Monastic Labor: Thinking about the Work of Monks in Contemporary Theravāda Communities

Transcription

1 Monastic Labor: Thinking about the Work of Monks in Contemporary Theravāda Communities Thomas Borchert* The work of Theravāda Buddhist monks is often understood as being focused on two different areas or burdens : the burden of books and the burden of insight. In other words, monks (and novices) are supposed to be either studying or meditating. While no one can deny that monks do in fact engage in these activities, this paper argues that these activities comprise only a small portion of the work performed by monastics, a fact that scholars have tended to ignore. On the basis of fieldwork conducted in a Theravāda community in Southwest China, in this paper I argue that we need to have an expanded view of what we should think of as appropriate monastic labor, to include activities that are not usually or necessarily seen as religious. It is only by seeing *Thomas Borchert, Department of Religion, University of Vermont, 481 Main Street, Burlington, VT 05405, USA. tborcher@uvm.edu. The research for this paper was conducted on a variety of trips to Sipsongpannā between 1998 and Funding for these trips was provided by the University of Chicago, Institute for International Education, and the University of Vermont. An earlier version of the paper was delivered at a panel by the same name at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in I want to thank my fellow panelists for their comments and suggestions, Jeffrey Samuels, Michael Jerryson, John Holt, and in particular Steve Collins. In addition, I would like to thank the following for reading and providing perceptive critiques in this later version: Kevin Trainor, Catherine Borchert, Jeffrey Samuels, Rhonda Williams, and the two anonymous reviewers from Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Their comments have made this a better paper and we know who to blame for remaining mistakes. It should go without saying that without the friendship and good humor of the monks and novices of Sipsongpannā there would be no paper. Finally, I would like to thank Donald Swearer, whose great humanity helped inspire what I am trying to do in this paper. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, pp.1 31 doi: /jaarel/lfq035 The Author Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

2 Page 2 of 31 Journal of the American Academy of Religion this wider variety of activities that we can begin to fully understand monks as social actors. WHEN I FIRST SAW the tattered saffron robes in the village temple (wat), I assumed that they were rags. After all, robes decay and after they do, monks and novices 1 often use them as rags for mopping the floor of the worship hall (wihārn), or of their dormitories (kuti). I had been to this monastery in Sipsongpannā, a Theravāda Buddhist community in Southwest China, 2 a number of times in the previous weeks and it seemed to be an average monastery. It was run by a single monk who was in charge of three or four senior novices ( pha long) in their late teens and two junior novices ( pha noy) who were both fourteen and in junior high school. Moreover, the temple seemed to be closely tied to the village, as is normally the case in rural Theravāda Buddhist communities in Southeast Asia, and I had already seen the monk conferring with the lay leader of the temple ( pu cān) and other members of the temple committee on a variety of matters. It was a well-maintained monastery, and the first few times I visited, the monk and the novices were neatly dressed in their robes, just as one would expect them to be. I was surprised then one day to see one of the pha long, wearing these ragged robes instead of what I perceived as normal attire, climb onto a motorcycle and drive down a path behind the wat into a nearby forest. After witnessing this several times over the course of a few weeks, I realized that the novices were going into the forest to collect sap from rubber trees. They were wearing the ragged robes because they did not want to get their normal robes dirty. When I asked the abbot about this activity, he indicated that the temple had several acres of woods in the back, and he or the novices would venture there several 1 Monks and novices in Theravāda Buddhism are distinguished in part by the fact that they are supposed to uphold 227 and ten precepts, respectively. In order to become a monk (that is to have taken the higher ordination ), one must be twenty years old. The minimum age at which one may become a novice varies according to the country, but in Sipsongpannā, nine or ten is a common age. 2 I use Theravāda here as shorthand to describe the Buddhism of much of mainland Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. While a comprehensive history of the term Theravāda has yet to be written, it is clear that it was an invention of the twentieth century, an effort to replace the term Hinayāna which was seen to be a pejorative term. While the Buddhist Sanghas of Southeast Asia are generally closely related to one another, they tend to refer to themselves, internally, simply as the teachings of the Buddha ( puttha-sāsanā) or Dhamma-Vinaya without reference to other forms of Buddhism. One of the problems with terms such as Theravāda and Mahāyāna is that they imply distinct schools, and while there are differences between the Buddhist communities of China and Thailand, for example, the assumption of earlier generations of scholars that Theravāda and Mahāyāna practices and beliefs were radically distinct was overstated.

