About

Sangseraima Ujeed is an Assistant Professor of Tibetan Buddhism Studies at the University of Michigan's Department of Studying Religion. She earned her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2018. Her primary research interests focus on the transnational, transregional, and cross-cultural aspects of Tibetan Buddhism during the Early modern period, with particular emphasis on lineage, reincarnation, identity formation, knowledge transmission, and travel. Her work aims to explore and elucidate the hybridity of religion and identity within the wider Tibetan Buddhist world, which she describes as highly cosmopolitan, multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual. As a textual scholar, Ujeed employs methodologies rooted in discourses of Decolonialism, Transnationalism, Translation theory, Narratology, Oral Literature, and Literary theory. Her research materials include Tibetan Buddhist literature and Qing period archival materials in Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, and Chinese. Her current projects include a monograph based on her doctoral thesis titled 'Mirror of Lives: Tibetan Buddhism, Lineage, and Identity in the Early Modern Period,' which examines Buddhist literary works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and aims to shed light on Mongolian monastic scholars and their contributions to the Tibetan Buddhist world. Additionally, she is developing a collaborative digital humanities project to visualize transmission lineages of tantras, teachings, practices, and interconnected biographical data regarding reincarnation and monastic networks. Ujeed's teaching interests are rooted in the history, practices, doctrine, and culture of Tibetan Buddhism. She teaches a range of courses from introductory surveys to specialized seminars on topics such as Tibetan Buddhist life stories, practice and ritual, medicine and healing, indigenous religions of the Himalayas and Inner Asia, and oral histories. Her teaching approach integrates traditional European philological methods, Oxbridge tutorial practices, the UK model, and North American theory-driven frameworks.

Research topics

• Art
• Religious studies
• History
• Philosophy
• Ancient history
• Theology
• Literature
• Psychology
• Archaeology
• Geography
• Environmental ethics
• Art history

Selected publications

• The Refuge of the Enemy of the Dharma: Qalqa Čogtu Qongtaiji’s Čagan Baiśing Stele Inscription བསན་དགའ་སབས་གནས། རལ་པ་ཆག་ཐའ་ ཧང་ཐ་ཅའ་ཕ་བང་དཀར་པའ་ར་བརས་ཡ་ག

  Journal of Tibetan Literature · 2025-07-03

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article presents the translation and analysis of an object that has preserved the voice of one such individual. Namely, the stele of Čagan Baiśing, “The White Palace” of the Qalqa Mongolian prince Čogtu Qongtaiji (1581–1637). This stele, which was inscribed in 1617, is one of the earliest examples of Tibetan and Mongolian language bilingual steles from the post-Yuan pre-Qing period. By translating and contextualizing the contents of the stele's two facades, this article makes an enquiry into the usage of Tibetan and Mongolian by examining and comparing the contents of both sides of the stele. By analyzing the contents of the stele's facades, I will also demonstrate that the story of Čogtu Qongtaiji was more complex than we have been led to believe by the extent authoritative Tibetan and Mongolian language historiographical sources that have passed down to us. རྩོམ་ཡིག་འདི་ནི་སོག་པོའི་ཨོ་ལན་བྷ་ཐར་གྱི་བྱང་ཕྱོགས་མེ་ལི་བརྒྱ་དང་བཞི་བཅུའི་མཚམས་སུ་ཡོད་པའི་སོག་པོའི་རྒྱལ་པོ་རྒྱལ་སྲས་ཆོག་ཐོའུ་ ཧོང་ཐེ་ཅིའི་(༡༥༨༡_༡༦༣༧)ཕོ་བྲང་དཀར་པོ་རུ་ཡོད་པའི་བོད་དང་སོག་པོའི་སྐད་གཉིས་ཤན་སྦྱར་གྱི་རྡོ་བརྐོས་ཡི་གེ་ལ་སྐད་ཡིག་སྣ་མང་གིས་དཔྱད་པ་བགྱིས་པ་ཞིག་གོ།

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• Recovering Mongolian Agency from the Shadow of the Qing: Inner Asian Polymaths and the Remaking of Faxian's Journey

