Johan Elverskog's Books

A History of Uyghur Buddhism

By: Johan Elverskog

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Today, most Uyghurs are Muslims. For centuries, however, Uyghurs were Buddhists. By around 1000 CE, they, like many of their neighbors, had decisively turned toward the Dharma, and a golden age of Uyghur Buddhism flourished under the Mongol empire. Dwelling along the Silk Road in what is now northwestern China, they stood at the center of Buddhist Eurasia, linking far-flung regions and traditions. But as Muslim power grew, Uyghur Buddhists converted to Islam, rewriting their past and erasing their Buddhist history. This book presents the first comprehensive history of Buddhism among the Uyghurs from the ninth to the seventeenth century. Johan Elverskog traces how the Uyghurs forged their distinctive tradition, considering a variety of social, political, cultural, and religious contexts. He argues that the religious history of the Uyghurs challenges conventional narratives of the meeting of Buddhism and Islam, showing that conversion took place gradually and was driven by factors such as geopolitics, climate change, and technological innovation. Elverskog also provides a nuanced understanding of lived Buddhism, focusing on ritual practices and materiality as well as the religion’s entanglements with economics, politics, and violence. A groundbreaking history of Uyghur Buddhism, this book makes a compelling case for the importance of the Uyghurs in shaping the course of both Buddhist and Asian history.

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212

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Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231560699

ISBN 13

9780231560696

Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

By: Johan Elverskog

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Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

By: Johan Elverskog

In the contemporary world the meeting of Buddhism and Islam is most often imagined as one of violent confrontation. Indeed, the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 seemed not only to reenact the infamous Muslim destruction of Nalanda monastery in the thirteenth century but also to reaffirm the stereotypes of Buddhism as a peaceful, rational philosophy and Islam as an inherently violent and irrational religion. But if Buddhist-Muslim history was simply repeated instances of Muslim militants attacking representations of the Buddha, how had the Bamiyan Buddha statues survived thirteen hundred years of Muslim rule? Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road demonstrates that the history of Buddhist-Muslim interaction is much richer and more complex than many assume. This groundbreaking book covers Inner Asia from the eighth century through the Mongol empire and to the end of the Qing dynasty in the late nineteenth century. By exploring the meetings between Buddhists and Muslims along the Silk Road from Iran to China over more than a millennium, Johan Elverskog reveals that this long encounter was actually one of profound cross-cultural exchange in which two religious traditions were not only enriched but transformed in many ways.

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353

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University of Pennsylvania Press

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ISBN 10

0812205316

ISBN 13

9780812205312

Our Great Qing

The Mongols, Buddhism, and the State in Late Imperial China

By: Johan Elverskog

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Our Great Qing

The Mongols, Buddhism, and the State in Late Imperial China

By: Johan Elverskog

In a sweeping overview of four centuries of Mongolian history that draws on previously untapped sources, Johan Elverskog opens up totally new perspectives on some of the most urgent questions historians have recently raised about the role of Buddhism in the constitution of the Qing empire. Theoretically informed and strongly comparative in approach, Elverskog’s work tells a fascinating and important story that will interest all scholars working at the intersection of religion and politics." —Mark Elliott, Harvard University "Johan Elverskog has rewritten the political and intellectual history of Mongolia from the bottom up, telling a convincing story that clarifies for the first time the revolutions which Mongolian concepts of community, rule, and religion underwent from 1500 to 1900. His account of Qing rule in Mongolia doesn’t just tell us what images the Qing emperors wished to project, but also what images the Mongols accepted themselves, and how these changed over the centuries. In the scope of time it covers, the originality of the views advanced, and the accuracy of the scholarship upon which it is based, Our Great Qing seems destined to mark a watershed in Mongolian studies. It will be essential reading for specialists in Mongolian studies and will make an important contribution and riposte to the ‘new Qing history’ now changing the face of late imperial Chinese history. Specialists in Tibetan Buddhism and Buddhism’s interaction with the political realm will also find in this work challenging and thought-provoking." —ChristopherAtwood, Indiana University Although it is generally believed that the Manchus controlled the Mongols through their patronage of Tibetan Buddhism, scant attention has been paid to the Mongol view of the Qing imperial project. In contrast to other accounts of Manchu rule, Our Great Qing focuses not only on what images the metropole wished to project into Mongolia, but also on what images the Mongols acknowledged themselves. Rather than accepting the Manchu’s use of Buddhism, Johan Elverskog begins by questioning the static, unhistorical, and hegemonic view of political life implicit in the Buddhist explanation. By stressing instead the fluidity of identity and Buddhist practice as processes continually developing in relation to state formations, this work explores how Qing policies were understood by Mongols and how they came to see themselves as Qing subjects. In his investigation of Mongol society on the eve of the Manchu conquest, Elverskog reveals the distinctive political theory of decentralization that fostered the civil war among the Mongols. He explains how it was that the Manchu Great Enterprise was not to win over "Mongolia" but was instead to create a unified Mongol community of which the disparate preexisting communities would merely be component parts. A key element fostering this change was the Qing court’s promotion of Gelukpa orthodoxy, which not only transformed Mongol historical narratives and rituals but also displaced the earlier vernacular Mongolian Buddhism. Finally, Elverskog demonstrates how this eighteenth-century conception of a Mongol community, ruled by an aristocracy and nourished by a Buddhist emperor, gave way to a pan-Qing solidarity of all Buddhist peoples against Muslims and Christians and to local identities that united for the first time aristocrats with commoners in a new Mongol Buddhist identity on the eve of the twentieth century.

