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5. Affected Signs, Sincere Subjects
- University of California Press
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5 Affected Signs, Sincere Subjects I am very apt to think, that great Severity of Punishment does very little Good, nay, great Harm in Education; and I believe it will be found that, cœteris paribus, those Children who have been most chastis’d, seldom make the best Men. All that I have hitherto contended for, is, that whatsoever Rigor is necessary , it is more to be us’d, the younger Children are; and having by a due Application wrought its Effect, it is to be relax’d, and chang’d into a milder Sort of Government. —John Locke With what emotion and tactics should monks reform the moral dispositions of others? For some Tibetan monks in India, this is a live and at times vexing question . In a range of male socialization practices in the monastery—public reprimand, courtyard debate, the meting out of corporal punishment—Sera monks are asked to exhibit a kind of anger. But this affective state must itself be affected. It exists under the strictures of a morally inflected dramaturgy summarized well by the aphorism that contrasts outer wrath with inner benevolence, “dark,” menacing, rocky mountains with “white,” snow-covered ones. Distinguished from vulgar, worldly anger (zhe ldang), histrionic anger targets a monk’s moral habitus. It extinguishes his arrogance and kindles humility. Like the ideal of speaker “sincerity”(Keane 2002; Trilling 1972), the self implied is split into an inside and an outside, but, unlike sincerity , one must disjoin rather than align inner and outer states. For its apparent insincerity, but also for its uncanny resemblance to “real” aggression , this histrionic anger—anger performed, not felt—has come to trouble certain Tibetans in exile. It may not be troubling in debate, where ritualized violence has been left intact, but it is troubling in disciplinary practices like reprimand and corporal punishment, some of whose features have been undergoing reanalysis by Tibetans who aspire to ideals associated with the modern liberal speaking subject, such as rights, autonomy, and directness. This partial emulation of the liberal subject can be seen vividly through comparison, through juxtaposing, as I do below, disciplinary practices at Sera Monastery in Bylakuppe with those of the Institute of 127 Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala. The institute’s name itself suggests its attempt to break from the past, from “traditional” monasteries like Sera. At the institute the globalizing liberal subject seems to rear its head, displaying its attributes of rights and autonomy, clarity and sincerity, which the monks there strain to emulate. These attributes are no random assemblage but a bundle of morally weighted ideals concerning language, affect, and personhood, whose genealogy is best understood in relation to a globalizing modernity, including liberal-democratic notions of autonomy and rights, as well as to the ideals of denotational “clarity” and “sincerity” that have been communicative desiderata since at least the seventeenth century. These ideals, conveyed across transnational networks involving human rights advocates , religious aid agencies, foreign Tibet activists, and others, have become objects of partial emulation in exile projects that court sympathy. Practices of courting sympathy with those abroad can sometimes change the way one makes monks at home, at monasteries like Sera. HOW VIOLENCE BECAME A PROBLEM Setting aside the disquieting application of pain to the body in corporal punishment , it is not hard to appreciate why monks might worry more generally about disciplinary practices like reprimand and corporal punishment: the practices’ failure to presume the disciplined subject’s rights and autonomy; their failure to be “clear” when communicating what has been done wrong or even who, specifically, has done it; their failure to put trust in a monk’s capacity to control himself; the whole asymmetrical, hierarchical tilt of these encounters, which makes them look alarmingly unequal and violent. If all this seems incompatible with Buddhist principles of nonviolence and compassion, and liberal-democratic principles with which these principles are designed to resonate, might this not jeopardize the projects of sympathy on which the exile government’s ethnonationalist struggle in part rests? Might this not disturb foreign supporters, whose gaze—real or imagined— could see in these behaviors a “culture” that deviates from the culture and politics of compassion and nonviolence promoted by the Dalai Lama? Such concerns, and the scrutiny of Buddhist institutions these concerns inspire, cannot be understood apart from the exile government’s positions toward violent resistance in Tibet and the engagement with liberal-democratic ideals, which stem from the early days of exile. While the problem of violence, not to...