  Religious Studies Review · 2023-09-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  IN THE FOREST OF THE BLIND: THE EURASIAN JOURNEY OF FAXIAN'S RECORD OF BUDDHIST KINGDOMSBy Matthew W. King. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. Pp. 312. Paperback, $40.00; Hardcover, $160.00; E-Book, $39.99. This review of King's new book examines the themes of nationalism, centers, and frontiers presented in this book in the context of Buddhist identity and translation alongside questions of continuity and agency. This review focuses on Chapters 3 and 5 and the appendix containing the annotated translation of the Tibetan version of Faxian's Travels. These chapters of King's study explore the evolution of Buddhist ideas and understanding of the world from the viewpoint of the Inner Asian polymaths who were the translators of the Mongolian and Tibetan versions of Faxian's Travels. In preparation for the 2022 AAR panel discussion of the present book under review, I posed the following questions: (1) To what extent can the twentieth-century Mongolian and Tibetan language translations of Faxian's travels be read as continuity of and/or breaking away from the pre-Qing, early-Qing, and high-Qing period Buddhist historiography authored by Mongolians? (2) How would these translations read through the lens of “Mongolian agency” instead of “Qing inflected” or “Qing synthetic” perspectives? To the first question, it is necessary to point out that despite the Mongolian and Tibetan language used to translate Faxian's Travels, the translators were both ethnic Mongolians, one a Buryat Mongol and the other a Khalkha Mongol. As King points out, the echo of Mongolian nationalism sounds in the language choice found in both translations, and these have continued to serve as the sources for Mongolian Nationalists today in their search for historical “Mongolness.” King draws the reader's attention to the linguistic choices made by the two Mongolian translators Banzarov (1822–1855) and Lubsangdamdin (1867–1937) in rendering the foreign into local and familiar cosmologies and geographies as well as the traditional Geluk Buddhist literary genres they translated the works into. In this sense, their works represent both their attempt at the continuity of their long-standing heritage of Geluk Buddhist scholastic traditions as well as their critique of the new bodies of knowledge that flooded in when the dam that held modernity at bay finally broke. To the second, the book takes us on a journey through the process of Faxian's Travels being translated from Chinese into French, French into Mongolian, and finally from Mongolian into Tibetan, a process that maps a multidimensional network of translation and transmission which challenges the traditional model of the diffusion of knowledge in “Buddhist Asia.” Chapters 3 and 5 trace the multilinear and multidirectional process of translations, dictionary compilations, and transmission of texts by traditional Geluk scholars from regions that King calls the “Qing Frontier” or “Sino-Tibeto-Mongolian Frontier.” Although the term “frontier,” itself suggestive of centers is problematic, for lack of a better term, it remains to encompass the regions into which Buddhist scholars of Inner Asian heritages are slotted into. For these scholars, the circulation of Faxian's Travels presented “the conditions of possibility for making history from the past are not only mutable but also mobile. They are nonlinear, circulatory, and centerless” (75). In short, King's work presents an innovative approach to look within and beyond academic fields such as Buddhist Studies and History. The circulation and afterlife of the Travels of Faxian through translation is approached following the Deleuze and Guattarian rhizomatic model of inquiry as “circuitous and centerless” (14). It is an important work for many reasons, but among them, I would like to highlight how this book unearths and contextualizes the scholarly interventions made by lesser-known Inner Asian polymaths of the twentieth century by juxtaposing their contributions within and against the backdrop of what is imagined as “Buddhist Asia” in the wider global scholarly context. In The Forest of the Blind, figures such as Banzarov and Lubsangdamdin emerge not as the objects of inquiry but as innovators of literary traditions, agents of discursive thought, and producers of history.

