Scripture in Inner Asia: A Symposium on Religious Books and Manuscripts

Inner Asia refers to the vast stretches of inland Eurasia between the Caucasus and the Hinggan Mountains, hemmed laterally by the Siberian Tundras and the Himalayan mountains. Mobility, cultural exchange, and campaigns of conquest, as well as their opposite — the quaint, isolated lives of nomads and Oasis farmers — have characterized its history. Accordingly, religious texts bear marks of both traversed distances and secluded growth.

At this Rare Book School event, we bring together textual scholars in the region with a shared focus on the religious texts and critical bibliography, engaging with not just the content of the books, but how we relate to them as physical objects.

Our esteemed speakers will share their research on Inner Asian books in the Islamic, Buddhist, and Christian religions, as well as the textual traditions in the Native Religions and the spiritual legacy of the Mongol Empire. The time and space covered collectively spans from the 12th c. Tibet, Mongol Korea in the 13th c., the 18th-20th c. Qing juggernaut, the heady days of the Japanese Empire, and contemporary Mongolia.

Info: "The Merit of Trans-Eurasian Textual Comparison: Buddhist Rulership, Mongol Political Practice, and Syncretism in Mongol-era Goryeo"
A critical reading of Goryeo Korea (918 – 1392) sources beside multilingual Eurasian texts offers important insight into how Mongolian political and cultural practices impacted realms that were absorbed by the empire but retained their core political elite. The official dynastic histories of the Goryeosa “History of Goryeo” and Goryeosa jeolyo “Essentials of the History of Goryeo” preserve important information about this process. However, because they were compiled and edited under the subsequent Joseon dynasty, they often preserve and deploy records of Mongol influence as evidence of moral corruption and decline that serve as a post-facto rationalization for the overthrow of Goryeo and legitimate establishment of Joseon. However, when read alongside other sources from across the Mongol Empire, such moments can be “demoralized” to reveal much about how M

Info: “Material texts of the Cult of Chinggis Khan: the inscribed musical instrument at Harvard Peabody Museum”
This paper provides an overview of how texts are used and transmitted in the Cult of Chinggis Khan, and how a particular object at the Harvard Peabody Museum – a wooden percussion instrument from the Cult with inscriptions on its leaves – must have been used for ritual performances. The Chinggis Khan shrines in Ordos, Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region in China have a very long history, and its keepers – the Darkhad – continue to make sacrifices to this day as affiliates of the museum complex where they are now kept; together, they are known as the Cult of Chinggis Khan in the scholarly literature. The Darkhad have preserved a corpus of liturgies for the rituals of offering sacrifices to Chinggis Khan, and this corpus is collectively named the Altan Bichig (“Golden Notes”). The most popular texts within this corpus include a song variously titled Yeke Daġu (“Great Song”) or Yeke Buy

Info: “Reading and digitizing Chaghatay manuscripts: Uyghur language, scripts, and textual heritage”
For over a thousand years, the Uyghur language developed at the cultural crossroads of Inner Asia, emerging from early Old Turkic as a major literary language of the Karluk Turkic lineage. This evolution is reflected in its diverse writing systems, from the Old Turkic and Old Uyghur scripts to the Perso-Arabic script adopted with the spread of Islam, followed by Latin and Cyrillic adaptations. The Uyghur literary tradition produced manuscripts for religious, administrative, and cultural purposes, creating a rich textual heritage across the region.
Within this framework, the presentation examines Chaghatay manuscripts (14th – 20th centuries) as both tangible objects and textual records. It highlights contemporary methods for manuscript study, including digitization, the creation of searchable databases, and the use of large language models to support transcription, metadata annotation, and co

Info: “Patronage regimes and the afterlives of Turki manuscripts in the Tarim oases”
This paper examines Turki manuscripts produced and circulated in Muslim societies of the Tarim oases from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries (“Turki” is the emic label; modern catalogues often classify the same materials as “Chaghatay” or “Eastern Turki”). It asks how shifting regimes of patronage and mediation shaped the making, movement, and survival of texts used for devotion, instruction, and learned transmission. Using colophons, ownership notes, acquisition documentation from the Jarring Collection, and copies of Yarkand waqf documents now held at Houghton Library, I argue that patronage is best approached here as overlapping practices of support and valuation that left distinct marks on manuscripts’ material forms and archival trajectories, and that structured what survives and how it is legible today. 
The paper traces three intersecting contexts. First, locally sponsored copying linked to r

