Contemporary Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. xvii, 210 pp. (Table, maps, B&W photos.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-6648-8.
With roughly 200 to 250 million adherents, Buddhism has the largest following of any religion in China today. The most prevalent form is Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism. It uses a textual canon in the Chinese language and is practised by the Han Chinese majority. Another form of Mahāyāna, using a canon written in Tibetan, is practiced by most of China’s Tibetans and Mongols—around 10 million people all together. In the context of these numbers, the approximately one million adherents of Theravāda Buddhism in China’s southwestern border region of Sipsongpannā constitute a tiny minority. Most of them belong to the Dai-lue people, who, besides being a religious minority, have also been recognized by the Chinese state as one of China’s 55 official ethnic minorities under the name of Dai. The Theravāda canon of the Dai-lue was originally written on palm leaves in the Dai-lue script.
Having spent considerable time in monastic education institutions in Sipsongpannā, Thomas Borchert provides us with an insightful perspective on what it means to be a Dai Theravāda novice or monk in China at the beginning of the new millennium. He starts with posing a simple question: What makes a Buddhist monk? His quest functions as a kind of heuristic device to make sense of what he terms a Buddhist ethnoscape and it takes us on a journey, from the different monastic institutions and village temples of Sipsongpannā to the more globalized presence of Buddhism in Shanghai, Singapore, and Thailand.
For male Dai-lue villagers, entering the local village monastery as a novice for a few years is an inherent part of being Dai-lue. Through apprenticeship young boys learn from older monks how to become a person who knows how to behave and act in a proper way. They also learn to read the traditional Dai-lue script used in the translation of the Pāli Theravāda canon. These local Buddhist institutions are intricately entwined with the local sangha in many other ways, be it through village sponsorship of novices and monks or through the village temple’s role in religious festivals. As such they are pivotal in the reproduction and maintenance of Dai-lue culture. Nevertheless—and this is one of the main points that Borchert keeps reminding us of throughout the book—being a Buddhist in China today, even in peripheral Sipsongpannā, transgresses the local in a multitude of ways and directions.
The state is all-pervasive in China, and where it concerns religion and ethnic minority identity, its meddling and scrutiny are inescapable. The unprecedented assault on Dai-lue religion and culture during the Mao period, which saw the destruction of countless monasteries and ancient palm leaf texts, is now increasingly a thing of the past. Nevertheless, many Dai-lue are still weary of the interference by the Chinese state, such as when the authorities promote a new writing system for the Dai-lue language, threatening the survival of the old traditional script used in the monasteries, or, when Theravāda teachers from Thailand and the Shan states in Myanmar, who have come to Sipsongpannā to help revive its Buddhist institutions, have difficulties in renewing their residence permits. As a professed atheist one-party state, the Chinese government is furthermore committed to the promotion and expansion of a non-religious public-school system everywhere in the country. This agenda often conflicts with the monastic education of young boys, forcing traditional Buddhist institutions to find compromises that are acceptable to the government, such as admitting only novices who have passed their junior secondary education.
On the other hand, through the active involvement and participation of senior Dai-lue monks in the official Chinese Buddhist Association, local monks are provided with opportunities to travel and study throughout the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and meet with Han Chinese and Tibetan Mahāyāna co-religionists, as well as with the general public. Through these translocal experiences and encounters, Dai-lue can establish a larger Dai identity as a recognized minority within the PRC and realize that Buddhists are also citizens. For some monks, being part of the official Chinese Buddha-scape also entails occasions for transnational participation in Buddhist studies and exchanges, whether in Thailand, Sri Lanka, or Singapore. Based on conversations the author had with Dai-lue monks in Buddhist institutions outside China, the book presents interesting material on border-crossing Buddhist networking, underscoring the point that modern Buddhism is universal in more than one way.
Educating Monks is an important book. Solidly grounded in empirical research, it presents us with a unique ethnography of the lives of ethnic minority monks and novices living in a less well-known corner of China and practicing a minority form of Buddhism. At the same time, it provides a convincing analysis of one way of being a Buddhist in the modern world by showing how such an existence is both anchored in the local as well as it is linked up in multiple different ways with translocal networks.
My only, minor, reservation about the book is that the bulk of the empirical data was collected fifteen years ago. While the author conducted several shorter follow-up visits in the years after his main research stay, the consequences for the Dai-lue of the unprecedented human migration from the countryside to urban areas of the last decade is barely touched upon. This reviewer would have liked to learn, for example, how urbanization and work migration is affecting the system of novice education at the village monasteries in Sipsongpannā. Nevertheless, this is less a critique than a desire for a follow-up study by Thomas Borchert. This book is highly recommended to students, researchers, and general readers with an interest in local minority cultures in China and Southeast Asia, in modern Theravāda Buddhism, as well as in Buddhism in general.
Koen Wellens
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway