Voices from Larung Gar, edited by Holly Gayley, is a landmark collection of the translated public speeches, essays, and commentaries of the Tenth Panchen Lama, Jigme Phuntsok, Sodargye, Metrul Tenzen Gyatso, Tsultrim Lodro, Rigzin Chodron, and Sherab Zangpo—the founding figures and influential Dharma teachers of the Larung Gar Buddhist Academy in Serta, an area of eastern Tibet currently in western Sichuan Province, China. The book is the outcome of Gayley's co-organized panel “Voices from Larung Gar” presented at the 2017 American Academy of Religion meeting. It is the first publication featuring the English translations of the selected works of these Tibetan luminaries, who have played a remarkable role in revitalizing Tibetan Buddhism and culture and in spreading their lineage-based teachings beyond Tibet. Soon after David Germano's pioneering 1998 piece “Re-membering the Dismembered Body of Tibet,”Footnote ¹ the study of Tibetan Buddhist revitalizations in Larung Gar and other parts of eastern Tibet became a growing interdisciplinary field.Footnote ² However, none of the research-based monographs and edited volumes provide substantial translations of these key Tibetan figures’ writings and speeches. In this respect, Gayley's book is to be applauded as a groundbreaking contribution to modern Tibetan Buddhist studies, as well as an invaluable work for a nonacademic audience with strong interest in Tibetan Buddhism and its globalization.

The translations and the research essays are thematized coherently so as to lay out the historical and contemporary contexts of how Larung Gar Academy was conceived and how it has socially engaged the questions of Tibetan cultural revival, modernity/modernization, science, social ethics, and the moral considerability of nonhuman lives. Together, the essays shape the book as a text of “Buddhist modernism” in the Tibetan Plateau, as Gayley puts it (pp. xiii–xvi). Each of the featured translations is coupled with a well-researched introductory essay providing the reader with the relevant monastic, social, and political conditions under which Larung Gar has become the largest Buddhist institution on earth.

The first two chapters, introduced by Antonio Terrone and Holly Gayley, respectively, set the tone of the book. Terrone's translation of the Tenth Panchen Lama's Serta speech of 1985 gives the reader a clear road map of how this prominent Tibetan Buddhist figure, as a high government official, played a critical role in the formal establishment of Larung Gar Academy under the rule of the People's Republic of China. At the same time, Terrone argues, the Buddhist modernism of Larung Gar was influenced by the Chinese version of socially engaged Buddhism initiated in the 1930s by Dharma master Taixu and advocated by his disciple, the late Zhao Puchu, who was a lay Buddhist teacher and political ally of the Tenth Panchen Lama, as well as the former director of the Chinese Buddhist Association in the 1980s and 1990s.

In her introduction to the late Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok's Heart Advice to Tibetans for the Twenty-First Century, Gayley describes the Tibetan Buddhist modernism present in Larung Gar as an “alternative modernity” that synthesizes the ancient and the modern by preserving Tibetan religious and cultural heritages, embracing science and technology, utilizing global market capitalism, and critiquing contemporary intra-Tibetan antitraditional voices (pp. 24–26).

All of the chapters in the book offer a wealth of descriptions and discussions of Buddhist modernist expressions. While many of the chapters reveal familiar scenes in the ongoing studies of Buddhist modernism, the collection's attention to women's unequal position in Tibetan Buddhism, and to the existential challenge posed by Larung Gar advocacy of “life liberation” to the nomadic mode of life, is praiseworthy, as these chapters bring these underresearched issues to the foreground of modern Buddhist studies. Modernism in these contexts is not abstracted in the conceptual categories of science, technology, and market economy; rather, it is ontologically situated in everyday life, which is taken to be culturally, ecologically, economically, and politically conditioned.

Chapters 3, 9, and 10 are must-reads for those who are curious about women's positions in contemporary Tibetan Buddhism, particularly those of Tibetan nuns. Thanks to Gayley's outreach, Pema Jamyang, an ordained nun from Larung Gar, is the most noteworthy contributor. The translation work that she undertook appears in chapter 3, which makes up nearly one-third of the book. Her discussion of how digital media and web technology are utilized in Larung Gar shows that modernism in practice there involves instrumentalizing modern communication methods and venues for the globalization of Tibetan Buddhism as an ancient world religion. The chapter leaves us with the strong impression that the content of Tibetan Buddhism is thus never modern, but its worldwide spread is expedited by modern means.

The introductions to the translations offered by Pema ‘tsho and Sarah Jacoby in chapters 9 and 10, respectively, inform the reader of Larung Gar's openness to monastic gender equality. At the same time, their research shows the challenges, difficulties, and opportunities for nuns to make their voices heard (pp. xxi–xxii, 211–13, 219–24). The resilience of the nuns is yielding positive changes in Tibet.

While the practice of life liberation or setting animals in captivity free, narrated in chapter 8 by Catherine Hardie, works well for Han Chinese Tibetan Buddhist constituencies in urban China, it has triggered intra-Tibetan debates regarding its allegedly negative impact on the nomadic mode of subsistence. Geoffrey Barstow's introduction to chapter 5 offers an insightful understanding of the existential dilemma that life liberation advocacy presents to Tibetan nomads, whose livelihood and cultural heritage are centered on their unique human-animal (domesticated) relationship. That relationship requires that humans are responsible for the preservation of the domesticated animal species, while the animals offer a number of their compatriots as nourishment to their human counterparts. Barstow's introduction is short, but it opens up complex inquiries beyond this book for further studies of life liberation, not merely as a simple intra-Buddhist matter but as both an ecological and a political issue regarding Tibet's environmentally conditioned subsistence, the growing consumption of Tibetan livestock by non-Tibetans, and the ownership of slaughterhouses in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands.

In sum, this book is a page-turner that is highly recommended to both academics and the public. It could be read intertextually with the publications mentioned in this review for a fuller picture of Larung Gar's critical role in Tibetan Buddhist revitalizations and global outreach.