The state–society lens forces itself upon many perspectives on social issues and social change, whereby people (society) are reduced to either victims of or resistors to the state. This is particularly true in accounts of undemocratic states, such as the People's Republic of China, and truer still in the case of minority groups living in China, such as the Tibetans. Jane Caple's Morality and Monastic Revival in Post-Mao Tibet demonstrates what is obscured by such a lens, namely, “a key part of what constrains and motivates people: their sense of right and wrong in relation to … their moral community” (p. 6). Such a lens, moreover, gives undue credit to the state for defining and shaping social change.
Historically, Tibetan Buddhist monasteries held an unrivalled position of influence and prestige in Tibet. There were thousands of monasteries across the Tibetan Plateau possessing as much as one-third of the arable land there, and somewhere between 10 per cent and one third of the male population were monks (pp. 21, 174). In 1958, however, Tibetans in Amdo revolted in response to early collectivization, socialization and attacks on tribal leadership and religious institutions. What followed was the destruction led by the People's Liberation Army of most of Amdo's monasteries, the defrocking of its monks, mass starvation and the implementation of so-called “democratic reforms.” It was not until 1978 that the PRC began its process of “reform and opening up,” which created space for the revival of Tibetan Buddhism, including monasticism.
The pace of the revival was astonishing: “according to official Chinese statistics, by 1997 there were more than 3,000 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries (most of them Geluk), 120,000 Tibetan Buddhist monks, and 1,700 reincarnate lamas in China” (p. 24). Caple's project, however, is not to chart this political and physical revival of Buddhist monasticism. Rather, she traces the “resurgence of a moral community” that drove and shaped that political and physical revival (p. 165; emphasis added). Caple argues that we must not understand Tibetan Buddhists as merely responding to state imperatives. They are members of “multiple and overlapping moral communities” (p. 159) that have provided Tibetan Buddhists with their own resources and challenges for defining the course of their monastic revival. These communities include the Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and monastics in exile, the imagined Tibetan collectivity, Buddhist modernists, and their own “moral past” (p. 163; see also pp. 158–59). By “seeing beyond the state” and focusing on what Tibetan Buddhists (primarily monastics, but also their lay devotees and patrons) themselves say and do, she is able to describe what this monastic revival looks like and explain why it looks the way it does to a degree that far surpasses previous scholarly descriptions and explanations.
Tibetan Buddhists’ own sources of morality do not just constrain what they can do, they also “create space for change” (p. 18). A particular example of this in Caple's book is the decision by monastics in the first decade of the 21st century to terminate the practice of sending monastic representatives to patron communities in order to collect alms from them (chapter two). One motivating force behind this decision was the recognition that such practices resulted in compulsion and an unmanageable burden for many families. Although this reason coincides with the state's discourse about the ideal monastery being one that is self-sufficient, Caple argues that monks were and are largely indifferent to the state's discourse. A variety of other sources forming Tibetan Buddhists' own moral community actually better explain this particular reform. The precedents set by Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in India weigh heavily on monks’ discussions concerning the proper way to finance a monastery. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, too, has promoted self-sufficiency and criticized certain traditional practices of finance (pp. 60–61). In addition, Tibetan Buddhists have developed their own image of the ideal monk as one who stays inside the monastery so as to cultivate his discipline and philosophical acumen. That image draws on traditional Tibetan critiques of wealth and its corrupting influence, and it is also tied to the way in which Tibetans today imagine monks and monasteries as bearers of Tibetan tradition and identity. The latter creates a (often unrealistic) standard toward which monks and their monasteries strive.
Between 2008 and 2015, Caple visited numerous monastic institutions belonging to the dominant Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, focusing on 16 in Qinghai province. She conducted formal interviews with 82 monastics and 55 laypeople and otherwise draws on relevant Tibetan- and Chinese-language materials to provide facts and detail regarding the emotions and thoughts behind the moral “negotiating” that has characterized the monastic revival. Caple approaches her informants with an understanding of agency that allows one to respect as genuine and effective the intentions of one's interlocutors without sacrificing suspicion and without losing sight of the impact of other social and political factors. This is not a definition of agency that sees it as merely a zero-sum “game to maximize their own interests and power” within the state framework (p. 155). Rather, she follows Sherry Ortner (Anthropology and Social Theory, Duke University Press, 2006) in understanding agency as “related to ‘ideas of intention, to people's (culturally constituted) projects in the world and their ability to engage and enact them.’ In this modality,” Caple continues, “people can be seen to be pursuing their own projects, ‘defined by their own values and ideals, despite the colonial situation’” (p. 7).
Caple leaves the reader wondering what the future might have in store for Tibetan Buddhists and for their “strategies” of navigating the forces of modernization, globalization and the “walls” set up by the Chinese state. One might ask what this second kind of agency really amounts to, given the reality of the omnipresent and omnipotent state? Tibetans can choose how to “affirm, move, or find ways around” the walls put in place by the Chinese state (8; see also pp. 156–59), but as recent years have shown, the state does not rest in its effort to restrain, assimilate or eliminate ethnic minorities within its borders.
In addition, Caple has demonstrated that Tibetan Buddhists are not simply responding to directives from the Chinese state but to a multitude of voices, including those of modernity and globalization. Nonetheless, the state is arguably the most significant vector of modernization and globalization, and so it becomes difficult to distinguish instances in which monastic revival and reform merely coincide with state imperatives from those in which monastic revival and reform are in fact responding to state imperatives.
But these are less criticisms than questions for future research. To what extent might Tibetan Buddhists continue to succeed in shaping developments in monasticism given the “new opportunities” and “new moral dangers and dilemmas” that are in store (p. 167)? Caple has ably demonstrated that the only way we will be in a position to answer such questions is to “do justice to the sincerity of people's moral concerns …” (p. 8) and to “take seriously the subjective perspectives of [one's] interlocutors” (p. 15). As such, this book stands as a model for how future scholars might proceed.
