This important work addresses an aspect of the modern fate of Tibetan Buddhism, which is little known outside of specialist circles: its steadily growing religious impact on Han Chinese over the last twenty years. Yü gives a detailed and insightful account of Han pilgrims to the abodes of Nyingmapa reincarnated lamas (tulkus) in the Kham and Amdo regions of Tibet (now part of Sichuan and Qinghai provinces). In a sophisticated dialogue with sociological and anthropological as well as (in this reviewer's opinion, less convincingly) psychoanalytical theory, Yü analyzes Tibetan notions of charisma, the active role of spirit‐inhabited high‐altitude landscapes in Han and Tibetan “mindscapes,” and discourses partaking in the Tibetan revival since the late 1980s. Particularly salient are his conclusions concerning the ambivalent role of China's evolving market economy in creating new spaces for Tibetan Buddhism and bridging cultural gaps, but also commercializing it and subverting traditional structures of authority. Such “new spaces” can be architectural (new monasteries and academies built with donations from wealthy Chinese disciples), but also linguistic (a growing body of literature on Tibetan Buddhism available in Chinese), social (new social formations for the transmission of teachings and rituals), and virtual (a rapidly growing presence of Tibetan Buddhism on the Chinese web). Despite Internet censorship, the Chinese and Tibetan‐language virtual spheres link up with discursive communities and patterns of religious globalization outside of China, complicating the Han/Tibetan interactions at the focus of Yü's analysis and limiting the scope of government control.