3 Borchert: Monastic Labor Page 3 of 31 times a week when the sap was running to collect it. They then gave it to a villager who sold the sap on their behalf and used the income to defray the costs of running the monastery. I asked what the lay supporters thought of the monk and the novices collecting rubber. The abbot responded that the villagers liked the fact that the monastery had the rubber trees and that the monastics were responsible for collecting the sap themselves, because it reduced the burden of the villagers in supporting the temple and its activities. I find the situation of the monastics at this temple interesting, if not wholly unique. The image of a monk or a novice in ratty old robes with rubber-sap stains, riding a motorcycle into the woods to collect sap is not the standard image of a Theravāda monk, either in the popular imagination or in the scholarly community. In the popular imagination, expressed in literature and in the visual sphere of movies and the web, monks tend to be portrayed as modest, demure even. They have their robes wrapped properly around their bodies and their faces are often blank. Perhaps they are chanting, on an alms round or receiving gifts from laity. 3 They are not riding motorcycles, wearing spattered robes, or performing activities for commercial purposes. While we could dismiss this simply as an example of non-specialists getting caught up in stereotyped images, scholarly discussions of monastic activities generally do not prepare one for encounters with monastic rubber-sap collectors. When scholars do talk about the activities of Southeast Asian Buddhist monastics, they tend to focus on a narrow range of activities, usually those which are either directed toward salvation (cultivation of the self, either in terms of meditation or education), or the various kinds of pastoral activities in which monastics engage (the performance of rites, practice of magic, delivery of sermons, etc.). The scholarly community does address other subjects with regard to Southeast Asian Sanghas, including politics and nationalism, the challenges facing female renunciants and issues surrounding modernization, for example. However, I would suggest that when scholars discuss the activities of monastics, it is often in a highly attenuated way. We seem to be most often interested in them as religious figures, and not as people, who sometimes act religiously and sometimes do not. In this conception, what makes monastics interesting to us is the fact that they are monastics, different from ordinary people and perhaps a trifle 3 In recent years, it has also been common to see monks protesting, particularly in Tibetan regions or in Burma (see e.g., Mydans 2007a, 2007b). For an analysis of the performative aspects of these protests, as well as the media coverage, see Whalen-Bridge (2008).

4 Page 4 of 31 Journal of the American Academy of Religion exotic. As a consequence, it is only their activities as monastics that capture our attention or are worthy of notice. This narrow focus poses serious limitations to our understanding of monastics. It means that we are inclined to pay attention primarily to the things that we think monks should be doing and the kinds of religious activities that are consonant with what, we think, a monk really is. 4 This presumes that we know what a monk should be. It also presumes that monastics think and act in stereotypically monastic ways far more than they necessarily do. Moreover, our narrow definition of monks presumes, implicitly at least, that acting religiously (i.e., acting according to our view of what Buddhism is as a religion) is the only appropriate way for a monk to act (or at least the only interesting way). For example, if a monk is watching a basketball game on television, does this mean that he is not a monk? Certainly not. It might mean that he is not a diligent monk or even that some might think him a bad monk; it might also mean that he is a monk who needs a bit of relaxation and enjoys basketball. However, because scholars have generally not paid close attention to or not reported on how it is that monastics spend their days, we have few tools for determining what constitutes appropriate behavior for monks, nuns, and novices on a daily basis. In this paper, then, I want to consider the kinds of activities that monastics actually engage in, and in particular, the work that occupies a large portion of their day, perhaps as much as one-third of their waking hours. I want to suggest that there is a range of activities that monks, nuns, 5 and novices engage in certain kinds of work, for example that escape our attention because they are not the stereotypical activities of renunciants. The heart of the paper concerns the kinds of work that monks actually do in Sipsongpannā, not the things that we think or assume they should do. Some examples of monastic labor, 4 In using the word religion here, I do not mean to imply a Durkheimian distinction of the sacred and the profane. I understand religion in part through Smith s (2004) genealogical arguments as a second-order anthropological category used to describe phenomena in societies. From a scholarly point of view, I find Lincoln s (2003) response to the Geertz-Asad debate, which sees religion as a set of discourses, practices, communities, and (significantly) institutions focused on the transcendent, to be useful. However, it is essential to recognize that religion is also a category deployed by a variety of actors to achieve certain ends. Indeed what I am critiquing here is a failure to remember that monk, like religion, is a social category that can change across time and space. 5 In the Buddhist communities that I am discussing here, there are no officially recognized orders of nuns. In Sipsongpannā, there are not even the communities of female renunciants that one sees in many other Southeast Asian Buddhist communities. A discussion of the appropriate activities of Theravāda Buddhist nuns would require a separate paper, and would have to begin with a discussion of what constitutes legitimacy in these contexts. Although she does not discuss the work of nuns as an explicit topic, legitimacy is a key topic in Falk (2007).

5 Borchert: Monastic Labor Page 5 of 31 such as pedagogical or ritual labor, are widely referred to in scholarly literature on Theravāda Buddhist communities. Other forms, such as administrative work or physical labor, are much less widely discussed. Taken together, I suggest that these activities ultimately challenge conceptions of what it means to be a Buddhist monastic in the Theravāda communities of South and Southeast Asia and press on the limits of what we understand as properly religious activity in general. APPROPRIATE MONASTIC ACTIVITIES AND MONASTIC LABOR At least since Weber, the default position for thinking about monks in Southeast Asia is that they are individuals who have dedicated their lives to attaining wisdom and/or salvation which is necessarily oriented toward other worlds. The reality is much more complicated as scholars well know, though their discussions do not always reflect this reality. While scholars have rarely explicitly referred to monastic work, discussions of monastic activities or responsibilities are sometimes framed in relation to the burdens (dhura) which monks might practice: gantha dhura, the burden of study, or vipassana dhura, the burden of meditation (e.g., Bunnag 1973: 55 59; Hayashi 2003: 107). Presumably, this would mean that scholars would pay attention to the form and content of the education of monks and novices, as well as their meditative activities. Although it is beyond the scope of the literal meaning of these burdens, monks are both ritual specialists and pastoral practitioners who engage in a variety of activities, including delivering sermons, healing, and protective rituals. Because monks are physically distinct from ordinary people (i. e., they shave their heads, wear distinct clothes, and live in a special place), scholars are also likely to pay attention to the activities such as vinaya restrictions that distinguish monks from lay people. We see all of these distinctions in the topics that scholars discuss about Buddhists in contemporary Southeast Asia. Hayashi Yukio s work on practical Buddhism in Northeast Thailand focuses on the rituals they perform, their education (either receiving or giving), and their performance of precepts (Hayashi 2003: ). We see a similar kind of attention in earlier ethnographic works on Thailand. Jane Bunnag s sociology of the Sangha in Ayutthaya focuses on those precepts that distinguish monks from lay people (i.e., their chastity, their not eating after mid-day, and their non-pursuit of business; Bunnag 33 ff), as well as their locus for attaining education. Bunnag does mention that monks have engaged in other activities (as healers and bankers, e.g.) but states that these were essentially activities of the past (Bunnag 1973: 49). She

6 Page 6 of 31 Journal of the American Academy of Religion also discusses the ritual activities of monks, not so much about what they do, but with regard to the networks in which they exist. Both of these scholars are indebted to Tambiah s work on Northeast Thailand (1970), and their attention to the activities of monks essentially mirrors his. He, too, extensively discusses the ritual activities of monkhood and to a lesser degree their education and the Vinaya-based rules that distinguish the monk from the layman. Tambiah also describes the daily activities of monks in Northeast Thailand, including the performance of morning and evening prayers, going on daily alms rounds, cleaning their kuti and the monastery grounds, studying, and napping. Odd jobs connected with maintaining the wat and its compound may be done as necessity arises. Additionally, he notes that the abbots of temples might also have to engage in assigning these responsibilities to others and teaching (Tambiah 1970: 117). Spiro gives a more elaborate description of the monks day, which I think is worth quoting more fully: The monk s daily schedule is more or less predictable, not only because theroutineis,withinbroadlimits,prescribedbytherule,butbecauseit transpires (with some exceptions) within the physical limits of the monastic compound....the following daily schedule...represents the routine of the average village monk. Rising at approximately 5:00 A.M. but never after sunrise he sweeps the monastic compound or has it swept by his novices and lay students....shortly after rising, the monk says his daily devotions. Then, for approximately an hour, from 5:30 to 6:30, he takes his morning tea while the novices, who have prepared the tea for him, say their devotions in their own quarter, usually on the ground floor of the monastery. About seven o clock monks and novices leave the monastery to collect alms food. Then, sometime between nine and ten, after their morning bath, monks take their main meal of the day....from ten to eleven, while the novices and lay students prepare their lessons, the monk is free. He may study or stroll in the compound, or talk with anyone who comes to visit, or nap. From eleven to twelve he has a morning snack....he is then usually free until the middle of the afternoon when, around three, he teaches the boys who...attend the monastery school....his teaching takes very little time....after his pupils leave for their homes, the monk again is free until five or six o clock, when, if he has novices in his monastery, he may either study with them or instruct them. Shortly before eight, monk and novices say their evening devotions, and by nine they are all in bed. In theory, at least, the day has been spent in study, meditation, and (to some extent) teaching. (Spiro 1970: ) What Spiro and Tambiah highlight here in the discussions of the daily routine of monks is precisely those things that one expects monks to

7 Borchert: Monastic Labor Page 7 of 31 do. Significantly, they gloss over what Tambiah refers to as odd jobs, though, in my observations, these odd jobs are as likely to take up as much or more time in a monk s day than is education or the conduct of rituals. Scholars have only addressed these odd jobs indirectly. A number of scholars have referred to the fact that monks are involved in varying types of social activism (McDaniel 2008, for example). Thai monks were involved in government efforts to domesticate hill tribes in the 1970s (Keyes 1971), and they have also been involved in environmental efforts, both in ordaining trees to prevent their being chopped down, but also in local disputes over land use (Taylor 1996). Seneviratne talks about the active involvement of Sri Lankan monks in both politics and rural development as a result of different ways that monks interpreted and enacted reforms advocated by Anagarika Dharmapala. One monk that he discusses, Kalukondayave Pannasekhara, was active in efforts to encourage temperance and eradicate crime in the countryside, and Seneviratne cites the fact that in support of the former, he canvassed personally, held public dharmadesanas and...organized a sit-in of monks (Seneviratne 1999: 78). Seneviratne also noted that Kalukondayave is said to have written constantly, and that he was a strong advocate of work (Seneviratne 1999: 65). Yet there is a curious aporia in this. If we read carefully what Seneviratne says about this monk s activities, beyond the idea that Kalukondayave wrote ( presumably on behalf of the causes he believed to be important) we know very little of what he did. How did he plan, organize, and administer his work and that of others in his temple? What did he do himself, and what did he have others do, and of these things ordered, what were the tasks of junior monks and novices and what were the tasks of lay supporters? What did work mean to this monk in a concrete sense? More broadly, what is it that occupies the time of monks that is not filled with meditation, education, or rituals? Are the odd jobs of a monk s day really odd, or can we in fact say something more systematic about them? 6 6 There are other examples. Heinze (1977: 87 94) has an extensive discussion of the daily and weekly routines of monks, but devotes almost the entirety of the discussion to the morning alms rounds and the times and processes of eating. She devotes barely a paragraph to the things that the Thai monks she studies actually do during the day, and leaves out the hours of 12: PM entirely. Falk (2007: 122) provides a chart of the daily schedule, but most of her discussion of daily life is also devoted to the issue of eating. Anuman (1986: 45 56), in a short essay on the life of a monk, also concerned much with alms and eating, refers to monks studying or going out on personal business (51) and giv[ing] a helping hand in any work as required by the wat (53), but does not seem to think it important to consider specifically the business of a monk or the work of a wat.

