Thomas Borchert's Educating Monks: Minority Buddhism on China's Southwestern Border provided me with an education in thinking about the political and social contexts in which Buddhist monastics live and travel throughout China and Southeast Asia. The introduction begins with the question, “What makes a Buddhist monk?” (p. 1). The answer Borchert develops is that it is a combination of the social, historical, and political processes at the local, national, and transnational levels that provide the context within which Buddhist monks are made. The rest of the volume is dedicated to showing how Dai-lue monks are made in Sipsongpanna, the Dai region in southwestern China. Borchert's primary focus is on Jiang Rung and the surrounding region, with some excursions into the broader Buddhist worlds of China, Thailand, and Singapore.
The book is divided into two main sections, “Shaping Buddhist Lives in Sipsongpanna” and “Educating the Monks of Sipsongpanna,” each with three chapters, and it ends with an afterword that revisits the issues raised in the introduction. Each chapter begins with an ethnographic anecdote that illustrates the chapter's topic and provides an engaging hook for the reader.
Part one is primarily an ethnography of the political structures within which Theravada Buddhist monastics in Sipsongpanna live and move within the region. In the first chapter, Borchert stresses the importance of understanding local practices within the larger institutional structures as well as the interconnections with regional, national, and international monastics. Chapter 2 begins with an example that suggests the limits on the monks’ ability to take action, which provides the context for an examination of Chinese government policies on religion. Against this backdrop, Borchert analyzes the monastic leaderships’ relationship with the local authorities, including the Buddhist Association, the Public Security Bureau, and the Minority and Religious Affairs Bureau. Chapter 3 highlights the networks that link local monks to Theravada monks and monasteries in Burma, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, as well as the networks that link them to other forms of Buddhism within China.
Part two shifts the focus to the education of monks in Sipsongpanna, with chapters on the education of monks in rural temples, formal monastic schools, and transnational schools. Borchert contrasts the apprenticeship learning that takes place in rural temples with the more formal curricular education in the monastic school. Although education in the village temples is not standardized, rural novices and monks, like their urban counterparts, learn to read and write Dai-lue. Novices in village temples develop their identity as members of their community as they learn skills appropriate for lives as adults. This identity is a local one and not one based on their ethnicity or minority status within the Chinese state. That awareness comes from the mandatory public schooling they receive; here they learn that they are less advanced compared with Chinese but they also begin to realize that they are members of the Dai minority. Borchert argues that the formal monastic school, in contrast, aims to develop Dai-lue intellectuals who “understand the close relationship between ‘Dai-ness’ and Buddhism” (p. 129). This goal often puts them at odds with national, regional, and local Chinese government policies on religion, religious schools, and minorities. While the monks can negotiate and sidestep some of these pressures, Borchert characterizes their limited ability to act as providing them with a fragile autonomy in these formal schools.
The final chapter shifts its frame from Sipsongpanna to transnational monastic education, which includes Mahayana Buddhist institutes on the east coast of China, in Singapore, and with other Theravada schools in Burma, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. These are all places where monastic networks discussed in chapter 3 have established links. The limits on autonomy and action are refracted through the changing policies of the respective national governments. Monastics have to cope with different Buddhist practices, different languages, and new forms of minority status.
Borchert's focus is on bureaucratic processes and the place of Buddhist monastics in these processes. His emphasis is on where the rubber meets the road and how monastic leaders use their skills and relationships with the local political leaders, many of whom are Dai-lue, to negotiate ways of being Buddhist that reinforce, but in some ways redefine, Dai-lue cultural and Buddhist practices. The ethnographic anecdotes do not inform the analyses; rather, they serve to introduce the topic or serve as examples. My preference is for a more ethnographic analysis and less structural but that is, perhaps, my anthropological bias.
Borchert is an engaging writer, and the ethnographic anecdotes help the reader visualize the particularities that he describes. Educating Monks should be accessible to upper-level students in religion studies courses. A more broadly ethnographic book about monastics would complement the structural analyses. When it is released as a paperback, it will be more accessible to students.
