Buddhism in Russia: The Story of Agvan Dorzhiev, Lhasa's Emissary to the Tsar

John Snelling's Buddhism in Russia, The Story of Agvan Dorzhiev, Lhasa's Emissary to the Tsar, published by Element Books in 1993, is the only book length biography of Dorzhiev in English, the Buryat Buddhist monk who served as an emissary between the Dalai Lama's Tibet and Tsarist Russia and helped establish Buddhist practice within the Russian empire. Its strength is that it fills a real gap, no other English language work covers Dorzhiev's remarkable career at this length. Its limit is that Snelling wrote for a general readership interested in Buddhism rather than as an academic historian producing a peer reviewed monograph, so its sourcing and archival apparatus are lighter than a specialist academic biography would carry, and a claim resting on a specific contested detail of Dorzhiev's diplomatic activity benefits from checking against the more recent academic scholarship on Russian and Buryat Buddhism that has built on, and in places revised, Snelling's outline.