8 Page 8 of 31 Journal of the American Academy of Religion It is this absence of knowledge of how monastics spend their days that needs to be corrected if we are to understand both how Buddhism is lived in various contexts and who monks are as social actors. While scholars no longer assume that Theravāda Buddhism represents the original words of the Buddha, those who speak of Theravāda Buddhism still have a tendency to privilege the Pali canon as productive of monastic activity. In this idea, monastics are generally thinking about attaining nirvana and their activities are governed by what the vinaya says that they should do. Certainly, the things learned from Buddha-vacanam are important, and the vinaya governs behavior to some degree (an issue that I will return to below), but I would argue that rather than understanding these texts as directly productive of Buddhist identity, they are rather one important resource in the debates and discussions by and through which legitimate forms of being a Buddhist are determined. 7 Moreover, even if most scholars no longer assume that the lives of monastics are directly produced by the words of the texts which they hold to be important, until we understand how they spend their days, the literal and actual work they do, we will only have a limited understanding of how Buddhism shapes their lives. Attention to the labor of monks is an effort to rectify that. 8 Provisionally, I am defining labor in this context to be work, productive activity or toil of some sort that is done by monastics. This activity is generally understood by a particular Buddhist community as being appropriate (perhaps even necessary) for the monk to do, and does not include leisure activities. It could be activities that we normally think of when we think of monks and nuns, such as performing rituals or meditating, but only if these are things that monastics in fact do. It should also be a job that is performed within the Sangha on a regular basis. For example, if a single nun in a Sangha of one hundred nuns performs a task just once, and it is not repeated, then we should not take this as being a task that fits with the labor of that particular Sangha. Monastic labor is comprised of tasks that would fit within the 7 That they are not the only resources for these debates becomes clear in Abeysekara s (2001) discussion of debates that took place in newspapers during the 1980s over how monks should be the protectors of Sri Lanka. McDaniel s (2008) discussion of pedagogies and practices of monastic education in Lao and Thai histories is a valuable intervention in the ways that Pali texts were used and productive of reading communities. 8 I would also note that labor and work are not the only activities that need to be addressed. Do monastics play? If so how? Do they exercise? Just looking at the bodies of monks in their robes, it is clear that some barely lift a finger while others seem to be very fit. More work needs to be done into which activities are perceived as appropriate for monastics, where these activities can be done, who determines their appropriateness and how.

9 Borchert: Monastic Labor Page 9 of 31 job description of a monk if that job description were written by someone just watching what monks do, rather than what they should be doing because they are religious actors. It is true that thinking about this as monastic labor is perhaps a little odd. After all, while the denotation of labor is simply work or toil, the connotation of labor has to do with physical labor or wage work. Neither of these activities is generally associated with monks. Indeed, with regard to the former, there is a conception within some literature that monks do not perform physical labor (Spiro 1972: 306; Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988: 254), and at a bare minimum, the relation of monks and money is a fraught issue. Monks can and do use money in the modern world (and probably always have, though it depends on what one considers to be money), but there are efforts by the texts, by lay supporters, state governing institutions, and monks to dissociate monastics from the use of money. For example, when I lived as a dek wat (boy of the temple) in Chiang Mai in 1994, the abbot of the temple would occasionally give me or a novice money to buy a soda, rather than buying it himself. His having the money was not the problem, but going into a shop to buy something would have been unseemly. 9 All of this is to say that labor would perhaps be a strange word to use here. I am using the term labor, though, because it was used by the monks of Sipsongpannā, though in a particular context. Labor was the term that the monks I worked with used to describe a certain class of activity: at the monastic high school where I was doing research, at the end of classes each afternoon, the novices would be called out to do labor, laodong in Chinese. Laodong is generally translated as labor, especially physical or manual labor. (It is different, though only marginally, from the term gongzuo which is work as in the job that one does. 10 ) Different monks offered different explanations for the purpose of this 9 Heinze (1977: 92) refers to the fact that Thammayut monks in Thailand are not allowed to touch money, though the complexities are deeper than she implies. While the monks of this order are not supposed to touch money, they can control its use in certain contexts by lay followers. The use of money by monks in contemporary Southeast Asian societies is another topic that needs much more discussion, a point also made by Rachelle Scott in her discussion of wealth and the Dhammakāya movement in Thailand (Scott 2009: 22). There has been some important work done on monastic wealth in the past (Wijayaratna 1990 on money in the Pali vinaya; Schopen 2004 on the business activities of monks in India; and Gunawardana 1979 on monastic landlordism in Sri Lanka). Scott also reminds us that while there are certain ideals surrounding wealth and its social value within Theravāda Buddhism, the social understanding and implementation of these values shifts across time and space (Scott 2009: 45). 10 It is worth noting that in the Dai-lue language, the monks would say het gaan or het weyk, both of which can be translated as gongzuo, work, rather than laodong, labor. Note, too, that while gongzuo and laodong do not seem to be used quite as interchangeably as they do in English, Chinese dictionaries still tend to see them in relation to one another.

