The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the most famous Buddhist text in the West, having sold more than a million copies since it was first published in English in 1927. Acclaimed writer and scholar Donald Lopez writes, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead is not really Tibetan, it is not really a book, and it is not really about death. It is about rebirth: the rebirth of souls and the resurrection of texts….The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a remarkable case of what can happen when American Spiritualism goes abroad.”

The Tibetan Book of the Dead:
A Biography
By Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

In this compelling book, Lopez tells the strange story of how a relatively obscure and malleable collection of Buddhist texts of uncertain origin came to be so revered–and so misunderstood–in the West.

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan. His many books include The Story of Buddhism (HarperOne) and Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West. He has also edited a number of books by the Dalai Lama.

We invite you to read the introduction online at:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9395.pdf

Also now available in the Lives of Great Religious Books series:

Augustine’s Confessions:
A Biography
By Garry Wills

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison:
A Biography
By Martin E. Marty

“No one in China or Japan applied yellowish pigment to the skin…and no one in the Far East referred to himself as yellow until late in the nineteenth century, when Western racial paradigms, along with many other aspects of modern Western science, were being imported into Chinese and Japanese contexts.”-Michael Keevak, from the introduction of Becoming Yellow

Becoming Yellow:
A Short History of Racial Thinking
By Michael Keevak

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become “yellow” in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.

Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University. His books include Sexual Shakespeare, The Pretended Asian, and The Story of a Stele.

We invite you to read the introduction online:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9451.pdf

FACT: Chinese workers in the third century b.c. created seven thousand life-sized terracotta soldiers to guard the tomb of the First Emperor. In the eleventh century a.d., Chinese builders constructed a pagoda from as many as thirty thousand separately carved wooden pieces. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China exported more than a hundred million pieces of porcelain to the West. As these examples show, the Chinese throughout history have produced works of art in astonishing quantities–and have done so without sacrificing quality, affordability, or speed of manufacture.

Ten Thousand Things:
Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art
By Lothar Ledderose

Lothar Ledderose takes us on a remarkable tour of Chinese art and culture to explain how artists used complex systems of mass production to assemble extraordinary objects from standardized parts or modules. As he reveals, these systems have deep roots in Chinese thought–in the idea that the universe consists of ten thousand categories of things, for example–and reflect characteristically Chinese modes of social organization.

Ledderose begins with the modular system par excellence: Chinese script, an ancient system of fifty thousand characters produced from a repertoire of only about two hundred components. He shows how Chinese artists used related modular systems to create ritual bronzes, to produce the First Emperor’s terracotta army, and to develop the world’s first printing systems. He explores the dazzling variety of lacquerware and porcelain that the West found so seductive, and examines how works as diverse as imperial palaces and paintings of hell relied on elegant variation of standardized components. Ledderose explains that Chinese artists, unlike their Western counterparts, did not seek to reproduce individual objects of nature faithfully, but sought instead to mimic nature’s ability to produce limitless numbers of objects. He shows as well how modular patterns of thought run through Chinese ideas about personal freedom, China’s culture of bureaucracy, Chinese religion, and even the organization of Chinese restaurants. Originally presented as a series of Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Ten Thousand Things combines keen aesthetic and cultural insights with a rich variety of illustrations to make a profound statement about Chinese art and society.

We invite you to check out more Asian Studies titles at:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/subjects/ar.html

FACT: In 1921 a traveling religious man appeared in eastern British Bengal. Soon residents began to identify this half-naked and ash-smeared sannyasi as none other than the Second Kumar of Bhawal–a man believed to have died twelve years earlier, at the age of twenty-six. So began one of the most extraordinary legal cases in Indian history.

The case would rivet popular attention for several decades as it unwound in courts from Dhaka and Calcutta to London.

A Princely Impostor? tells an incredible story replete with courtroom drama, sexual debauchery, family intrigue, and squandered wealth. With a novelist’s eye for interesting detail, Partha Chatterjee sifts through evidence found in official archives, popular songs, and backstreet Bangladeshi bookshops. He evaluates the case of the man claiming, with the support of legions of tenants and relatives, to be the long-lost Kumar. And he considers the position of the sannyasi’s detractors, including the colonial government and the Kumar’s young widow, who resolutely refused to meet the man she denounced as an impostor.

