Embodying the sacred: Gender and monastic revitalization in China's Tibet.

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of the gendered nature of religious revitalization in the Tibetan Buddhist monastery town of Labrang in southwest Gansu Province, China. Labrang monastery, which belongs to the dGe-Lugs sect of Tibetan Buddhism, was founded in 1709 and in its heyday housed over 3000 monks. It was considered a center of high learning and of religious and political authority in Amdo Tibetan regions. Chinese government efforts to liberate Tibetans from the feudal oppression of the monastery culminated during the radical period (1958--76) in the closing of the monastery and the persecution of monks, nuns and prominent lay people. Since the state relaxed controls on religion and the economy beginning in the early eighties, Tibetans began rapidly revitalizing the monastic community by participating in worship practices and donating goods and labor to its reconstruction. With a secular education system that offered few alternatives for young Tibetans disadvantaged in fierce competition for jobs in the more open economy, this process drew large numbers of young men and women to Labrang seeking ordination. The thesis avoids reductionist portrayals of Tibetans as pious Buddhists opposed to the Chinese by developing a performance approach to gender and religion. It uses field and archival data collected among Tibetan monks, nuns and laity during two years of fieldwork. Drawing on linguistic anthropological methodologies that integrate analyses of micro and macro contexts, the author demonstrates that local Tibetans' appeals to the karmic inferiority of the female sex justified the intensifying burden placed on women to maintain traditional boundaries between household and monastic life while young men exercised a greater range of choices in pursuing social mobility in ways that weakened their ties to both. The analysis conceptualizes monkhood as the performance of a separate masculine gender status epitomizing the superiority of maleness. In the context of state efforts to control monasticism and increasing demographic pressures from Han and Hui settlers, Tibetans considered the gender ambiguity represented by unprecedented numbers of young nuns in town to be the most pressing threat to the integrity of the community. Yet, with the erosion of the ritual infrastructure of the monastery, the much larger numbers of young monks experimented with performing monkly identities in new ways that seriously blurred the lay-monastic divide.