Ritual Economy:Ethnography Of Hongpo Monastery In Dechen County,Northwestern Yunnan

The monastic economy of Tibetan Buddhist regions is an area in need of further exploration.Past studies mainly showed two orientations:Economic Reductionism and Rational Reductionism.The former makes an economic interpretation on the monastic economy from a purely objective perspective,while the latter makes a cultural interpretation based on Buddhist doctrines such as “almsgiving-merits” or “almsgiver-fields of merit”.The Hongpo Monastery in Dechen County,Yunnan Province offers a rich platform for delving into this topic.Based on years of fieldwork,this article attempts to engage in dialogue with the above two viewpoints by describing the career,livelihood and daily life of the monks,and analyzing the history and vicissitudes of the lay–monastic economy.Taking the historical context of “monastery-manor relations” as the ground color,the economy of the original family constitute the structural reason why monks choose to become a monk.The monastery features a high degree of imbrication between both sacred and secular aspects of the local society.Monks do not have monolithic livelihoods,but rather,are arranged according to the institutionalized differential seniority,combining with corresponding income from ritual services,both of which construct the disparity of livelihood structures of monk in the Hongpo monastery.Before the 1950 s,the “three chieftains and three Gelugpa monasteries” constituted the political structure of Dechen.At that time,the land in Dechen and the people who cultivated the land belonged to different chieftains and monasteries.In this structure,the monastery was mainly a taxation agency in the local society and barely involved in the ritual system of the village.Historically,monks received“salaries” and had an authoritative status,combining with the ethics of the Gelugpa Sect,made them showed a tendency to underestimate the ritual economy.Comparing the present with the past,the evolution of the ritual economy originated from the democratic reforms in the 1950 s.During th at period,monasteries and monks completely lost the economic foundation on which they used to live on.Religious revival and temple reconstruction in the 1980 s showed a tendency of “social relations”between local temples and local society.It is based on this social context that ritual service providers have become the main role played by contemporary monks in local society.Through this ethnography,we can see that the lay-monastic ritual economy as a "total economy" mainly shows four different contexts——the religious relation of almsgivers and fields of merit,the historical and political relation of monasteries and their manors,the market relation of ritual services and their remuneration,the social relation of rural monasteries and the local society.These four contexts of the lay-monastic ritual economy are interwoven mutually,and neither economic reductionism nor rational reductionism can reduce it.