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Available From UC Press
Discipline and Debate
The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery
The Dalai Lama has represented Buddhism as a religion of non-violence, compassion, and world peace, but this does not reflect how monks learn their vocation. This book shows how monasteries use harsh methods to make monks of men, and how this tradition is changing as modernist reformers—like the Dalai Lama—adopt liberal and democratic ideals, such as natural rights and individual autonomy. In the first in-depth account of disciplinary practices at a Tibetan monastery in India, Michael Lempert looks closely at everyday education rites—from debate to reprimand and corporal punishment. His analysis explores how the idioms of violence inscribed in these socialization rites help produce educated, moral persons but in ways that trouble Tibetans who aspire to modernity. Bringing the study of language and social interaction to our understanding of Buddhism for the first time, Lempert shows and why liberal ideals are being acted out by monks in India, offering a provocative alternative view of liberalism as a globalizing discourse.
Michael Lempert is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
"Discipline and Debate offers both a vivid picture and a painstaking analysis of social and linguistic practices of traditional and post-traditional monastic education among Tibetans living in India." -Guy Newland, author of Introduction to Emptiness: As Taught in Tsong-kha-pa's Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path
"Ethnographically rich, interpretively acute and generative, and always lucid and compelling, Discipline and Debate is a singular contribution. Lempert moves with insight from detailed examinations of the language of monastic debate to broad gauge considerations of diasporic Tibetan Buddhist entanglements within its contemporary exilic world." -Don Brenneis, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz
“This extraordinary study sets a new standard for the study of the links between culture and social interaction. No one who cares about the study of religion, language or modernity—or who cares about the place of interaction in cultural theory—should miss this book.” -Joel Robbins, author of Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society
"Ethnographically rich, interpretively acute and generative, and always lucid and compelling, Discipline and Debate is a singular contribution. Lempert moves with insight from detailed examinations of the language of monastic debate to broad gauge considerations of diasporic Tibetan Buddhist entanglements within its contemporary exilic world." -Don Brenneis, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz
“This extraordinary study sets a new standard for the study of the links between culture and social interaction. No one who cares about the study of religion, language or modernity—or who cares about the place of interaction in cultural theory—should miss this book.” -Joel Robbins, author of Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society