Books in the Encounters with Asia series

Drawing on political writings, religious texts, and other cultural artifacts, as well as comparative examples from other empires and frontiers, this book explores the construction of ethnicity during the Tang dynasty, which reigned for roughly three centuries from 618-907. It offers insights on East Asian and Inner Asian history.

This groundbreaking work challenges contemporary stereotypes by revealing how both Buddhist and Muslim religious traditions were shaped by a millennium of cross-cultural exchange along the Silk Road from Iran to China.

From antiquity to the nineteenth century, the royal hunt was a vital component of the political cultures of the Middle East, India, Central Asia, and China.

Building a Religious Empire presents an account of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism during its expansion and consolidation of power from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, examining the extraordinary effort Geluk lamas put into establishing institutional frameworks to standardize monastic life.

Modern Orientalism was born in the eighteenth century after a very long gestation period defined less by economic or political motives than by religious ideology. The Birth of Orientalism presents a completely new picture of the Western encounter with Asia, its underlying dynamics, and the discovery of Buddhism and Hinduism.

In Thomas T. Allsen's analysis, pearls illuminate Mongolian exceptionalism in steppe history, the interconnections between overland and seaborne trade, recurrent patterns in the employment of luxury goods in the political cultures of empires, and the consequences of such goods for local and regional economies.

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. However, 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.

In this collection of original essays, leading Asian studies scholars take a new look at the way the Chinese conceived of India in their literature, art, and religious thought in the premodern era.

This interdisciplinary study examines the reception of Ayurvedic knowledge and other Indian medical teachings in medieval China through analysis of Buddhist texts, including translations from Indian languages as well as Chinese compositions between the second and ninth centuries.

Although we may be aware that China and Japan were not nation-states until relatively recently, we still speak and write about Han dynasty China or Jomon Japan. And almost all historians refer to prehistoric China or Japan. Thus imposing the national story on the local, the authors contend, harms the historical record.

Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages exposes a number of long-hidden "foreign" elements in Chinese culture that represent the legacy of the Tuoba, a former nomadic group originally from central Asia.

The Silk Road served to connect the diverse geographies and populations of China, the Eurasian Steppe, Central Asia, India, Western Asia, and Europe. The majority of the Silk Road routes passed through the Eurasian Steppe. This book looks at the history of this crucial area before the formal establishment of Silk Road trade and diplomacy.

As more and more Asian medical practices cross into Western culture through the popularity of yoga and herbalism, and as Western medicine finds its way east in the form of plastic surgery, these systems of meaning become inextricably interrelated. The essays in this volume consider the larger implications of transmissions between cultures.

The Blacks of Premodern China describes the earliest Chinese encounters with peoples regarded as black. It focuses on the first exposure of Chinese to blacks hailing from East Africa, chiefly from today's Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, who arrived in China as slaves between the seventh and seventeenth centuries C.E.

From 1932 until the end of World War II, the Japanese established and maintained by bloody rule a puppet regime in the Chinese region of Manchuria. Yamamuro Shin'ichi's extraordinary book rereads this occupation under new light.

Based on the latest scholarship in cognitive science and linguistics, and the author's intimate experience with East Asian languages, The Writing on the Wall provides a balanced and thoughtful account of one of the most important problems facing modern Asia in the age of globalization.