Too often, general histories of Tibet are religious histories, recapitulations of the chos ’byung, or “sources of the dharma,” the indigenous histories of the origin and spread of Buddhism in Tibet. Or, to the extent that a history of Tibet avoids leading the reader through the vagaries of the factions and subfactions of Tibetan Buddhism and does, in fact, include political, social, and economic change, it often starts at the beginning—in imperial Tibet of the seventh century—and proceeds to march dutifully through time to the twentieth century, when history comes to an abrupt end in 1950. There, the reader is often left wondering what happened, what fundamentally changed at that moment in time. Not so for Peter Schwieger's Conflict in a Buddhist Society: Tibet under the Dalai Lamas. Schwieger adopts a social scientific, thematic approach to Tibetan history and leaves the reader with a satisfying answer to the question of what fundamentally changed in mid-twentieth-century Tibet: the multifaceted system of regulating and eliminating conflict was forcefully dismantled and otherwise could not meet the demands made on it by Tibet's “environment” (i.e., the human world outside Tibet) (p. 5).

Schwieger is a respected senior Tibetologist who has published on all aspects of Tibetan culture, including Buddhism, social history, and law. One of the great gifts of Conflict in a Buddhist Society is that he draws upon his tremendous breadth of knowledge, including his intimate familiarity with Tibetan-language decrees and other archives, to provide a comprehensive view of Tibetan society. He also provides insights from and overviews of German-language scholarship on topics such as Tibetan law by himself and others, such as his former advisor, Dieter Schuh. Even a seasoned scholar of Tibetan history and society will learn new facts or benefit from the book's comprehensive and schematic presentation of Tibetan Buddhist society.

“Conflict” in the book's title is a technical term. Throughout the book, Schwieger employs the theory of Niklas Luhmann, and he defines “conflict” as a “communicated contradiction” (p. 5).Footnote ¹ Conflict is something that escalates and expands naturally without having in place social systems or subsystems to regulate or eliminate it. Schwieger writes that he seeks to answer this question: “How did the society of Tibet, as it existed from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, deal with conflicts?” (p. ix). He proceeds thematically, examining how different analytical concepts (e.g., “domination”) or domains of society (e.g., law, war) featured in Tibetan society, and how they help explain the appearance or regulation of conflicts there.

I find the following question more helpful for understanding Schwieger's intent throughout the book: Why was “Tibetan Buddhist society” so stable for centuries but collapsed suddenly in the twentieth century? The book is focused on answering the first part of this question, although implicit throughout (because each chapter is chronological) is the idea that Tibetan Buddhist society as a social system never developed distinct functional subsystems, such as education or legal theory, separate from religion. As a result, it “was neither adapted to a changing environment in which no old-style mighty ruler functioning as a patron for Tibetan Buddhism was to be found nor was it prepared for incremental integration into the developing world as a state” (p. 239).

According to Schwieger, several factors served to stabilize Tibetan Buddhist society. For example, significant power imbalances between classes kept conflicts within rather than between classes and thus manageable (p. 76), and hierarchy instilled a sense of an immutable social structure (p. 59). Three factors, however, stand out in the book for the role they played in Tibetan Buddhist society. The first and, by far, most important is religion, particularly the dominance of clergy throughout the centuries. Buddhist monks, as the literate custodians of history and memory, determined the “expectation structures” of the nascent Buddhist society by controlling “the choice of topics to be handed down” and by providing “a cohesive conception of the world that functioned as an unavoidable premise for decision” (p. 12). In fact, the reason we even speak of a single “Tibetan Buddhist society” that can encompass such a diverse range of peoples is that the clergy “created the conditions under which communications were reproduced and the unity of the system ‘Tibetan Buddhist society’ constituted itself” (p. 12). However, this was also a process of “narrowing of the horizon and a desemiotization of a whole range of ‘world segments’” (p. 12), which would have dire consequences in the future for Tibetan Buddhist society's ability, indeed its willingness, to engaged with concepts that did not fit its structures (p. 238).