10 Page 10 of 31 Journal of the American Academy of Religion laodong. Some said it was to teach novices how to take care of the wat, some said it helped instill discipline, while others said that it had no intrinsic meaning and was simply about the need for someone to do basic maintenance. Laodong was also used for the purposes of punishment. When young monks and novices misbehaved in one way or another, they were forced to do extra labor (Borchert 2006). What is interesting here is that the first half of the Chinese term, lao, has a couple of different possible meanings, principally the idea of a meritorious deed or service that derives from the language of Chinese communism. That is, there is merit in the performance of physical labor, of doing work/labor for the service of the people. When the novices were doing labor, they were doing work for the temple, and hence they were doing labor for the Sangha of Sipsongpannā. Note that questions over whether this work was this worldly or other worldly were not a part of the agendas of my monastic interlocutors, and so we should not understand monastic labor to be one or the other. To facilitate this discussion then I am defining monastic labor as having two components: first, it is work or toil that is done by some monks or nuns in a Sangha on a regular basis and second, it is understood as being appropriate for them to do. SIPSONGPANNĀ AS A CASE STUDY The need to consider the work of monks, and what qualifies as the work of monks is one that should be extended to the study of Sanghas throughout Southeast Asia, where there has been a lack of attention to the ordinary day-time activities of monastics. Before making general claims about monastic labor, it is necessary to examine specific contexts, and for this paper, I will use the monastic community of Sipsongpannā as a case study. Sipsongpannā is a region of Southwest China, a country more commonly associated with Mahāyāna Buddhism. While it is not the only minority Theravāda Buddhist community in the world, its status as a place that has not been part of the scholarly construction of Theravāda Buddhism makes it useful for this context. However, because it is a small region that most are not familiar with, it is also necessary to provide some background into the region. While being a part of the modern Chinese nation-state is an important fact for understanding Buddhism in contemporary Sipsongpannā, it is also something of an accident of history. In 1894, Britain recognized Qing control over the area as part of its competition with France over control of the middle Mekong region (Keyes 1992; Lefèvre 1995

11 Borchert: Monastic Labor Page 11 of 31 [1898]). This recognition of Qing control formalized a relationship in international terms that was already several hundreds years old. Sipsongpannā, a traditional Southeast Asian state (Natchā 1998), had been ruled by a local king, the lord of the earth (cao phaendin), for forty-four generations, but throughout most of the Ming ( ) and Qing ( ) dynasties, the cao phaendin s court had paid tribute to the Chinese empire. They had also paid tribute to Burmese empires, and had long-standing ties of trade, religion, and kinship with comparable city-states of the region such as Luang Phrabang and Chiang Mai. Indeed, the Dai-lue of Sipsongpannā considered themselves to be a kingdom under two skies (rat song fay-faa; Natchā 1998: 45), under the influence of two different political systems. Despite long ties and nominal allegiance to the Chinese empire, direct Chinese control over Sipsongpannā did not begin until the 1950s when the People s Liberation Army entered the region and began to transform both the economy of the region and the social system. A few years later, the Dai-lue were declared to be an ethnic minority (part of the Daizu), 11 and the region was declared to be an autonomous region (zizhi zhou). Ostensibly, this meant that the people in the region were given the opportunity to develop as they saw fit, but in reality, it has often meant that they have been subject to the modernizing and civilizing projects of the Chinese state. 12 In the late 1960s during the Cultural Revolution ( ), the Buddhist institutions in the region were forcibly disbanded, as they were throughout China. While these institutions were reconstituted during the post-mao religion fever (zongjiao re), it is also true that significant damage was done to the Buddhist practice in the region: a generation of teachers either fled to Southeast Asia or disrobed with the result that extensive knowledge, textual and generational, was simply lost. 11 Four different Tai groups in Yunnan Province make up the Daizu (literally the Dai group). The other Tai groups live in regions that are not immediately contiguous with Sipsongpannā, and though they all speak Tai dialects, they did not consider themselves as a unified group of people until they were forced to do so by the Chinese state. 12 It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss China s ethnic minorities (shaoshu minzu) in any kind of extensive way. It is worth noting that these shaoshu minzu are on the receiving end of a significant amount of state pressure and power, in the form of ideologies and security. This has led scholars to discuss how minorities are treated as subaltern to the Chinese state, and that the Chinese state in general sees ethnic minorities as backwards and an impediment to economic development and modernization. While different minority groups have suffered significant oppression in the last fifty years, we should see their interactions with the state as part of a complex of contestation and negotiation, rather than simply a narrative of oppression. See in this context Gladney (1998) and McCarthy (2009).

