Thomas Borchert opens and closes this engaging, informative and illuminating monograph by asking ‘What makes a Buddhist monk?’. This is a deceptively simple question around which to organise a research project and argument. While Borchert ultimately can't answer this tortuously complicated question at its most generic level, his analysis of the education of Dai-lue monks in the Sipsongpanna region of southwest China insightfully reveals what social, cultural and political dynamics make — and unmake — novice monks in particular within a Buddhist minority community. The Dai-lue of Sipsongpanna are Theravada Buddhist in a Mahayana Buddhist majority country, ethnic minorities in a Han majority nation, and borderland Buddhists who strongly identify with their Theravada compatriots in mainland Southeast Asia, Thailand and Myanmar in particular. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and since the 1980s, the Dai-lue have been rebuilding their Buddhist temples, communities and networks in a national and regional political environment that has selectively opened up possibilities for limited religious revival. The question of how to educate the novices and monks that constitute this growing and revived Sangha has been a central challenge for Dai-lue Theravada Buddhists as they seek to find their voice and place within Chinese and pan-Asian Buddhist landscapes.
Following an introduction, Educating monks is divided into two parts. The introduction frames the book project in relation to the existing scholarly literature on Buddhist monastic education, particularly in the Theravada world. It also situates monastic education among the Dai-lue in Sipsongpanna in relation to the political realities of the post-Mao Chinese state, its national ethnic minority policies, and the social dynamics of the China–Southeast Asia borderland region. Part One paints an ethnographic portrait of Buddhism in Sipsongpanna. Chapter 1 maps the regional religious field, the shape of village Buddhism, the organisation of the local Sangha, and the conventional monastic career path as laid out in the region. Chapter 2 explores the politics of religion in China and Sipsongpanna, paying particular attention to how official discourses about religion intersect with structures of national and local governance. Chapter 3 documents the local, national and transnational social networks that structure and guide the travels and education of local monks, highlighting the differing flexibility and friction of movement and agency enabled by these networks. Part Two examines a variety of social contexts within which the education of Sipsongpanna monks takes place. Chapter 4 examines apprenticeship education in two settings — Dai-lue village temples and Han Chinese public schools — and explores how it is pedagogically focused on training novices to act and behave like monks. Chapter 5 examines curricular education in the region's largest formal school, Wat Pajie, and unpacks how this involves training a cohort of monks as educational elites who understand the cultural value and fragile autonomy of Dai-lue Buddhism and ethnicity within the larger Chinese national project. Chapter 6 examines how Dai-lue monks cross borders to study in Thai Dhamma schools and Chinese Mahayana institutes, subtly learning in the process how to situate themselves within wider and more diverse transnational and national Buddhist landscapes and identities.
Educating monks richly documents the content, character and dynamics of monastic education within, and across, local, national and transnational settings. The narrative successfully oscillates between and balances individual voices and experiences, general accounts and descriptions, and the author's own particular positionality as a teacher and scholar active within a variety of educational settings and institutions over the course of his multi-sited research spanning two decades. Borchert's comparative analysis of the pedagogical and practical priorities of apprenticeship education versus curricular education are eye-opening, and scholars of Buddhist monastic education elsewhere will find them a fruitful frame of analysis. Similarly, his exploration of the complexities involved in how the curricular education at Wat Pajie combines formal and informal instruction in Buddhist teachings, secular skills, and local cultural heritage provides a nuanced unpacking of the character and dynamics of monastic education that scholars studying Buddhist pedagogy elsewhere will find illuminating.
In addition, Educating monks provides scholars of Buddhism and Asia with analytic models and insights applicable beyond the specific focus on Buddhism, monks, pedagogy and educational institutions. First, Borchert lays out a model of how social networks composed of nodes, spokes and structures, and inflected by flexibility and friction, shape the mobility, affiliation and identification of the individuals located within these networks. This model has general applicability and explanatory power far beyond the domain of Buddhist schools and educational settings. Second, Borchert consistently illuminates not only how actions at the local, national and transnational level display unique social and cultural dynamics, but how they are also contingently interwoven, continuously complicating the meaning of practice for different actors co-present within the same social setting. This model of the entangled but differentiated dynamics of spatial scales and horizons of action is similarly applicable and useful for scholars exploring a wide range of other cultural phenomena. Finally, Borchert's analysis of the contingent comingling of apprenticeship and curricular education has great value for studying the training and education of anyone, not just Buddhist novices. Thus, extending this analysis to the study of the more advanced and specialised career paths of Buddhist monks — as scholars, preachers, meditation masters, administrators, or virtuosos of ‘magic’, for example — would greatly enrich our current understanding of not only of what makes a monk in a generic sense, but of how vocationally specific types of monks are produced at different times and places within Buddhist worlds more generally.