Along the way, Chatterjee introduces us to a fascinating range of human character, gleans insights into the nature of human identity, and examines the relation between scientific evidence, legal truth, and cultural practice. The story he tells unfolds alongside decades of Indian history. Its plot is shaped by changing gender and class relations and punctuated by critical historical events, including the onset of World War II, the Bengal famine of 1943, and the Great Calcutta Killings. And by identifying the earliest erosion of colonialism and the growth of nationalist thinking within the organs of colonial power, Chatterjee also gives us a secret history of Indian nationalism.

A Princely Impostor?
The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal
By Partha Chatterjee

For more books in our online sale catalog, please visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/booksale/

If you guessed General Petraeus, you are correct! See this great short article from Reuters for more.

After travels all over the world, Tom Barfield is finally venturing to the state of New Jersey to give a lecture at Stockton College. Details below — hope you can make it.

“Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History”
Thomas Barfield

Date: Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Time: 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Location: Townsend Residential Life Center, Stockton College, Pomona, NJ

Thomas Barfield, author of Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History will give a lecture at The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University on September 16th. Details below.

Just ran across a great review of Thomas Barfield’s Afghanistan in BusinessWorld (India).

Think about Afghanistan, and the first image that comes to mind is that of a failed, balkanised nation. And the Afghans, a people caught in constant tribal wars or with an invading power. And then comes a book that overturns all of this, making you think again.

Sounds like good reading to me. Check out the introduction to the book here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9144.pdf

We couldn’t have said it better. Understanding the real history of Afghanistan is imperative to make sensible decisions about the war. Yet fake history abounds. Myths and stereotypes, skewed historical facts, and manipulated versions of historical events get in the way of plotting the best way forward. The time has come to truly educate ourselves on the history of Afghanistan. This is our best bet at securing a good outcome for the war. And nowhere will you find a more comprehensive and authoritative history of that troubled country than in Thomas Barfield’s Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History.

Read Christian’s article here for a quick dose of real history, but make sure you check out Tom’s book for the complete story.

Here’s a quick summary of the key points in the article that are drawn from the book:

Fake History: Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires
Real History: This reputation isn’t borne out by the country’s long history.

“For most of its history Afghanistan has actually been the cradle of empires, not their grave,” writes Barfield.

Fake History: Afghanistan repelled powerful invading forces from England and the Soviet Union.
Real History: The history of these wars is much more nuanced.

Yes, it is true that the Afghans massacred all but 1 of 16,000 British troops in its initial invasion in the eighteenth century, but as Caryl notes, “Everyone tends to forget what happened after the rout of the British: In 1842 they invaded again, defeating every Afghan army sent out against them.”

As for the Soviet defeat, Caryl writes, “even the most skeptical historians concede that, around 1984 or so, the Soviets were actually getting the better of the mujahideen.” It was U.S. intervention and weapons that eventually allowed the Afghans to gain the upper hand.

Continues after the jump.

When I arrived in Dili, capital of the new nation of Timor Leste (East Timor), in early 2006, much of the town still looked like a war had just ended…That Timor had not yet recovered was hardly surprising. Seven years earlier, in 1999, after the former Portuguese colony occupied by Indonesia since 1975 had voted in a referendum for its independence, pro-Indonesia militias razed the tiny half island. The campaign of slaughter would not have been out of place in the Rwandan genocide or the brutal West African wars…Thousands died, 70 percent of Timor’s infrastructure was destroyed, and nearly half the population of East Timor fled their homes and wound up as refugees.

–Joshua Kurlantzick, reviewing “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die” by Geoffrey Robinson at The Washington Monthly.

With the American daily news having transformed itself into an incessant trumpeting of economic Armageddon, it might seem the height of escapism, not to mention irrelevance, to contemplate a vanished Japanese mathematical tradition known as temple geometry.  Escapism it surely is; irrelevant, maybe.

Daniel A. Bell discussed China’s changing political landscape this past October at the United Nations University.   Communism has lost its capacity to inspire the Chinese. But what is replacing it? And what should replace it? Clearly, there is a need for a new moral foundation for political rule in China, as well as a new philosophy that can provide moral guidance in everyday life.  You can watch the interview here.

Daniel’s excellent position as one of the few Western professors at a major Chinese university (Tsinghua University in Beijing) gives us a unique, unbiased look at Chinese society.