12 Page 12 of 31 Journal of the American Academy of Religion This generational break in the Sangha and the increasing integration of the region into the Chinese political economy is essential for understanding the work of monks in Sipsongpannā. Historically, Buddhism served as a primary locus of cultural reproduction among the Dai-lue, as it did in other parts of Southeast Asia. The vast majority of Dai-lue men were ordained as novices, during which time they learned how to read and write in Dai-lue, as well as a variety of other kinds of knowledge (medical, astrological, historical, and so forth). While many still ordain, and Buddhism remains central to Dai-lue identity (Hansen 1999), the context for ordination has changed. The rupture in knowledge has caused a certain anxiety about the state of Buddhism among certain parts of the Dai-lue population. As a result, while training novices has always been an important job for monks in Sipsongpannā, some monks understand their post-cultural Revolution role to be expanded to one of protecting Dai-lue culture as well as Buddhism. Many of these monks have spent time in the Chinese public schools and so they have learned the vocabulary of the state about the need to serve the people. This does not mean that they are really Communists in monastic garb, rather it is to highlight that the monastic context of Sipsongpannā is a hybrid of traditional Dai-lue logics and those of the developmental Chinese state (Borchert 2008). PRACTICES OF MONASTIC LABOR There are six tasks that comprise the regular work of many of the monks of Sipsongpannā. While Spiro suggests that a daily monastic routine can be described, in my observations at temples around the region, beyond the morning and evening services, temple schedules varied widely. Some wats were busier in the morning and some in the late afternoon and early evening, though most of the region was quiet from noon to 2 PM for a post-lunch siesta, regardless of nationality or religious status. Moreover, the labor of any given monk might vary a great deal, even from the monks in neighboring temples, in terms of what he did and how much time he devoted to it. A monk s work depends in my observation on a number of factors, including his training, ambitions and status in the Sangha, the size of the temple, and the number of novices. What follows helps fill in some of the gaps in the descriptions of Tambiah and Spiro, but it is by necessity a general summary of what I observed, rather than an exact description of any monk s day. Pedagogical Labor Training novices is perhaps the most important activity of the monks of Sipsongpannā. As noted above, monasteries have been the

13 Borchert: Monastic Labor Page 13 of 31 place where much Dai-lue culture was communicated, and in the period after the death of Mao and the reestablishment of Buddhism in the early 1980s, monastic education took on an especially important place. With rare exception, monasteries remain the place where boys learn how to read the Dai-lue script, and for many Dai-lue literacy in the traditional script remains a valued social good. As a result, in some circles, Buddhism and the Dai-lue ethnic identity have a very close relationship, and monks are seen as the guarantors both of Buddhism and the foundations of the ethnic community. Indeed, a common view expressed by novices and young monks was that their single-most important responsibility was to teach Buddhism to younger novices and to lay people. 13 There are two different contexts in which monastic education takes place within Sipsongpannā: apprentice and curricular education. 14 Apprentice education takes place largely in village temples and is concerned with turning young men into good members of the Dai-lue community. The pedagogical labor in village temples is largely focused on teaching the use of the Dai-lue script, with a particular emphasis on chanting texts for the performance of rituals. Because many of the younger novices at a temple also study at the local elementary school or junior middle school, this training in Dai-lue literacy and Buddhism often occurs at odd times, either in the early morning or late at night. Curricular education is located in formal schools (of which there are only a handful in Sipsongpannā), with an emphasis on advanced Buddhist knowledge, 15 and are dedicated to producing a cadre of young Buddhist intellectuals. The work of monks in these schools is also more differentiated than in apprentice education, and includes the various kinds of tasks involved in the administration of a school. Textual Labor Just as it is the Sangha s responsibility to train novices, it is the responsibility of monks to protect the words of the Buddha so that they will not be lost. Textual labor, then, is the work that monastics do to protect, preserve, reproduce, and transmit the textually based knowledge 13 I discuss some of these issues within Borchert (2008). For recent accounts of monastic education in Buddhism in Southeast Asia (and to a lesser extent pedagogical labor), see Blackburn (2000), McDaniel (2008), and Samuels (2010). 14 This distinction is first made by Blackburn (2000: 45), following a suggestion by Charles Hallisey. I explore the consequences of this more fully in Borchert (2006). 15 The curriculum (and the textbooks) of these schools is based on the formal Dhamma education of monastic schools in Thailand and the Shan States.

