Associate Professor Jeffrey Moser is happy to announce the publication of Countless Sands: Medieval Buddhists and Their Environments (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2025). Co-edited with Jason Protass (Brown University, Religious Studies), and featuring contributions from eleven prominent scholars, the volume presents engaging analyses of the diverse relationships between Buddhism and the environment that existed in medieval Asia. 

Recent years have witnessed a surge in publications across the humanities that advance powerful ethical and political arguments to account for the human failure to respond effectively to global climate change. While the contributors to this volume are attuned to this challenge, rather than present explicit political arguments, they pursue a subtler effort to historicize the environment as a site and subject of Buddhist practice while providing research grounded in rigorous analysis of complex and fragmentary sources. The volume thereby mitigates against the Orientalist, East-West binaries that have long informed the invocation of Buddhism in Euro-American environmental discourses. As the chapters collectively demonstrate, there was no singular, consistently “Buddhist” understanding of the natural world, but innumerable, varied engagements preserved in discrete texts, images, and artifacts.