Art and Imagination: Mongolian Buddhist Texts and Rituals

In Mongolian Buddhism, texts, rituals, and images are deeply interwoven, yet they are typically studied separately. This book is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary exploration of Mongolian Buddhism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on previously unexamined writings and artworks to shed new light on the intricate interrelationships that define this tradition.

Vesna A. Wallace and Uranchimeg Tsultemin―a religious studies scholar and an art historian―combine their expertise to demonstrate how textual and visual imagery have built and maintained Mongolian Buddhist community and identity over time. They show that individual and collective acts of imagination are central to a vast range of contemplative, ritual, liturgical, and artistic practices, shaping religious and cultural experience and tradition. Wallace and Tsultemin track the transmission and development of Buddhist belief and practice through a vast range of textual and visual sources. This book also considers how Mongolian Buddhist scholars, contemplatives, and artists expressed their religious views and social concerns in response to the political events of their times. Highlighting little-known treasures of Mongolian culture and featuring extensive illustrations, Art and Imagination develops pioneering insights into Mongolian Buddhist texts, objects, and practices.

Vesna A. Wallace is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the editor of Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture, and Society (2015), among other books.

Uranchimeg Tsultemin is the Edgar and Dorothy Fehnel Chair in International Studies and an associate professor of art history at Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design. She is the author of A Monastery on the Move: Art and Politics in Later Buddhist Mongolia (2021), among other books.