Info: “The Manchu New Testament of 1835, a hybrid book”
The Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at Boston College owns parts of Musei ejen Isus Heristos-i tutabuha ice hese, the Manchu New Testament published in Saint Petersburg in 1835. The Institute only holds one volume, comprising 72 leaves and covering the Pauline Epistles from Ephesians to Hebrews. This thread-bound book at first glance looks much like a Manchu book published in the contemporary Qing empire, but it is in fact far from it in material terms. The Manchu New Testament was published with movable type, which was never used for Manchu books in the Qing empire. In my presentation, I’ll situate this book in the context of Manchu Christian literature and the history of Manchu publishing.

Info: “Moral authority within and without the court: The Manchu Taishang ganying pian in print”The Qing dynasty (1644–1911) presided over an ambitious multilingual publishing enterprise that produced texts across a wide range of genres and languages, including devotional works in Manchu. Drawing on holdings from the Harvard-Yenching Library, this paper surveys Manchu-language books that can broadly be categorized as religious — encompassing Buddhist, shamanic, and Christian texts — and considers the role of the Qing imperial court in shaping their production. While many such works were directly sponsored, translated, or printed under imperial auspices, others appear to have been less associated with official channels. Focusing on the Treatise of the Most High on Action and Retribution (Taishang ganying pian 太上感應篇), this paper examines a revealing case in which an early Qing court-authorized Manchu translation was reprinted in the nineteenth century. By tracing the afterlife of this text, the

Info: “Mongolian Bible publishing and its surrounding networks: past and present”

Info: “From transmission to transformation: a reassessment of early Tibetan Madhyamaka”
Prevailing historical accounts of early Tibetan Madhyamaka typically characterize the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a period of exegetical consolidation rather than philosophical innovation. These accounts emphasize the reception of Indian Prāsaṅgika sources and depict Tibetan thinkers primarily as transmitters or precursors to subsequent systematizers. The focus on Indian authority and lineage has obscured significant Tibetan interventions that reworked the epistemic and metaphysical foundations of Madhyamaka. This paper contends that such historiographical tendencies have overlooked the central philosophical contributions of early Tibetan thinkers such as Chapa Chökyi Sengé (1109 – 1169).
A close analysis of textual records from early Tibetan thinkers, including Drolungpa Lodrö Jungné (11th century), Gyamarpa Jangchup Drak (11th century), Patsap Nyima Drak (ca. 1055– ca?), Tangsakpa Yeshé Juné (11th

Info: “Nārokhecharī in the nineteenth-century Mongolian woodblock prints: materiality, iconography, and lineage”
My presentation examines a set of nineteenth-century Mongolian woodblock prints comprising 507 miniature paintings, which were commissioned for the tantric empowerments conferred in Mongolia by the Fourth Paṇchen Lama, Tenpai Nyima (1781 – 1854). These prints were based on the Rinjung Lhantab, the Paṇchen Lama’s compendium of sādhanas. The Rinjung Lhantab itself draws upon Rinjung Gyatsa, an earlier collection compiled by the Tibetan scholar Tāranātha (1575 – 1634). I focus on one of the prints depicting the tantric female deity Nārokhecharī. By paying close attention to the materiality of these prints, I examine the evolution of her iconography and trace its visual and textual connections to the thirteenth-century Indian painted Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom) manuscripts, as well as to the Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscript of the Guhyasamayasādhanamālā dated to the twelfth or

Info: “Canonizing the empire: Tibetan Buddhism and colonial knowledge production in Modern Japan”
This paper examines the collection, cataloguing, and study of the Tibetan Buddhist canon in modern Japan as colonial knowledge production. While Tibetan Buddhist canons have long been discussed in philological, doctrinal, and historical terms, the processes through which canons were reconstituted under modern colonial and imperial conditions – especially within the Japanese Empire – remain insufficiently examined. Focusing on the transmission of the Derge Canon from Tibet to Japan and the compilation of the Tōhoku Catalogue in the early twentieth century, this paper argues that the Tibetan canon was reconceived in Japan not simply as a Tibetan religious corpus, but as a transnational, pan-Asian canon linking Tibet, Mongolia and Manchuria to Japan's empire-building projects. Japanese scholars and clerics, driven by revived interest in esoteric and tantric traditions no longer accessible in China,

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