This is a brilliant book, one that will appeal to specialists and nonspecialists alike. In graceful prose, and with both erudition and sensitivity, Nicole Willock reveals a world most of us could never have seen. The title, Lineages of the Literary, announces her work as a textual study. Willock delights in the subtleties of the texts, and she conveys some of that delight to those of us who do not read Tibetan. But her own wordplay begins with the subtitle. What can it mean to describe the three men whose portraits grace the cover as “Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China?” How did they fare as Buddhists? If they were of Socialist China, were they socialist? Willock resolutely refuses to assign them to the categories of “resisters” or “collaborators,” focusing instead on the ways they worked within state institutions to promote scholarship and maintain religious traditions. The Three Polymaths were both Buddhist adepts and participants in, though at times also targets of, state formation in the People’s Republic of China. By combining literary analysis, fieldwork, Buddhology, political history, and biography, Willock produces an exceptionally rich portrait of individuals facing difficult choices in times of political turmoil. Like many other Tibetan monastics, all three figures suffered during the Cultural Revolution, and two spent years in prison. Rehabilitated in the 1980s, the three gained positions as professors and returned to writing. In the classroom they were constrained to appear in secular guise; beyond university walls they returned to religious teaching and worked to restore temples. In recognition of their great learning and heroic efforts, Tibetans began to refer to them as the Three Polymaths, after three tenth-century monks who had earned the epithet for saving Tibetan Buddhism from “dark times” during the reign of Langdarma. Through careful readings of the scholars’ voluminous writings Willock reveals how they mastered Tibetan religious and literary traditions, protected them in very difficult circumstances, and helped pass them on to new generations. But instead of a simple story of damage and “revival,” she offers one of transformation. One of the polymaths, subjected to a public struggle session during the Cultural Revolution, commemorated the event not in a chronicle of suffering but instead in a “song of spiritual realization.” Willock has crafted an account of Tibetan Buddhism in China since 1949 that is at once scholarly and optimistic. It is likely to shape the field of Tibetan studies for years to come. Tibetan Buddhist polymaths Nicole Willock Lineages of the Literary Tibetan Buddhism in Socialist China Cultural Revolution and Tibetan monastics Buddhist scholars in China Tibetan studies and literary analysis Buddhism and state politics in China Religious transformation during Cultural Revolution Tibetan Buddhism revival post-Cultural Revolution Biography of Tibetan scholars Tibetan literary and religious traditions Buddhism and socialism in China Tibetan monasticism in modern China Buddhist scholarship under Chinese socialism Tibetan Buddhism and political history Modern Tibetan Studies Modern Tibetan Studies Podcast Nicole Willock East Asian Studies Podcast East Asian Studies Tibetan Literature