical way.

The book raises a range of issues that have been intensely debated in the humanities but still have not received due attention in Asian studies, such as the relationship between Western scholarship and Asian knowledge systems and views on history, the notion of a West/non-West binary opposition, and the formation of ideas about the “East” in Western academies. King analyzes all these issues in connection with a single crosscutting plot: the history of translations of the fifth-century BCE travelogue of the famous Chinese pilgrim Faxian, which, King argues, first became a way for the Western academy to discover Buddhist Asia and discipline Buddhist studies as a distinct area of studies, and then became the basis for self-reflection of Buddhist intellectuals in Russia, Mongolia, and Tibet.

King writes here in the genre of intellectual history. Although it is Faxian's Record that is the main plot-forming element of the book, it focuses to a large extent on the biographies of three translators of Faxian's Record who are separated by time and space but intellectually interlinked: the famous French orientalist Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832), and his editors, Julian von Klaproth and Ernest Augustin Clerc de Landresse; his Russian colleague of Mongolian origin, Dorzhi Banzarov (1822–55); and a Mongolian Buddhist monk, Zava Damdin Lubsangdamdin (1867–37). Even though King devotes a chapter to him, I deliberately omit here the personality of Faxian, a fifth-century Chinese pilgrim who undertook a perilous trip to India to acquire Buddhist sutras, since he is mainly present as a figure in the book only in regard to his authorship of the Record.

King considers these main characters of the book in the contexts of their time, their cultural milieu, intellectual environments, and the institutions in which they participated. He masterfully sews together all these life stories into an interconnected and centerless system of knowledge circulation and exchange. Yet I would not say that all these biographical parts are written equally well. For example, the story of Dorzhi Banzarov, one of the earliest Asians to get a European university education, comes between a brilliant chapter focused on the life path of Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat and a no less fascinating chapter about Zava Damdin. However, in the chapter on Banzarov, this very important story of the Russian academy and the role of Banzarov as a critically important nexus in the movement of Faxian's Record across Eurasia is written rather superficially.

After reading the chapter, one remains a bit confused regarding what could be a driving force behind Banzarov's decision to translate the Record into Mongolian. King's reflections on his nascent national sentiments in the 1840s are based only on Robert Rupen's work on the early twentieth-century Buryat nationalists. Whether Rupen's ideas are applicable to the mentality of earlier persons like Banzarov remains questionable. The outcome is that this key episode in the whole story is insufficiently elaborated. Yet I am convinced that the central idea of the book does not suffer too much from this deficiency, because no matter why Banzarov accomplished this translation—whether it was a part of his academic exercises, prompted by his teacher Osip Kovalevsky, or inspired by his Buryat religious mentors (one of them, by the way, was Galsan Gomboev, whom King mentions a few times)—the translation as a development of Faxian's Record remains a fact.

Here I would like to cautiously suggest that a key to solving the puzzle of why Banzarov translated Faxian's Record is the contemporary Indigenous historiographic tradition of the Buryats in Mongolian script, which widely cited Russian ethnographic accounts and historical works. That said, nineteenth-century Buryat chroniclers combined the material from European sources with data taken from Tibetan dharma histories and philosophical treatises. I think it is possible to consider Banzarov's translation within this development, but in order to do that, one would need to immerse more deeply in the nineteenth-century Russian and Buryat context. Without that, it is difficult to fully comprehend the circulation of knowledge in Eurasia.

Nonetheless, the major impact of In the Forest of the Blind is that perhaps for the first time in Western academia, a book raises the issue of knowledge exchange between Europe and Inner Asia in a non-Eurocentric way, underlining the role of “place-bound, static, and divergent actors,” rather than “boundary-crossing figures” (p. 140) and go-betweens who acted in colonial and imperial zones of contact. This is an important novelty of the book that leads us to discussions of interactions between established institutes of knowledge production and interpretation, and emphasizes self-sufficiency and equality of cultures. King's approach allows us to view Banzarov or Zava Damdin not as merely cultural mediators or intellectual marginals but rather as intellectuals who reached the edge of one epistemological system and stepped on another.

King's book is written as an enthralling intellectual quest through time and space, but I am not sure that a lay reader should anticipate a smooth reading. Yet King's account of the amazing transitions across Eurasia, from the vibrant fifth-century oasis cities of Serindia to the quietude of the dusty libraries of nineteenth-century Paris and Kazan, and then to Mongolia in the midst of the 1920s nation-building process, will surely keep any sophisticated reader in suspense. The main characteristic of King's new book is that it places its reader at the center of ongoing debates about the integration of Western and non-Western epistemologies, urging us to rethink the boundaries of academic disciplines.