In Building a Religious Empire, Brenton Sullivan addresses several important questions that, although familiar to anyone who has encountered Tibetan Buddhism or traveled in Inner Asia, have rarely been systematically explored: Why do the majority of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries belong to the Geluk school? Why were these monasteries so large? How did they command and manage the resources to sustain the lives of so many men (and, to a lesser extent, women) in Tibet, Mongolia, and other parts of Inner Asia? And, perhaps most importantly, how was it that the Geluk school developed and then maintained a distinct identity and sense of collective purpose across time and space?

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the period that is the focus of this book—the followers of the teachings of Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) transformed themselves from one of many groups struggling to survive in the tumultuous political and religious terrain of central Tibet into a vast network of hermitages, monasteries, and monastic universities stretching from Manchuria to the Volga. In Tibet, and perhaps in nearly every other locality where they established monastic institutions, hierarchs of the Geluk school also came to exercise at least some degree of temporal authority, thereby making the Geluk a critical part of the governing infrastructure of Inner Asia. According to Sullivan, although the Geluk received assistance from powerful patrons such as the western Mongol ruler Güüshi Khan and subsequently the Manchu emperors of the Qing state, the school's success was more than just the by-product of great power politics in Eurasia. Moreover, the Geluk possessed—and continue to possess—an internal coherence and an ability to mobilize human and material resources that enabled them to not only outlast various Mongol polities and the Qing dynasty but even frustrate the Chinese Communist Party's desire to dominate the spiritual and political lives of citizens of the People's Republic of China (PRC) well into the twenty-first century.

Sullivan attributes the durability of the Geluk enterprise to the bureaucratization of monastic governance and the standardization, routinization, and homogenization of key aspects of monastic life and religious practice. The leaders of the Geluk school, Sullivan argues, were “organization men” (p. 24) who, deliberately and with impressive intellectual plasticity and administrative dexterity, built an ecclesiastical polity that could survive within and/or beside a series of other states and could absorb diverse ethnic and cultural communities.

Building a Religious Empire is one of several recent book-length studies of Tibetan society to emerge from what appears, from the perspective of 2021, to have been a unique historical conjuncture: Tibetan regions in the PRC were relatively accessible to foreign researchers for the first decade and a half of the twentieth century; it was possible to collaborate with PRC-based scholars and institutions on mutually constituted research projects; and organizations such as the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center (now the Buddhist Digital Resource Center) made vast numbers of digitized primary sources available for analysis.

At its core, Building a Religious Empire is a detailed history of Gönlung Jampa Ling monastery (est. 1604), located in present-day Qinghai Province, based on Sullivan's extensive fieldwork. As a relatively peripheral yet well-documented node in the Geluk polity, the monastery proves in Sullivan's treatment to be a useful site for understanding the expansion of the Geluk school beyond central Tibet. Gönlung was one of the earliest Geluk monasteries in the Qinghai region and subsequently served as a springboard for the school's expansion into Mongolia. Astute use of contemporaneous sources from other monasteries and influential Geluk hierarchs allows the reader to understand both how Gönlung fits into broader patterns of institution building across Inner Asia and in what ways it was distinct.

Building a Religious Empire identifies five key fields in which Geluk practices either diverged from those of other schools of Tibetan Buddhism or the Geluk themselves significantly innovated relative to their own prior practices between the 1650s and 1750s: the composition of monastic constitutions; the concomitant elaboration of administrative regulations and the development of new offices and institutions for the management of monastic affairs; the construction of specialized training centers for esoteric, tantric practices; regimentation and systematization of religious training and scholarship; and the promotion of uniform liturgies across Geluk monasteries. Each of these topics receives a chapter-length analysis based on a wide range of primary sources—biographies, epistles, constitutions, regulations, charters, liturgies, ritual manuals, and chronicles—written in both Tibetan and Chinese and produced in central Tibet, Amdo, Kham, and Mongolia.

