Educating monks: Buddhism, politics and freedom of religion on China's southwest border

This dissertation explores how religion and politics work together in Sipsongpanna, a minority region in contemporary China. I examine the institutions and practices of monastic education of a Tai, Theravada Buddhist minority group of China, the Dai-lue, particularly as they have emerged in the first three decades after the death of Mao Zedong. While traditional forms of monastic education continue to be practiced, a leading group of Dai-lue monks have also established their own Buddhist Institute and fostered ties with both transnational Buddhist networks and the Chinese national Sangha in order to send their students abroad for Buddhist training. In these contexts, monks and novices do not simply learn how to be monks, but they also learn how to be members of particular communities. In other words, I argue, monastic education reveals agendas that a community or a state has for its religious actors.; I examine the training of Dai-lue monks and novices in the village temples and Buddhist Institutes of Sipsongpanna, in a Buddhist Institute of Shanghai, and in monastic high schools of Thailand in order to understand the role the Buddhism plays in the formation of Dai-lue identity, particularly in relation to the Chinese state. Rather than seeing Buddhism as a source of resistance to the Chinese state, I suggest that Theravada Buddhism is a resource for developing a subnational identity among the Dai-lue, an identity which asserts distinction within China without seeking separatism. The monks of Sipsongpanna avoid troubles that other religious actors in China have faced in fostering politically potent identities and practices by exploiting the legitimacy given to "normal religions" by the Chinese state, and by practicing politics in a depoliticized mode. In the conclusion, I suggest that rather than being a source of tension between minority groups and the Chinese state, religions (and in particular transnational religions) mediate the relationship between the Chinese state and minority groups.