| Located in Zhuandao Township, Minhe County, Qinghai Province, Honghua Monastery has long been a place of cultural blending for the Han Chinese, the Tibetan and other ethnic groups near the border of Gansu and Qinghai provinces. It enshrined Shakya Yeshe who, as one of the most excellent disciples of Tsongkhapa, the founder of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, went to the capital twice for his royal audiences during the reigns of Emperor Yongle and Emperor Xuande and was granted the title of Jamchen Choje in the ninth year (A.D.1434) of the Xuande reign. Word has it that on his second trip to the capital, Jamchen Choje religiously chose a site for building a monastery called dam chos thar gling at Dzomokhar in Hezhou. Since the death of Jamchen Choje, the royal court of the Ming Dynasty ordered his relics to be buried in this monastery and thus in the seventh year (A.D.1442) of his reign, Emperor Yingzong ordered a monastery to be built by officials in Hezhou and Xining, denominating it as Honghua, and Buddhist appendants such as towers, compounds and a castle to be built for worshiping Jamchen Choje’s relics, of which fifty-five official monks were appointed as guardians. Generations of his disciples, since Zhangxingjizangbu, were given positions like Master of the State, Master of Buddhism and Buddhism Supervisor by the royal court of Ming. Centered around Honghua Monastery was the tribe of Honghua, a minority tribe submitted to the early Ming Dynasty. Through the dynasties of Ming and Qing, Honghua Monastery gradually developed into a local social organization with a hereditary system and integration of religion and politics, and the Honghua tribe was at once a minority group paying taxes to the court in the form of horses and a monastery based tribe in Hezhou. In its zenith, Honghua Monastery administered virtually all local social affairs including agriculture, politics, economy, justice, taxation, religion and culture, and played a role in Ming’s guard-post system, the tea-horse trade, and the tributary trade in the dynasties of Ming and Qing. The monastery started to decline since the Qing court’s crackdown on the rise of Luobuzangdanjin. The reform in the administration system of Qinghai not only brought the whole province to the full control under the royal court, but also significantly undermined Honghua Monastery by annulling Master of the State and Master of Buddhism. During the reign of Emperor Tongzhi, the monastery was destroyed by warfare; it was rebuilt and destroyed several times since then. Since its reopening in 1983, this ancient monastery, with a history of more than four hundred years, has been facing new challenges and opportunities.Through methods like historical textual research and ethnological field work, this thesis examines Honghua Monastery’s history and describes its current situation, with the aim of reconstructing its rise and decline. Changes in aspects demonstrated by Honghua Monastery, such as system, society, culture and national identity, are analyzed in this thesis in the hope of being more inspiring. In the last chapter, the author offers suggestions on maintaining Honghua Monastery, promoting the essence of traditional culture and revitalizing Buddhist monasteries, hoping that those suggestions could have a positive influence on the survival and development of Honghua Monastery. |
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