Sullivan points out that the institutional reforms of the mid-seventeenth century and early eighteenth century were foreshadowed by the practices of Tsongkhapa and the first cohorts of disciples. However, Sullivan attributes the dynamism of the latter period to the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617–82) and a broad constellation of Geluk luminaries who, taking advantage of the patronage of first Güüshi Khan and then successive Qing rulers, sought to vastly expand the “empire” of Geluk monasteries and ensure that their doctrines and soteriological mission remained intact as the movement absorbed new members and patronage communities far from its core in central Tibet. Much as the Qing rulers sought to maintain the élan of the conquest elite, Geluk hierarchs were profoundly concerned with patrolling the boundaries between not only monks and laypeople, but also “insiders” (Tib. nang pa) and outsiders to Buddhism and the Geluk teachings.

Specialists in the field of Tibetan studies and the history of religion in China will appreciate Sullivan's thorough analysis of monastic constitutions and liturgies, as well as his account of the development of several key offices for administration of monastic affairs, especially the “General Management Office” (Tib. spyi so ba, p. 75), which handled monastic finances as well as relations with patrons and lay support communities. Extensive translations from Tibetan sources and detailed explanations of key terms and institutions should make this a useful reference work for scholars working on the social history of Tibet or Buddhist monasteries.

Building a Religious Empire should also be relevant to a broader audience interested in understanding how, in the nonmodern, preindustrialized world, ideologies and religious movements became substantiated as political institutions capable of mobilizing human and material resources. Sullivan places his study of monastic administration within a provocative framework that sees parallels between the Geluk “church” and the history of the Catholic Church in medieval and early modern Europe (pp. 14–18, 173). Although Sullivan dispenses with many of Max Weber's problematic generalizations about “Asian religions,” the book builds on the neo-Weberian scholarship of Philip Gorski to argue that the hierarchs of the Geluk church engaged in a project of “rationalization” that resembled the efforts of Protestant statesmen and subsequently Catholic churchmen to revitalize governance and reform religious practice (p. 15).

In a book with less attention to the specific historical context and vocabulary of eighteenth century Geluk monastics, these generalizations might be problematic. However, Sullivan's study presents the voices of Tibetan elites at Gönlung and other Geluk monasteries in sufficient detail that the comparative framework does not oversimplify the Tibetan situation or reduce it to some sort of “early modernity” derivative of Western Europe. Placed in comparison with the Catholic Church or the Prussian state, the Geluk school emerges as a distinct political formation that was relatively decentralized yet remarkably coherent. Sullivan contends that the imposition of uniform liturgical calendar and body of ritual, indoctrination through a homogenized educational curriculum, shared administrative practices, and even a carefully scripted program of choral singing and chanting, produced a resilient franchise that was resistant to schisms and could weather uneven support and even violent upheaval in the temporal world. As a “polycephalous” (pp. 3, 7), “bureaucratic” (p. 18) organization with multiple centers and leaders, the Geluk school could also survive crises generated from within, such as those brought on by untimely deaths of important lamas (such as the Ninth through Twelfth Dalai Lamas) and seems to also have avoided or otherwise managed doctrinal conflicts that might have split the school.

As with all detailed historical studies, Building a Religious Empire raises more questions than it can possibly answer. While Sullivan's contention that the efforts of elite monks to consolidate the school through monastic charters, curricular guides, and so forth is persuasive, these were nonetheless top-down visions of how the school should work, not necessarily pictures of how it did work. As Sullivan points out, the documents were laced with acerbic criticisms of perceived mismanagement. Thus, Sullivan's study can reasonably only partially explain the internal integrity and long-term durability of the Geluk school. For example, Sullivan does not discuss artistic and architectural practices, as well as the overall design and layout of the Geluk monastery, all of which, one suspects, were highly intentional and contributed to the solidarity of the school. Sullivan's exploration of monastic administration also ends, quite literally, at the gates of the monastery. And while there has been considerable attention to the high-level patronage of the Geluk by the Qing state, the historical relationships between Tibetan monasteries, monks, and their local host communities has also not yet received sufficient study, especially considering the wealth of materials that exist for such projects. These sources, to the extent that they have been studied, reveal considerably more conflict and tension within the Geluk school and between monks and laypeople than is described in Building a Religious Empire.