14 Page 14 of 31 Journal of the American Academy of Religion of the Buddhist traditions. Because of the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, the problem of knowledge and its preservation is a particularly salient one for the Sangha of Sipsongpannā. Some of their work has been the basic construction of books, often in traditional ways. In one of my first visits to Sipsongpannā in 1999, I helped the abbot of a village temple and some older Dai-lue villagers stitch together Dhamma books that had been handwritten on locally produced mulberry paper. I have also observed senior monks training novices in the construction of palm-leaf books. Many of these traditional-style books and texts will be used not for the transmission of knowledge, but for merit-making ceremonies. The construction of the books is most often done by monks and novices, but it is not solely the responsibility of monks; former monks (khanan) may do this work as well. Textual labor occurs in less traditional ways as well. For the last fifteen years, the central temple of the region, Wat Pājie, has had a lively semi-independent publishing practice. Their publications have included textbooks for the Dhamma schools of Sipsongpannā, as well as publications for the wider Sangha, including an alphabet book, liturgies and handbooks for new abbots and lay leaders, and a Dai-Chinese dictionary which used the classical version of the Dai-lue alphabet. 16 The textual labor of monks (and khanan associated with Wat Pājie) has included translation and transcription as well as digitization, editing, and computer management. While many monks are engaged in textual labor in one way or another, it does not seem to be a part of their daily responsibilities. This is occasional (albeit important) work that is done during free moments such as during the afternoon siesta or in the evening after teaching has been done. This work is done for a variety of reasons: to help friends, for money, as well as to foster Dai-lue culture and the Dai-lue community. One monk I met was independently collecting texts from village temples with the plan of digitizing them and sending them to Lue communities around the world. Ritual Labor The monks of Sipsongpannā regularly perform rituals at a variety of occasions. These rituals and the work associated with them are 16 It is beyond the scope of this paper to go into the politics of language and scripts in Sipsongpannā. Briefly, however, the Chinese government sought to impose a simplified version of the Dai-lue script, which it saw as part of the feudal pre-modern past of Sipsongpannā. Monks have generally resisted this script and have sought to expand the use of the older version of the script whenever possible. This has at times put them into tension with the local government, as Davis (2003) points out with regard to the publication of this particular dictionary.

15 Borchert: Monastic Labor Page 15 of 31 FIGURE 1. A MONK VIDEOTAPING A STUPA DEDICATION, MENG CE broadly similar to what one finds throughout Buddhist Southeast Asia. There are daily, monthly, and annual rites associated with personal and community protection and merit-making, including spirit-tying ceremonies, funerals, and the blessing and dedication of new buildings and temple buildings. 17 The ritual activity of monks has been widely discussed by scholars, and this is not the place to consider it in great detail. However, even here, scholars have paid less attention to the actual things that monks do during particular rituals. At times a monk s sole responsibility is to chant. In a restaurant dedication that I attended in August 2001, the monks were driven to the restaurant, and once seated chanted protective blessings. Afterwards, they were given lunch, their responsibilities over. In other rituals, they have tasks to do in addition to the chanting that remains a key to the success of the ritual. For example, during the ordination of novices, a monk (or senior novice) has to help the future novices change their clothes from that of the young prince to the new monk. At dedications for a new structure at a wat, the monks do a variety of different tasks. These tasks might include (but are not limited to) acting as an emcee or videographer (Figure 1), collecting meritorious donations (dān) from lay supporters (Figure 2), or even working as stagehands in 17 For much of this work, money is given to the monk in exchange for his labor. See, e.g., Bunnag (1973: 66 67).

16 Page 16 of 31 Journal of the American Academy of Religion FIGURE 2. MONKS TAKING DONATIONS AT AN IMAGE DEDICATION RITUAL, JING HONG FIGURE 3. NOVICES SETTING UP A STAGE AT A FESTIVAL, JING HONG preparation for an event (Figure 3). There is often significant effort that goes into the preparation of different kinds of ritual labor that requires weeks or months of a monk s time. In other words, even in the welldescribed ritual labor, monks do work beyond that which scholars usually write about.

17 Borchert: Monastic Labor Page 17 of 31 Physical Labor Perhaps the most surprising work of monks is physical in nature. As noted above, Spiro comments that the vinaya prevents monks from engaging in any kind of physical labor, which is similar to observations made by Gombrich and Obeyesekere as well (Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988: 254; Spiro 1970: 306). Despite this, I have found that many monks regularly engage in the physical labor that is necessary for the cleaning and repair of their wat. Much of this physical labor is pedagogically motivated, and considered to be a part of the training process. Through labor, novices and young monks learn how a wat should be maintained, as well as what it means to be a monk and a part of the Sangha. The quintessential activity in this regard is sweeping (Samuels 2004), but sweeping does not exhaust the physical labor required of novices and young monks. Novices have to do other types of gardening and cleaning in order to keep the monastery orderly (Figure 4). Moreover, physical labor is an important part of disciplining naughty novices. At the monastic school at Wat Pājie, when students failed to do their work or missed the morning service, they were required to do extra labor to make up for their transgression. This labor was often more onerous in nature, including cleaning the toilets, moving bricks, and cleaning the street outside the monastery. The second type of physical labor is simply the work that needs to be done around the temple for its long-term upkeep. It is often the case FIGURE 4. NOVICES GARDENING, JING HONG 2007.