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• Acknowledgments

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2023

  • Geography

  Stories about Xuanzang, that most famous of pilgrims, have traveled far and wide.It seems appropriate, then, that this book, a story about stories, has taken shape on the road.It began in Taiwan,

  DOI

• The namthar in Khalkha Dzaya Paṇḍita Lobsang Trinle (1642-1715)'s Clear Mirror

  Routledge eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire. By Matthew W. KingEnlightenment and the Gasping City: Mongolian Buddhism at a Time of Environmental Disarray. By Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko

  Journal of the American Academy of Religion · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Ancient history
  • History
  • Art

  Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire. By Matthew W. KingEnlightenment and the Gasping City: Mongolian Buddhism at a Time of Environmental Disarray. By Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko Ocean of Milk, Ocean of Blood: A Mongolian Monk in the Ruins of the Qing Empire. By Matthew W. King. Columbia University Press, 2019. 304 pages. $65.00 (hardcover); $64.99 (e-book).Enlightenment and the Gasping City: Mongolian Buddhism at a Time of Environmental Disarray. By Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko. Cornell University Press, 2019. 252 pages. $115.00 (hardcover); $26.95 (paperback); $12.99 (e-book). Sangseraima Ujeed Sangseraima Ujeed University of Michigan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 89, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 756–760, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab038 Published: 31 May 2021

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• The Autobiography of the First Khalkha Zaya Paṇḍita Lobsang Trinley

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Literature

  Abstract The First Zaya Paṇḍita Lobsang Trinley (Tib. Blo bzang ’phrin las, Mong. Luvsanphrinle, 1642–1715) was and remains known as one of the most prolific Mongolian Buddhist masters in history. Despite his desire to stay in Tibet to continue his study of Buddhism, he was sent back to Mongolia to spread the Dharma among the Mongols by the Fifth Dalai Lama, which sets his experience aside from many of his peers. His autobiography translated and presented here is the first known Tibetan language biographical work authored by a Mongolian and went on to have a huge influence on Buddhist biographical writing in Mongolian lands. Although following what the author saw to be the idealized model of Tibetan Buddhist biographical writing, this work also weaves in stylistically Mongolian characteristics. The author’s own experience contained within, as well as the way in which this life story is presented, created a piece of writing that is able to personify the amalgamated Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhist world of the seventeenth century.

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• Decolonial/Anti-Racist interventions in Tibetan/Buddhist Studies – AAR Roundtable, Colorado 2019

  Waxing Moon · 2020-10-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  This roundtable session held at the 2019 meeting of the American Association of Religious Studies explores how decolonial analytics and praxis can be applied productively in Tibetan/Buddhist Studies. As scholars, it is critical for us to consider how the racialized perceptions of non-Western religious traditions and peoples are tethered to their continued structural dispossession. A decolonizing intervention here means making the material hierarchies among peoples and their knowledge systems legible but also interrogating the politics of knowledge production in light of these overlapping colonial histories. Our discussion explicitly explores how our choices as scholars have effects in the real world, including how we represent Tibet and the Himalayas/Buddhism in our publications and teaching, the current inequalities of access to academic capital for Tibetan and nonwhite students/scholars, etc. We draw from Indigenous Studies approaches that center Indigenous knowledges and voices, given the history of their marginalization and ask how can we better center Tibetan/Himalayan voices/epistemologies in the study of Tibetan Buddhism.

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• The <i>namthar</i> in Khalkha Dzaya Paṇḍita Lobsang Trinle (1642–1715)'s <i>Clear Mirror</i>

  Life Writing · 2019-05-30

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Clear Mirror: A Records of Teachings received (Thob yig gsal ba’i me long) was written by Dzaya Paṇḍita Lobsang Trinle (Dza ya Paṇḍita Blo bzang ’phrin las, 1642–1715) between 1698 and 1702. It is a unique work with many defining characteristics, the foremost of these being the huge number of namthar (rnam thar, ‘life stories’) which form the structural backbone of the eleven chapters of the topyik. Not only are these namthar capable of standing alone as biographies of the respective Buddhist masters, they are also reminiscent of the links in a chain, or the beads of a rosary. Strung together, these individual life stories form a larger lineage life story, reflected within them is the history, identity and chronology of the Gelukpa (dGe lugs pa) tradition as interpreted by the author and his tradition in the late seventeeth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries.

