Welcome people all around the world, and thank you for once again joining us for another interesting talk this week.
We're very happy to have Brent and some of them joining us.
Who is the author of his latest book, Building a Religious Empire, Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy and The Rise of the Globe.
Fresh off the press and it is a continuation, I think of his doctoral thesis, which already dealt with a very important monastery in under.
And he mixed up a lot of various disciplines, so that's going to be field work notes,
there's going to be proper philology, there's going to be diplomatic studies.
And he will also introduce the general outline of his book and then delve into the third chapter,
which deals with the institutionalisation of culture.
Brenton is currently an assistant professor of Buddhism and East Asian religions at Colgate University,
and was recently awarded a Fulbright Scholar Award to commence his research on a new project,
which is going to be the sort of precursor to his latest book, focussing on the three Dundon project periods.
And without further ado, Branson. Welcome.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Daniel, for inviting me and thank you to the the Tibetan Graduate Studies seminar and for having me.
I made the mistake just now of looking through the people present and and now deeply,
not deeply, but somewhat anxious because of the impressive roster of established scholars,
published scholars, as well as talking to a no doubt impressive group of Oxford graduate students.
So but it's also flattering, and it does make make this whole job of of learning about Tibet and researching
the history of Tibet seem more worthwhile to be able to share it with others.
So I really look forward to your feedback on this. As Daniel just said, I am mixing a lot of methodologies and I think I do that quite consciously.
But I suppose that's also my weakness. And so I'm not an expert in tantra.
I've been I have a fledgling interest in understanding it as practitioners understanding understand it, and I'm doing my best to to do that.
But the approach I take is somewhat different, as you'll see.
So as Daniel mentioned, my my talk is based somewhat on my recent, well, based very much on my recent book, Building a Religious Empire.
Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy and the Rise of the Group.
But it's also based on a trip I took in 2016 from Hohhot.
To either side, and from there up onto the Tibetan plateau, it's shining.
I travelled this route with a scholar in Inner Mongolia named Change City, who really did a lot of the work in opening doors for me there at Alisan.
He himself is a a student of the late Josten Rinpoche, and it seems the Queen has written about the history of this monastery.
So together we've been working on a perhaps an article.
It's still very much in the works, but I'll talk a little bit about that near the end of my talk today so that my talk today is.
I should kind of lay some general parameters before diving into the specific topic of a the domestication of tantra,
if I, as I've titled my talk today. My sustained academic interest has always been on institutions and institution building.
So as a graduate student, for instance, and as a postdoc, I was drawn to such thinkers as Max Faber, Robert Bela, Amitai Etzioni.
These are thinkers who, as I see it, see beyond the individual and also see through the hoary guise of ideology to
the inner workings of groups of communities of societies and institutions.
More recently been shown that Otago University,
who has himself written about senala monastic constitutions or Kattegat test for Buddhism in Sri Lanka, has brought to my attention.
An article published recently in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion
by a group of scholars who studied Japanese religion and Japanese Buddhism.
The title here why scholars of religion must investigate the corporate form.
The article Prevent presents a manifesto, and it calls scholars to take seriously the corporate form,
meaning the variety of ways in which people have collectivised and created organisations that
are seen as larger than any one individual and also seem to outlive the life of any individual.
They argue that that much attention has been given to religious doctrine, to values, to ritual, even to ritual specialists.
The laity. But the corporate form is what embodies all of these and often goes unnoticed and unexplored.
They further argue that the corporate form allows us to see where many of these different aspects of religion most intersect.
They say the corporate, the corporation, the corporate form, the institution is where individual subjects are made.
It's where their values and habits are stamped upon them.
It's where individuals contend over the purpose of their organisation and their determine its values and mission.
I have a few quotes from that article.
One is the corporate form, these corporations, they traverse and erode the artificial division of public and private,
in which many conceptions of religion depend.
And by this, I mean, I take it that they mean that the study of the corporation of the institution of the organisation.
By default causes to question some of the categories we create a scholar such as religion and secular or religious and political.
Their manifesto caught my attention because I spent the better part of the last
decade studying Buddhist monasteries on the on the plateau and the Tibetan Plateau.
They argue further that corporations make demands on all segments of society,
and so they by studying the corporate form, it presents some of the most important features of any society.
When people I quote here from their article, when people organise collective enterprises,
however informal or illegal, they need to negotiate their degrees of responsibility and goals of growth,
basically formal members, external stakeholders and societal expectations so all of society gets roped into the corporate form.
Finally, they urge scholars of religion to pay attention in particular to some of the following, and here I have three points from their article.
One is how religious organisations emphasise their contribution to the public good and work to strike a
balance between their shareholders who make up the organisation and stakeholders from society at large.
Have something to gain or lose by the organisation's existence and endeavours. I call this the what's good for General Motors is good for the country.