Schwieger suggests that religion, and especially the theory of karma, encouraged the internalization of discipline, since karmic consequences rest on the individual's intentions rather than his or her actions (p. 133), and karma served to justify and stabilize social stratification (pp. 65, 132). The belief in incarnate lamas that return life after life to aid in the salvation of the Tibetan people masked “the history of struggle and conflict over power and dominance” (p. 70). The Dalai Lamas sat at the pinnacle of this system of belief, allowing them to unify all subjects irrespective of social strata and thereby contribute to the stabilization of rulership (p. 43).

The second factor that stands out in this book is the relationship and agreement reached between the Dalai Lama and the Qing emperor. As Schwieger has shown in great detail in his previous book, The Dalai Lama and the Emperor of China,Footnote ² and repeats here, since the eighteenth century, “in contrast to the image suggested by symbolic order, in terms of actual power structures, the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government were clearly subordinated to the Qing emperor” (p. 58). Nonetheless, neither party was interested in acknowledging or addressing this “contradiction between the symbolic order and the real order” (p. 58), because the fiction worked well for both parties. However, this fiction failed Tibetan Buddhist society after the new power in Beijing disregarded it: when the Communists came to power, from the nuanced and personal relationship that had existed between the Dalai Lamas and the Qing emperors, they derived modern claims of nationhood and sovereignty which “paved the way for open conflict” (p. 231; cf. pp. 55–56).

The third factor that stands out in this book for its role in stabilizing Tibetan Buddhist society is law. It is the subject of the longest chapter in the book, and it brings together findings from an extensive bibliography of research on law in Tibet from the last forty years. The chapter is filled with rich summaries and translations of actual cases which make for an exciting read. Schwieger argues that law under the Dalai Lama's government was on its way to becoming a fully differentiated legal subsystem. Tibetan law under the Dalai Lamas was independent of religion and morality, and it had developed autonomous procedures that included reference to legal documents (p. 199). These legal practices served to provide stability for the entire society. Nonetheless, large parts of society continued to settle disputes out of court, and abstract legal norms fixed in legal codes never fully developed (p. 200).

The major weakness of the book is its frequent deployment of abstract and off-putting vocabulary and over-reliance on quotes from Luhmann's work. Luhmann's work is largely unknown in the English-speaking world outside of a few specialized subfields. As such, his theory and its relevance to Tibet deserves more than a “bare essentials” overview. It is not the case, even for the theoretically inclined scholar, that “the theoretical framework becomes familiar because it accompanies the reader throughout the entire book” (p. x). Certain technical vocabulary, such as “environment,” meaning the world outside “Tibetan Buddhism society,” does eventually become clear through repeated encounters. However, abstract quotations from Luhmann's work are regularly dropped into the text without interpretation, and nowhere is it summarily stated what the implications of Luhmann's systems theory are for our understanding of Tibet.

The ideal audiences for this book include scholars already familiar with Luhmann's theory and students of Tibetan society and history. For the latter, Schwieger provides a unique way to approach the study of Tibet. Schwieger encourages the reader to “follow their own paths through the book” (p. x); indeed, one can imagine assigning to a graduate seminar or an advanced undergraduate course on Tibet several of these chapters each at the start of a different unit. The chapters are not all equal. For instance, the chapter “Ritual” is a mere fifteen pages long and hardly does justice to the topic. On the other hand, the chapters “Domination,” “Law,” and “War,” for instance, stand out for their clarity, comprehensiveness, and even originality (in the case of “Law”).

In conclusion, the reader will learn of the variety of mechanisms in place in premodern Tibet that contributed to its stability and due to which we speak of “premodern Tibet” as a relatively homogenous entity. Schwieger does not ignore change, especially in the chapters on relations with the Qing court, law, and war. However—and here I attempt to surmise the import of Luhmann's theory for the book's argument—those very mechanisms and the excessively “closed” nature of Tibetan society (p. 5), which endured for centuries and did not just assert themselves in the twentieth century when threatened by novel technologies or concepts, were inflexible and ill-suited to the developing and aggressive world system of nation-states.