Sullivan's monograph is a major contribution to the field of Tibetan studies and should spark further consideration of the social and institutional histories of Tibetan monasticism, especially in a broadly comparative perspective. As should be obvious from the title, Sullivan thinks of the Geluk as a “religious empire” and repeatedly analogizes it to a state. He writes that it possessed “mechanisms of rule” that can be “placed alongside those of states” (p. 23). Quoting R. A. Stein, Sullivan writes that Tibet might be called an “ecclesiastical state” like the Catholic Church (p. 17). But Sullivan stops short of directly labeling the Geluk a “state.” Why? And, by the same token, was the Geluk school like an empire or was it an empire? Is a religious empire qualitatively different than an empire? And if it was an empire, then why not also a state?

Much as David Sneath's The Headless State forced a reckoning about why the study of Mongol “tribes” had seemingly been permanently relegated to obscure corners of political science and anthropology reserved for the study of nonstates,Footnote ¹ Sullivan's study points to the analytical limits of referring to the Geluk as a “school”—the standard label for the Geluk in the field of Tibetan studies. “School” is, at best, a loose interpretation of the underlying Tibetan label, chos lugs, which is more accurately understood as a “doctrinal tradition” or “lineage of teachings on the dharma.” Although the label “school” is certainly closer to the meaning of chos lugs than “state,” it seems to me that the field should be less hesitant about using the latter term since the former also obscures some of the key roles the Geluk played in society. As Sullivan puts it, in contrast to many stereotypes about Buddhist movements, “the Gelukpa did not flee from society; they ruled it” (p. 17).

Similarly, adding the qualifying adjective “religious” to the label “empire” is useful only to the extent that it points out some of the distinct features of the Geluk state—most importantly, its self-conceit to be an educational institution dedicated solely to Buddhist liberation. If we follow Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's now inescapable definition of empire cited by Sullivan (p. 23), the Geluk were a variation of empire, not something fundamentally different. Geluk state making generated and/or sustained hierarchies of difference—in this case, not only between different regions and ethnicities, but also through the ways elite Geluk hierarchs carefully evaluated different individuals’ and communities’ levels of spiritual attainment and attempted to parcel out authority and status accordingly. In broad strokes, the Geluk's profoundly sectarian effort at instilling conformity of religious knowledge was not categorically different from the efforts of other contemporaneous states to discipline their populations or promote legitimating ideologies.

Like the Mongol states of Inner Asia, the Geluk polity did not look exactly like Weber's Prussia (and Prussia, like any other state, appears increasingly atypical once one digs below the surface), but as the contents of Sullivan's book and other recent studies make clear,Footnote ² it claimed and exercised powers that are unique to states, even well beyond the administrative boundaries that the Qing established for the Lhasa government in the mid-1700s. Geluk bureaucrat-hierarchs attempted to impose a unified disciplinary regime on both monks and affiliated lay people across extensive geographic domains and, although they did not always possess a monopoly of force, were often able to enlist mercenary support from outside powers or local supporters. The Geluk polity was a state, and as such, it implemented imperial cum colonial strategies at its margins and abroad to maintain control.Footnote ³ From Gönlung, Labrang, and other monasteries in Amdo and elsewhere in Inner Asia, the Geluk extracted extraordinary amounts of wealth from lay communities that were often effectively enclaves outside of the routine administrative purview of the Qing state and other temporal authorities. Like other contemporaneous polities in both Europe and East Asia, the Geluk's sovereign claims were unstable and layered above and below the sovereign claims of other polities. In this respect, the Geluk expansion uncannily resembled the ways in which the British and Dutch East India companies (EIC and VOC, respectively) gradually acquired sovereignties over ports and other littoral zones around the Indian Ocean and over particular sectors of human activity all the while operating within the sovereign claims of other rulers. While the EIC and VOC were expanding their corporate enterprises in the 1600s, the Geluk were building their own multicentric, corporate empire of monastic “ports” along the trade routes of the “steppe maritime” of inland Eurasia.

In legal documents submitted by lay Tibetan neighbors of Geluk monasteries to the Qing officials in the nineteenth century, petitioners complained about the degree to which the monasteries attempted to exercise exclusive sovereignty over wealth, land, and humans and called for the Qing state to exercise its own sovereignty over their communities. In other words, contemporaneous Tibetans saw the Geluk as a state formation well beyond central Tibet.Footnote ⁴ The field of Tibetan studies needs to be more cognizant of this fact. Simultaneously, Sullivan's book points to the ways in which the history of the Geluk state can enrich political science and other disciplines that generally ignore Tibet and Inner Asia.