One or None? Truth and Self-Transformation for Śaṅkara and Kamalaśīla

This article explores how two influential 8th-century Indian philosophers, Śaṅkara and Kamalaśīla, treat the threefold scheme of learning, reasoning, and meditation in their spiritual path philosophies. They have differing institutional and ontological commitments: the former, who helped establish Advaita Vedānta as the religious philosophy of an elite Hindu monastic tradition, affirms an unchanging “self” (ātman) identical to the “world-essence” (brahman); the latter, who played a significant role in the development of Buddhist monasticism in Tibet, denies both self and essence. Yet, they share a concern with questions of truth and the means by which someone could gain access to it, such as what, if anything, meditation contributes to knowledge and its acquisition. By exploring their answers to this and related questions, including how discursive and conceptual practices like learning, reasoning, and meditation could generate nonconceptual knowledge or knowledge of the nonconceptual, this essay shows the difficulty of separating “philosophical” problems of truth from those related to self-transformation or “spirituality,” as Michel Foucault defines the terms. It also reassesses, as a framework for comparison, the well-known contrast between “gradual” and “sudden” approaches to the achievement of liberating knowledge and highlights them as tensions we still struggle to resolve today.

Defining Manhood: Monastic Masculinity and Effeminacy in Contemporary Thai Buddhism

The study of Theravada Buddhism and gender has often focused on the relationship between men's and women's roles, particularly their differing ability to become fully ordained monks. Yet in Thailand, as in many parts of the world, gender is more complicated than the binary of just men and women. Scholars have noted that what it means to be a man in Thailand is often defined in terms of not being effeminate, gay, or transgender. Drawing on Thai news stories, social media comments, and ethnographic research, I explore how monastic masculinity—the way in which what it means to be an ideal monk informs notions of being an ideal man—is constructed through the assertion that effeminate gay or kathoei (transgender) individuals cannot and should not be ordained. Taking into account such broader social constructions of gender and sexuality is important to better understand the relationship between masculinity and Buddhist monasticism.

Interlude

This chapter discusses early Western Buddhist monks around the turn of the twentieth century. It highlights the increased significance of the ordination of Westerners in this period, both from the colonial and Asian points of view. It discusses the careers of three early Western Buddhist monks: Asoka (Gordon Douglas), Ananda Metteyya (Allan Bennett), and Dhammaloka (?Laurence Carroll). The chapter explores the monastic politics of ordination and compares the lineages created by Ananda Metteyya and Dhammaloka. It looks at a wide range of early Western Buddhist monks, and in particular the issues of class raised by “beachcomber bhikkhus,” poor white converts. It goes on to explore three moments in Western Buddhist monasticism: a conventional ordination at the Tavoy monastery in Rangoon, an unusual ordination in Dhammaloka’s “English Buddhist Mission” in Singapore, and a contested disrobing at the same mission. It concludes by discussing the nature of legitimacy in these contexts.

Questioning the Revival

A common narrative of Buddhist monasticism in modern China is that monastic institutions were virtually eliminated during the Cultural Revolution period (1966–1976) but have undergone continuous revival since that time. This simplistic narrative highlights differences in state-monastic relations between the Maoist and post-Maoist eras, even as it oversimplifies various developments. In this article, I analyze the notion of revival and assess the state of Han Buddhist monasticism in the prc. My focus is on clarifying the “basic facts” of monasticism, including the numbers and types of monastics and monastic institutions. I draw on studies published since Holmes Welch’s works as well as on my own fieldwork conducted in China since 2006. This article questions the revival metaphor and shows that it is misleading. First, as Welch noted for the Republican period, recent developments are characterized by innovations as much as by revivals. Second, evidence for the growth of monasticism from around the year 2000 is weak. Yet in two aspects, monasticism today revives characteristics of Republican-period monasticism: ritual performance is central to the monastic economy, and Buddhist seminaries are important for monastic doctrinal education.

Becoming Chinese Buddhas: Claims to Authority and the Making of Chan Buddhist Identity

According to many recent scholars, by the Song dynasty Chan Buddhists had come to identify not primarily as meditation experts—following the literal meaning of chan—but rather as full-fledged buddhas. This article pursues a deeper understanding of how, exactly, Chan Buddhists claimed to be buddhas during the eighth through eleventh centuries, a critical period in the formation of Chan identity. It also addresses the relationship between Chan Buddhists’ claims to the personal status of buddhahood, their claims to membership in lineages extending back to the Buddha, and their appeals to doctrines of universal buddhahood. Closely examining Chan Buddhists’ claims to be buddhas helps explain the tradition’s rise to virtually unrivaled elite status in Song-era Buddhist monasticism, and illuminates the emergence of new genres of Chan Buddhist literature—such as “discourse records” (yulu)—that came to be treated with the respect previously reserved for canonical Buddhist scriptures.

Religious Others, Tourism, and Missionization: Buddhist ‘Monk Chats’ in Northern Thailand

Conjunctures of globalization and education have shaped the intersection of Buddhist monasticism and international tourism in the Northern Thai city, Chiang Mai. International tourism in Chiang Mai has been popular since the 1990s, while monks from all over Thailand and South and Southeast Asia have come to Chiang Mai in large numbers to pursue higher education in English since the 2000s. Focusing on Buddhist temples that contain a Monk Chat programme, where tourists and monks engage in conversation, this article analyses the responses of Buddhist monks towards a range of international tourists. Utilizing the perspectives of Buddhist monks through interviews reveals attitudes towards Western and Asian tourists as situated within broader discourses of Thai society. Investigating these attitudes and responses within the context of wider state, regional, and transnational influences, I argue that attitudes towards religious others are inextricably connected to missionization.