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• The Thob yig gsal ba'i me long by Dza-ya Paṇḍita Blo-bzang 'phrin-las (1642-1715): an enquiry into biographies as lineage history

  Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) (University of Oxford) · 2017-01-01 · 1 citations

  dissertationOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This thesis centres on a text belonging to a rich but understudied genre of Tibetan Buddhist literature known as thob yig or gsan yig, 'records of teachings received'. Their undeniable value has been acknowledged by scholars who utilised them as supplementary material for research on biographies, transmission lineages and authentication of Buddhist texts. However, extensive studies of thob yigs as the focal topic of research are few and scarce. Chronologically, these texts form the "biography" of Tibetan Buddhism since the very beginning of sectarian Buddhism in Tibet. The primary purpose of these texts is to document in detail the transmission lineages through which major religious practices and teachings were passed down. The main text investigated for this thesis is titled the "Thob yig gsal ba'i me long" and was compiled by the 17th century Khalkha Mongolian monk-scholar Dza-ya Paṇḍita Blo-bzang 'phrin-las (1642-1715). He who was one of the most distinguished Mongolian Tibetan Buddhist masters of his time and still occupies one of the highest positions amongst the ranks of Mongolian monk-scholars to have emerged throughout history. Unlike simpler examples of its genre, Dza-ya Paṇḍita's thob yig also includes relevant information on tantric and monastic precepts, instructions and consecrations, expositions on doctrine and practice, meditation guidelines, historical events, and autobiographical and biographical material related to important female and male Buddhist figures. Though catching the attention of scholars both in and outside of Mongolia as an important work for the study of Tibetan Buddhism, to date, it has never been studied in detail. This thesis attempts to remedy the lack of study of this vast work. The focus here being the aspect of rnam thar, 'biography" in Dza-ya Paṇḍita's thob yig. These life stories totalling around 227 form the structural backbone of the work and is the feature which makes the Thob yig gsal ba'i me long a truly unique example of its genre. The chapters of this thesis investigate a selection of rnam thars belonging to Dza-ya Paṇḍita's own teacher and contemporaries, as well as the author's rang rnam, 'autobiography'. Through thus analysis, the goal of this thesis is to demonstrate what these life stories reveal about the author's outlook on the chaotic 17th century period, his vision of an exemplary Dge-lugs tradition, the manifestation of Dza-ya Paṇḍita's relentless devotion to Buddhism in the narratives he composes, and how this work and its contents fits into the larger context of Tibetan Buddhist writing.

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• Dge-slong-ma dpal-mo, the Princess, the Mahasiddha, the Nun and the Lineage Holder: as Presented in the thob yig of Za-ya Paṇḍita Blo-bzang 'phrin-las (1642-1715)

  Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies · 2016-05-12

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Za-ya Paṇḍita Blo-bzang 'phrin-las (1642-1715) was a Khalkha Mongolian Tibetan Buddhist monk scholar belonging to the Dge-lugs-pa school of Tibetan Buddhism. He was a renowned Buddhist master who left behind a huge corpus of religious writing of which the most famous is his Thob yig gsal ba'i me long (The clear mirror of the records of teachings received). As well as numerous transmission lineages of teachings and practices, this encyclopedic text contains detailed biographical, historical and instructional information on various topics. This article is a study of the Kriyātantra section of the thob yig . Emphasis is given to the biography of the nun Dge-slong-ma dpal-mo, founder of a major Dge-lugs-pa Kriyātantra fasting practice known as smyung gnas that belongs to the system of the Bodhisattva Mahākāruṇika Avalokiteśvara. My analysis aims to offer some clarity in regard to her dating and her identity within the religious context of Za-ya Paṇḍita’s tradition, the Dge-lugs-pa school during the 17th century.

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Frequent coauthors

• Fabrizio Pregadio

  4 shared

• Juhn Ahn

  University of California, Los Angeles

  4 shared

• Michael Barend Ter Haar

  University of Chicago

  4 shared

• Jimmy Yu

  University of British Columbia

  4 shared

• Gary Snyder

  University of British Columbia

  4 shared

• Steffen Döll

  Universität Hamburg

  4 shared

• Nelson Foster

  University of British Columbia

  4 shared

• Kurtis R. Schaeffer

  University of Virginia

  4 shared