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265

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University of Hawaii Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

082486381X

ISBN 13

9780824863814

A History of Uyghur Buddhism

By: Johan Elverskog

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A History of Uyghur Buddhism

By: Johan Elverskog

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212

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Columbia University Press

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ISBN 10

0231560699

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9780231560696

The Buddha's Footprint

An Environmental History of Asia

By: Johan Elverskog

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The Buddha's Footprint

An Environmental History of Asia

By: Johan Elverskog

A corrective to the contemporary idea that Buddhism has always been an environmentally friendly religion In the current popular imagination, Buddhism is often understood to be a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment. The Dharma, the name given to Buddhist teachings by Buddhists, states that all things are interconnected. Therefore, Buddhists are perceived as extending compassion beyond people and animals to include plants and the earth itself out of a concern for the total living environment. In The Buddha's Footprint, Johan Elverskog contends that only by jettisoning this contemporary image of Buddhism as a purely ascetic and apolitical tradition of contemplation can we see the true nature of the Dharma. According to Elverskog, Buddhism is, in fact, an expansive religious and political system premised on generating wealth through the exploitation of natural resources. Elverskog surveys the expansion of Buddhism across Asia in the period between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, when Buddhist institutions were built from Iran and Azerbaijan in the west, to Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north, Japan in the east, and Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the south. He examines the prosperity theology at the heart of the Dharma that declared riches to be a sign of good karma and the means by which spritiual status could be elevated through donations bequeathed to Buddhist institutions. He demonstrates how this scriptural tradition propelled Buddhists to seek wealth and power across Asia and to exploit both the people and the environment. Elverskog shows the ways in which Buddhist expansion not only entailed the displacement of local gods and myths with those of the Dharma—as was the case with Christianity and Islam—but also involved fundamentally transforming earlier social and political structures and networks of economic exchange. The Buddha's Footprint argues that the institutionalization of the Dharma was intimately connected to agricultural expansion, resource extraction, deforestation, urbanization, and the monumentalization of Buddhism itself.

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192

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812296702

ISBN 13

9780812296709

The Jewel Translucent Sūtra

Altan Khan and the Mongols in the Sixteenth Century

By: Johan Elverskog

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The Jewel Translucent Sūtra

Altan Khan and the Mongols in the Sixteenth Century

By: Johan Elverskog

The first full-fledged critical edition and historical study of the Erdeni Tunumal Sudur, the Mongolian history of Altan Khan and his descendants, offering a full-range English-written historical and literary evaluation of this unique and fairly reliable, but long neglected discovery in Mongolian studies. With transcription, word index and English translation, as well as extensive commentary on the historical events of Altan Khan’s reign, especially the 1550 attack on Beijing, the 1571 peace accord with the Ming, and the 1578 meeting with the Dalai Lama and the subsequent Buddhist conversion. In particular, the author shows how Altan Khan’s reformulation of the boundaries of Dayan Khan’s Mongol nation and state catalyzed the political fragmentation of the Mongols with dire consequences in relation to the rising Manchu state. Vital for a better understanding of Mongol history during the late Ming.

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Page Count

400

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

9004420347

ISBN 13

9789004420342

Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

By: Johan Elverskog

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Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

By: Johan Elverskog

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353

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University of Pennsylvania Press

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ISBN 10

0812205316

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9780812205312

Our Great Qing

The Mongols, Buddhism, and the State in Late Imperial China

By: Johan Elverskog

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Our Great Qing

The Mongols, Buddhism, and the State in Late Imperial China

By: Johan Elverskog

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

265

Publisher

University of Hawaii Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

082486381X

ISBN 13

9780824863814

The Buddha's Footprint

An Environmental History of Asia

By: Johan Elverskog

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The Buddha's Footprint

An Environmental History of Asia

By: Johan Elverskog

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

192

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812296702

ISBN 13

9780812296709

Book's by Johan Elverskog

A History of Uyghur Buddhism

A History of Uyghur Buddhism

Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

Our Great Qing

Our Great Qing

A History of Uyghur Buddhism

A History of Uyghur Buddhism

The Buddha's Footprint

The Buddha's Footprint

The Jewel Translucent Sūtra

The Jewel Translucent Sūtra

Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road

Our Great Qing

Our Great Qing

The Buddha's Footprint

The Buddha's Footprint

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