What Time Is Right View? Monks, Revolutionaries, and Straw Men at the End of History

Abstract

In the ruins of the Qing Empire, monastic writers of the previously favored Géluk tradition produced all manner of literary genres and deployed all manner of interpretative operations to set the postimperial ruins into time and place. One particular and quite peculiar strategy among Géluk scholastics in Yeke-yin Küriy-e, presented and examined in this article, was to deploy an extensive polemical attack against the Nyingma tradition. The Nyingma tradition, however, was nowhere present in the contested field of revolutionary nationalism and socialism that increasingly threatened the social and political status of the Buddhist monastery. Nor was it obvious in any way how Nyingma and Bön philosophical views and ethical standards had any bearing on the future of Géluk institutionalism in Asia’s first experiment in state socialism. Turning to resources from the social theory of knowledge and historical anthropology, this article asks what historical arguments were being made by polemicists without opponents, and by this, what was the intersection between “right view” and writing in late and postimperial scholastic cultures from the Tibeto-Mongolian frontier?