Kailas Histories: Renunciate Traditions and the Construction of Himalayan Sacred Geography

Alex McKay is a historian of Indo-Tibetan history with a doctorate from SOAS, and this Brill monograph, part of Brill's Tibetan Studies Library, is his academic study of how Mount Kailash came to be constructed as sacred geography across Hindu, Buddhist and Bon renunciate traditions. Its strength, confirmed independently in reviews of the published book, is genuine multi-tradition fieldwork and textual research tracing how a shared idea of a heavenly mountain was mapped onto real Himalayan peaks over centuries, including the argument that much of today's Kailas pilgrimage geography is a comparatively recent construction shaped by colonial, Hindu modernist and New Age interests as much as by older tradition. Its limit is that this recency argument is itself a scholarly interpretation and not the last word, so a claim about any one tradition's own understanding of Kailas is better checked against a source from within that tradition specifically.