18 Page 18 of 31 Journal of the American Academy of Religion that in Sipsongpannā, lay people are quite busy in the fields and cannot devote as much attention to everything that needs to be done to maintain a temple. This means that when something breaks or needs tending to, the monk may have no choice but to deal with it himself. I have observed monks rewiring electrical lines, fixing plumbing lines, repairing the roof on an ordination hall (Figure 5), setting up and taking down stages around festivals, and caring for chickens that live on the temple grounds. In one temple at least, as previously stated, they also collect sap from rubber trees. There are three points to make about this labor. First, none of the monks are experts in the things that they are doing, but almost all of them are former farm kids with a bit of technical knowledge and enough practical experience that they can deal with minor issues as they arise. Second, as should surprise no one, there is a very clear hierarchy in the performance of the labor. Novices do most of the physical labor around a monastery. This is in part because they are constrained by fewer vinaya rules (such as the rule against digging); in part because this labor is understood to be part of their training, and in part simply because they are the ones with the least authority. Despite this, however, monks can be seen performing hard physical labor as necessary. Third, this work does not occur in public places. It takes place within the confines of the wat, and so while monks (and novices) are still constrained by the vinaya, in the wat s interior they are less FIGURE 5. MONASTICS AND LAYMEN REPLACING THE ROOF ON AN ORDINATION HALL, GASAI DISTRICT, 2002.

19 Borchert: Monastic Labor Page 19 of 31 constrained by the need to conform to certain standards in relation to the laity (a point I will return to below). Commercial Labor In Sipsongpannā, several of the larger temples have small gift shops which sell books, small Buddha images, and recordings of monks chanting. This Buddhist paraphernalia comes from both China and Thailand. Most of this is provided for tourists; similarly, some temples charge tourists admission. In Thailand, shops like these are usually staffed by lay workers, but in Sipsongpannā, one is as likely to see a young monk or an older novice in charge. Additionally, there are a handful of wats that are involved in other businesses. People might run classes on the temple grounds, or pay the temple rent for having a small shop on land owned by the temple. In either case, while the fee may be very small, there is often some sort of rent paid to the temple. When I have asked monks about this, they have generally replied that the money (whether from gift shops or rent) is used for the upkeep of the temple (e.g., to pay the electric or water bills). Political and Administrative Labor In many ways, the Sangha is a decentralized bureaucracy, and in China at least, the Sangha bureaucracy is tied to the much larger bureaucracy that is the Chinese state. At the lowest level, abbots are the chief administrative officers of the small non-profit which is their temple. As such, the monk has a number of different tasks he must do: train novices, make sure that the temple is maintained, manage relations with lay supporters, and ensure there is enough food for the denizens of the temple. Many of these monks, these local administrative officers, also do work for the Buddhist Association of Sipsongpannā. This in turn is affiliated with the Buddhist Association of Yunnan, and the Buddhist Association of China. The Buddhist Association, as an institution, acts as the liaison between Buddhists and the government and so senior monks in the region must regularly interact with the local and provincial governments. These same monks also occasionally must travel to Kunming to go to study sessions. There is paperwork that needs to be filled out for government regulations, and in the case of the abbot and vice-abbots of Wat Pājie, there is international travel on behalf of the national office of the Buddhist Association. This administrative work goes beyond the daily work of running a temple, and in the case of a handful of monks, the monks receive a government salary. Among the most important administrative jobs of monks both in the local and regional spheres seems to be managing the repairs of the old buildings and building new ones at a wat.

20 Page 20 of 31 Journal of the American Academy of Religion This requires that they spend substantial time with donors to rally support for new construction, raising both money and labor for the project, as well as meeting with contractors or construction companies to discuss the plans for the building(s) and local government officials to receive authorization and permits. 18 Administrative labor does not involve all monks to the same degree, of course. Senior monks and those formally associated with the Buddhist Association spend much more of their time in meetings with government officials than does the average abbot. However, administration can take up a great deal of time and energy even for the abbots of small wats. Analysis Most of the monastic labor analyzed in this paper is not particularly glamorous, but for the most part these were the tasks that comprised the bulk of the monastic day as I observed them and in which I participated. It is difficult to generalize about how much time each type of labor takes for the average monk, because the situation of each monk varies significantly, often as a factor of the number of novices at the wat or his role in the Sangha. Of the six categories I have listed, four of them ( pedagogical labor, ritual labor, physical labor, and administrative labor) are undertaken by all monks, though there are some distinctions that can be made. All monks are engaged in pedagogical labor over the course of their career, but if an abbot does not have novices, then he probably does not spend much time teaching. All monks and most novices are also engaged in ritual labor, but how much time it takes them varies in relation to the village, the condition of the monastery, the monk s location in the region s monastic networks, and other contextual factors. Similarly, the ancillary work involved with organizing festivals and other rituals varies with a monk s status. Most monks engage in some sort of administrative labor, but just how much depends on whether it is the monk rather than the temple committee that exercises real authority in the running of the wat. 19 The remaining 18 This is by necessity an oversimplification. Who decides when and where something gets built in a temple has a lot to do with the local politics at a temple. While in most cases, the monk will play an important role, the key work may be done by the temple committee. For example, in one case that I witnessed in Meng Hai County, a UNESCO project based at Wat Pājie convinced a village wat committee to rebuild their wihārn according to traditional practices. While the monk attended the negotiations, it was very clear he was not the key figure involved in making the decision about the temple. I thank Roger Casas for introducing me to the abbot and temple committee at this temple. 19 Temple committees are usually made up of the abbot and several lay villagers, including the lay leader in the temple ( pu cān) and some of the village leaders. Older well-educated monks often wield a good bit of authority in the temple. However, it is not uncommon for a village wat to be