As Nicole Willock explains at the outset of her important and innovative book, Lineages of the Literary, in Tibetan Buddhist tradition the epithet “Three Polymaths” (mkhas pa mi gsum) has long referred to three semi-legendary monks who during a period of anti-Buddhist persecution “safeguarded Buddhist monasticism in Tibet a millennium ago” (p. 1). Lineages of the Literary, however, concerns a new set of Tibetan Buddhist polymaths, those of “socialist China.” Tibetan contemporaries bestowed this honorific on Tsétan Zhabdrung (1910–1985), Mugé Samten (1914–1993) and Dungkar Rinpoché (1927–1997) for their “efforts to restore Buddhist practices and Tibetan studies in the People's Republic of China [PRC] after the Maoist period, an epoch characterized by destruction similar to that of a thousand years earlier” (p. 5). Prior to the founding of the PRC, each was a monastic leader and Buddhist scholar. After 1949, the Chinese Communist Party recruited them into its United Front, where they separately served the new state in various administrative capacities while working as translators (including translating the state constitution and Mao's Collected Works into Tibetan), scholars and educators. Each was purged and imprisoned prior to the launch of the Cultural Revolution but emerged in the reform era to pioneer “the academic study of Tibetan language, history, and culture at state-run universities, while simultaneously rebuilding their respective monastic institutions and teaching the next generation of monks, nuns, and laypeople” (p. 20).

Buoyed by insights and analyses drawn more from religious and literary studies than from historical methodologies, Willock has crafted a nuanced account that rejects “the ‘collaborator’ – ‘resistance fighter’ dichotomy” (p. 7) that can colour depictions of Tibetan leaders who remained in China. Drawing on Saba Mahmood's concept of “moral agency,” which Willock describes as a “capacity for action bound by historical conditions and by culturally specific disciplines of subject formation” (p. 153), she asks “how three Buddhist monastics moved across state-imposed boundaries between religious and secular domains to advocate for Buddhist epistemic values, to continue Tibetan Buddhist institutions, and to secularize Tibetan studies within the People's Republic of China” (p. 33). Through an exhaustive and erudite excavation of major writings penned by the three modern polymaths – including Tibetan genres of autobiography, poetry, works of Buddhist philosophy, and secularized histories – as well as through interviews with their students and others, Willock demonstrates how even in the extreme contexts of Maoist and post-Mao China, “religious epistemes can be alternatively adapted, safeguarded, and sometimes discarded in order to engage with new situations and new types of knowledge” (p. 20). To varying degrees, for instance, each polymath integrated historical materialism and state-led developmentalism within Tibetan Buddhist philosophical frameworks in ways that “alternatively resisted, drew upon, complied with, and subverted state policies to advocate for Tibetan language, religion, and history in the post-Mao era” (p. 232). For example, each “promoted the construction of Tibetan national identity within the confines of state discourse” (p. 184). Willock describes “how Dungkar Rinpoché as a Marxist theorist and Buddhist scholar created a secular past for Tibet” (p. 143) as a way to “unmoor Tibetan history from its Buddhist roots and bring notions of modernity on Tibetan terms rather than in a Han paternalistic way” (p. 171). Perhaps most significantly, rather than the usual watershed years of 1949, 1966 and 1978, Willock shows how the Three Polymaths constructed an alternative “timeline for Tibetan Buddhist history … that ignores the standard historical sequencing of events” (p. 38) promoted by the state. The activities of the original polymaths are said to have ushered in what is known as the “Later Diffusion” (phyi dar) of Buddhism to Tibet. In the autobiographical writings of Tsétan Zhabdrung and Mugé Samten, this Buddhist epoch came to an end in 1959 with the exile of the Dalai Lama and the destruction of the traditional Tibetan society, a re-periodization that serves to delink state violence against Tibetan language, religion, and material culture from the temporal limits of the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, Willock adds, Tsétan Zhabdrung and Mugé Samten “write about their lives in ways that almost completely ignore state power” (p. 125) and instead “interpret the ineffable suffering of the Maoist years as integral to the human condition according to the Buddhist worldview … replete with opportunities for spiritual practice” (p. 130). In turn, the reform era is cast not as an end of ultra-leftism, but as the start of a new Buddhist epoch, the Yang-dar period or “Era of the Dharma's Rediffusion” (p. 38) during which time “these three men took up the charge of transmitting Buddhist knowledge after a period of tyranny and destruction” (p. 67). The result is to “emblematically connect[] the efforts of three monastic scholars of the first millennium to their twentieth-century counterparts” (p. 38) and thereby place “Tibetan Buddhism at the center of the historical narrative” (p. 68).

Willock's sophisticated exposition of Tibetan religious epistemes and her detailed analysis of Tibetan literary forms will primarily appeal to students of Tibetan Buddhism, literature and history. And while they may quibble with some of the sweeping statements Willock makes about the Mao era, one hopes that historians of the PRC will also give serious consideration to this pioneering study. With an eye to the post-Yang-dar/reform era of Xi Jinping, Willock writes, “One of the truly remarkable features of the lives of the Three Polymaths is how they crisscrossed religious domains and state-sponsored secular institutions in China in ways that might be unthinkable today” (p. 144). Indeed, as access to both traditional archival materials and human sources becomes ever more restricted in Xi's “new era,” Willock's careful study of officially produced but quietly subversive writings by elite members of a marginalized community offers an exciting alternative for scholars wishing to similarly decentre the state and to explore diverse communities and subjectivities from within their own epistemological frameworks.