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Podcast: New Books in Buddhist Studies
Episode: Matthew W. King, "In the Forest of the Blind: The Eurasian Journey of Faxian's Record of Buddhist Kingdoms" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Description: What would an âanti-field historyâ of Buddhist Studies look like? What does the social history of knowledge look like when it both includes and exceeds the West/Nonwest binary, the ethnonational subject, the secular humanist gaze, and the moral narratives and metaphysical content of modernism? Matt W. King explores these critical questions and models innovative approaches in his second monograph, In the Forest of the Blind (Columbia University Press 2022), which uses Faxianâs Record of Buddhist Kingdoms to expose âecologies of interpretationâ in both nineteenth-century European Orientalist scholarship and Inner Asian monastic cultures.Although Faxianâs The Record of Buddhis...