In Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood, Matthew King highlights the writings of Zava Damdin (1867–1937), a Mongolian intellectual and religious leader who was revered during his lifetime. Zava Damdin's work is well known and highly respected in the field of Buddhist studies, but with this book King's extensive translations and analysis of the monk's writings now offer a window onto late Qing Buddhist interpretations of political and social order, and the cultural consequences of the Qing dynasty's end, for readers in other disciplines.
King scrutinizes two products of Zava Damdin's historical imagination: first, his view of the Qing state as imbued with absolute political authority and indisputable religious legitimacy; and second, his attempt to comprehend and preserve a polyethnic, Inner Asian Buddhism before and after the Qing's demise. These two elements contribute fresh evidence to our understanding of how Qing institutions gradually adjusted to the nationalist and communist political orders in China and Mongolia, and of how people who belonged to transcultural groups during the Qing learned to become members of particular ethnic groups.
In six chapters, which are divided into two parts, and framed with an introduction and conclusion, King portrays Zava Damdin's life and reflections on the upheavals in his religious community and the wider world through an intellectual history centered on the monk's writings. He translates numerous excerpts from the writings and gives ample references to the texts that Zava Damdin utilized as sources for his research. King's translations achieve the perfect balance between comprehensibility for readers who do not know the original language and sophisticated description that evokes the emotions embedded in Zava Damdin's prose.
Chapter 1 describes Zava Damdin's rejection of secular life as a young child, his religious education, and his literary work, particularly his autobiographical writings, which belong to three Tibetan genres of life writing: outer biography, inner biography, and secret biography (pp. 39–40).
Zava Damdin's achievements as a historian, evident in his research and writing of Tibetan-language histories of “Mongolian people,” are the subject of chapter 2. King draws attention to the wide range of sources that Zava Damdin consulted not only because the monk could read several languages proficiently but also because he wanted to narrate the Mongolian past with content from Mongol and non-Mongol perspectives.
Zava Damdin's methods of producing Mongolian history, as shown in chapter 3, were tied to his own identity. He was a quintessential member of the polyglot, multiethnic Géluk monastic community (p. 91). A core tenet of the Géluk school was that the Qing state provided legitimacy and purpose for Buddhist faith and practice (p. 2). This symbiotic Qing-Géluk relationship, the so-called Two Systems (p. 93), informed not only Zava Damdin's conceptions of Mongolian history but also his memories and documentary records of the Qing.
Chapter 4 examines how Zava Damdin was uninterested in recording political milestones before and after the Qing-Republican transition, but he nevertheless tried to rationalize why the Qing regime failed to survive. He attempted to uphold what he considered to be the proper forms of Géluk faith and practice by traveling to holy sites for inspiration and establishing colleges to promulgate spiritual teachings.
King aptly suggests in chapter 5 that Zava Damdin was obsessed with understanding the decline of the Qing state not only because it presented him with a philosophical puzzle but also because of the identity crisis that incarnate lamas and ordinary monks experienced after they no longer enjoyed a special relationship with the Qing government.
Chapter 6 reveals the challenges that Zava Damdin faced from within his community in his quest to conserve what he could. He could not tolerate certain reforms of Buddhist social order and practice, such as the establishment of monastic colleges to educate both monks and laymen. His abhorrence of “modernizing” Buddhism emanated from his personal struggle to “clarify” and “order” what he viewed as chaos in the post-Qing world (p. 12).
Zava Damdin's biography shows that the emergence of “modernity” raised palpable concerns among not only ethnic Han intellectuals in the Qing heartland but also non-Han thinkers in politically marginal places. King's work also prompts further discussion about what the continuity of Qing institutions and thought into the first half of the twentieth century meant in nonpolitical settings. His case study furthermore demonstrates that deliberate preservation of the recent past, rather than dogmatic rejection of unfamiliar ideas and customs, was a key motivation for organizations like religious groups attempting to remain stable if not exactly the same. Through Zava Damdin's words and feelings, as conveyed poignantly throughout the book, we see that efforts to reject “modernity” were a valuable form of coping with loss, and just as significant to investigate as how leaders and citizens in the 1910s to 1930s embraced new forms of governance, social structure, and morality.
