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261 On March 10, 1959, after a popular Tibetan uprising against Chinese troops stationed in Lhasa, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama fled Tibet and received political asylum in India.1 Approximately a hundred thousand Tibetans followed him into exile. The vast majority of Tibetans—both those living in exile and those still in Tibet—consider this date to mark the beginning of Chinese colonial occupation of their homeland, an occupation that brought with it the most widespread destruction of Buddhism ever witnessed in Tibetan history. From the point of view of the Chinese government, 1959 marks the final stage in the “peaceful liberation” of the Tibetan people from the yoke of the feudal oppression they had suffered at the hands of the Tibetan aristocracy and religious elites. Whatever one’s political viewpoint on what has come to be known as “the Tibet question ,” one thing is clear: the face of Tibetan religion has changed radically in the wake of Chinese control of Tibet. From 1959 to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, thousands of monasteries and nunneries were destroyed, tens of thousands of monks and nuns were forcibly laicized, scores of high-ranking monastic officials were imprisoned or executed, and a large portion of Tibet’s religious-artistic patrimony was confiscated, destroyed, or sold on the international antiquities market. Tibetans are a devout people. Religion is at the very heart of Tibetan ethnic identity,2 and monastic institutions are one of the hallmarks of Tibetan religion. According to the most conservative estimates, monks made up 10–12 percent of the total male population (Samuels 1993:309 and appendix I) in central agricultural regions (the percentages for nuns being somewhat lower). Most Tibetans had close family members—children, siblings, aunts or uncles—who were monks or nuns. Monasteries served as a focal point for many lay religious practices. They were places that people visited to 10 State Control of Tibetan Buddhist Monasticism in the People’s Republic of China José Ignacio Cabezón UC-Yang-rev.indd 261 UC-Yang-rev.indd 261 8/27/2008 1:02:04 PM 8/27/2008 1:02:04 PM 262 / José Ignacio Cabezón worship, to circumambulate, and to make offerings. Monasteries were also the site of important villagewide or regional festivals and pilgrimages. Because of the importance of monasteries to Tibetan religious and cultural life, it is not surprising that Tibetans should view the Chinese government’s systematic dismantling of Tibetan monasticism from 1959 to 1976 as part of a multipronged strategy to destroy Tibetan cultural identity. Like religious institutions in the rest of China, Tibetan monasteries benefited from the more liberal policies toward religion that the CCP set into motion in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Over the past two decades, many of Tibet’s monastic institutions have been rebuilt and repopulated by monks and nuns (though never to pre-1959 levels). The reestablishment of monasticism in Tibet was, of course, welcomed by Tibetans. Like the Han Chinese majority, Tibetans in general (and Tibetan clergy in particular ) began to test the limits of their newly found freedoms, exploring, for example, whether the liberalization extended to other areas of life beyond religion. Beginning in the mid-1980s, monks and nuns played a prominent role in organizing a series of pro-independence protests in Lhasa. The government ’s response was quick and severe, leaving no question that such actions went beyond what it was willing to tolerate. Lhasa was put under martial law, the monks and nuns who had participated in the protests were jailed, and new policies were instituted in an attempt to tighten control over the monastic population, which, from this point forward, was seen as the most potentially destabilizing internal force3 threatening the government ’s control of Tibet.4 I lived among exiled Tibetan Buddhist monks in India from 1980 to 1985, and have been visiting the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) for research purposes since the late 1980s. This chapter is based on various studies of Tibetan monasticism in post-Mao China (Goldstein & Kapstein 1998; Swartz 1994; International Campaign for Tibet [ICT] 1996, n.d.), and on my own fieldwork in India and Lhasa over the past fifteen years. It focuses especially on the three largest monasteries in Lhasa, the socalled densas, or “seats of learning,” the elite monastic universities of the Geluk school that before 1959 were the largest monasteries in the world. My goal is to examine some of the policies and strategies used by the...

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