This dissertation is a history of religion on the “peripheries” of the modern Chinese state, the Japanese wartime empire, and the Tibetan Geluk Buddhist world. Using a transnational history approach, the project uses multilingual source materials collected from archives located in China, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States and challenges traditional disciplinary categories in postwar Religious Studies and Area Studies. Focusing on interwar Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, an understudied region within the postwar academic disciplines of Buddhist Studies and Areas Studies, my dissertation explores the history of transnational Buddhist networks in the region that both supported and challenged the nation-building and empire-building efforts of modern China and Japan (1912-1949). The specific temporal scope of this project is between the fall of China’s multi-ethnic Qing Empire in 1912, and the retreat of the Chinese Nationalists and their Republican government to Taiwan in 1949 after their defeat in the Chinese Civil War. This period also saw the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire in 1945 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China under the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. During this period, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, the continental regions of Northeast Asia and the “frontiers” of the Qing Empire, became the new “borderlands” that both the modern Chinese Nationalist Republican State and the expanding Japanese Empire competed to take control of. The two regions were administratively disciplined through the laws of Republican China (albeit often nominally) and effectively occupied by Japanese settler colonization as well as military and industrial annexation. Both regions also eventually saw the births of two modern states, the states of Mengjiang United Autonomous Government (1939-1945) and Manchukuo (1931-1945), although both are often referred to as “puppet states” of the Japanese Empire. At the same time, local Buddhists, both monastic and lay, in Inner Mongolia and Manchuria positioned themselves differently and beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the modern nation and empire. Using Buddhist networks connecting Manchuria in the East to Tibet in the West that have existed since the eighteenth century, Buddhists negotiated agency and mobility in this volatile interwar period marked with various crises of modernity. In this dissertation, I identify three types of Buddhist networks operating in early twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, namely, 1) a transregional Inner and East Asian monastic and intellectual network formed in the Qing period, 2) border-crossing Buddhist networks informed by old lineages in Inner Asia and new patronage in modern China that responded to Buddhist sacred geography, historiography, and apocalyptic time, and 3) transnational networks paved by Japanese Buddhists and Mongol monks that promoted an Esoteric Buddhist Pan-Asianism in the Japanese wartime empire. I argue that these Buddhist networks not only engaged in various overlapping nation-building and empire-building projects in the interwar geopolitical landscape of Northeast Asia, but they offered cross-border access to Buddhist and non-Buddhist individuals to exercise agency and mobility to extend and maintain landscapes of their own that challenged the spatial-temporal orders of the modern nation-states and empires.

This study examines The Seven Siddhi Texts, a short corpus of tantric Buddhist works that the Tibetan tradition identifies as the mahāmudrā transmission from the famed semi-mythical land of Oḍiyāna. Owing to the nature of the corpus itself, this study is best characterized as properly Indo-Tibetan in its scope. The Seven Siddhi Texts are first examined here as independent treatises that reflect the development of Vajrayāna Buddhism in its Indic cultural and historical contexts between the eighth and tenth centuries. They are then approached as a means for examining the formulation of Vajrayāna institutions and their attendant corpora in Nepal. Finally, they provide a case study in the phenomenon of practical canonicity in their employment in mahāmudrā polemical literature in Tibet from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.

Part I argues for the adoption of a demonological paradigm in the study of South Asian religions. Using data from The Seven Siddhi Texts in dialogue with the Āyurvedic discipline of demonology (bhūtavidyā), it highlights that Vajrayāna Buddhist traditions maintained a dual apotropaic-soteriological goal in their conception of the practice of yoga. Part II addresses the sociological implications of sect and sectarian identity in The Seven Siddhi Texts. It presents the phenomenon of dissimulative asceticism in Vajrayāna Buddhism as a potential social context for the highly Śaiva-Buddhist hybrid forms of ritual that emerged with the Buddhist yoginītantras. It then addresses the issue of inclusivist and exclusivist expressions of sectarian identity from the authors of The Seven Siddhi Texts. Part III discusses the formulation and transmission of The Seven Siddhi Texts as a corpus of mahāmudrā works in light of the broader phenomenon of practical canonicity in Buddhist traditions. It presents philological evidence that The Seven Siddhi Texts were part of a known mahāmudrā practical canon in Nepal prior to their transmission to Tibet. It then discusses historical data and Tibetan historiography on their transmission to Tibet beginning in the eleventh century. It concludes with a discussion of The Seven Siddhi Texts' incorporation into two Kagyü mahāmudrā practical canons in Tibet at the turn of the sixteenth century, and the role that The Seven Siddhi Texts played in a number of mahāmudrā polemical works composed by the subsequent generation of Kagyü authors.

This dissertation explores a series of nineteenth-century intra-sectarian polemical writings in the Tibetan Buddhist Geluk order between Buddhist scholars representing Khalkha’s Ih Hüree, the largest monastic institution of Outer Mongolia (today, the independent state of Mongolia), and Labrang Monastery in Amdo, eastern Tibet. China. In the nineteenth century, Labrang Monastery was a major Geluk monastery and a rising cosmopolitan center, located at the frontier of Tibetan, Mongolian, and Han Chinese cultural regions. This dissertation focuses not only on the doctrinal issues involved in the polemics over the interpretation of a particular text, but also on the sociopolitical motivations behind the dispute, its historical impact, and institutional ambitions underlying the exchange. The polemical disputes between leading scholars of these two important Geluk institutions in the Qing dominated Mongolian and Tibetan cultural regions highlight the historical development of Buddhist scholasticism and institutional competitions in the Qing border regions, isolated from the central government in Beijing and the religious center in Lhasa. Unlike many other polemical exchanges in Tibet, which mostly involved defeating or responding to the views of the “other” sects or schools, the polemic dispute examined in this dissertation occurred within a single school, the Geluk. Moreover, the most prominent polemicists of this exchange—Belmang Könchok Gyeltsen (1764–1853) from the Amdo-Tibetan region and his Mongolian counterpart Ngawang Khedrup (1779–1838)—were trained in the same monastic textbook (yig cha) tradition. I therefore call their exchange an “intra-sectarian” polemic. Plausible motivations behind this intra-sectarian dispute are explainable through a detailed study of the ambitions of Amdo-Tibetan and Mongolian monasteries to develop their respective institutions into influential cosmopolitan centers in the northern part of the Qing-Geluk world. Moreover, certain personal factors were also involved, since the polemicists also sought to defend the viewpoints of their respective teachers.