This is a quote from a former CEO of General Motors from the 80s, I believe.
Next, from again,
a point from their article that I think reflects my own interest in the study of institutions is how the organisation regularly presents itself as
an entity that can and must endure forever while presenting individual members as fungible and in the service of the organisation's larger mission.
And thirdly, how religious organisations require intricate systems of management to resolve internal tensions and disputes,
to maintain harmony and to maintain a positive public image, amongst other things.
And so. What I what I focus on in this in particular and this point is the intricacy of these organisations of these
institutions and also their role in helping to maintain and promote a positive public image of the organisation.
So all this has been rather theoretical and abstract,
so let me try to connect some of it up with my own work on the history of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries.
The the you my book can be summarised pretty easily.
The history of religion and it on the Tibetan Plateau over the past 400 years has been the history of the Gaelic school.
How that school came to power is often explained as having made very strategic alliances with martial and wealthy inner Asian powers.
First, the aurora and then later the Manchu ching.
And I don't argue with any of that,
but I do argue that it's not the complete story that the complete story must take account of what what these gave Luke,
what the Gaelic School did and what its advocates the Gaelic Lamas did once they secured that patronage.
And the answer as far as I'm concerned, is bureaucracy. That is, they legislated and administered a far flung bureaucracy.
So bureaucracy for me is the key word in the book's title. It's in the subtitle, but I had originally had it in the title.
I think the editors didn't find it sell very well, and so they they put it in the subtitle, but it for me, is the key word.
Bureaucracy calls to mind, of course, writing record keeping standardisation.
These are some of the hallmarks of bureaucracy. Max Faber called it the most rationalised known means of exercising authority over human beings,
by which he meant a system that attempts to maximise predictability through standardising action through codified, codified laws and practises.
In naming bureaucracy as the key to understanding the rise of the Gaelic school,
I am suggesting that it is best understood alongside states and state making and the practises of state making,
such as such as standardisation record keeping, organising, concentrating manpower in urban cores, conscription of males and so forth.
Unfortunately, some of the best records for looking at all of those aspects of.
Institution building lights say conscription requires archives.
And many of those are still unavailable to us, they're housed in secret in a way in the Potala Palace or in some major monasteries on the plateau.
So instead, I've made use of principally Azerbaijan of text known as Jike or monastic constitutions
to better understand how Gaelic leaders legislated and administered administrative life.
In these monasteries. So that means my attention has been drawn to the subject matter of these texts of these men as the Constitution's.
Here's some examples of what these monastic constitutions look like this is the first one I ever looked like looked at very short.
Then they get much longer at times,
so you will find them on brocades like this rolled up and usually held on to by the highest officers in the monastery,
either the Abbot or the disciplinarian. And then what?
More often one has access to them as this as a scholar in the form of block trends, which you see in the lower image here.
And many of these have been published in The Sun.
Boomer collected works of Gaelic Lamas, so the subject matter of these constitutions covers a whole range of things.
But the ones that I see most common occurring are these discipline and individual comportment,
delineating administrative offices and roles within the monastery,
codifying compensation and salaries, designating responsible parties for financing the upkeep of the monastery.
Creating a calendar of ritual activities be carried out hourly, daily, monthly and annually.
Designating a curriculum curricula of study, complete with protocols for debate examinations and the awarding of degrees,
creating a schedule and protocols for the proper execution of collective Typekit rights and more.
And you can guess that my focus today is on the last of these are the schedule and protocols for the proper execution of collective contract rights.
And what I said earlier that my methodology is mixed and then I'm not a specialist.
In part of the reason for that is because in looking through these, these monastic constitutions, they call upon a wide variety,
a range of different specialisations in, say,
scholastic system and Tibetan gave philosophy in the NAIA and discipline in tantra, amongst other things.
But again, today, my focus is on the latter of these.
I don't claim that the group are ruled by bureaucratic authority alone, clearly they have recourse to charisma and tradition too.
And I also am not claiming that other schools of Buddhism did not exercise similar tendencies toward legislation and administration.
In fact, the most,
most obvious example of a non-Catholic school that did have these tendencies towards legislation and administration is the Karmakar new school.
Most of the subjects these subjects here before you that you find in a Gaelic
constitution can be found in karma constitute a cornucopia of constitutions as well,
and notably, they're often earlier. So we're talking, in the case of the Karmakar argue constitutions about the 16th century.
However, the topics here are often scattered piecemeal across the various kamikaze constitutions,
rather than being found within a an entire constitution for organising administrating a large scale monastery.
The major takeaway also is this earlier non-NATO constitutions tend to have these characteristics in general.
They're mostly composed for retreats or hermit edges, and therefore focussed on maintaining the boundaries the sima of the retreat or some in Tibetan.
Their focus, therefore on having few possessions. The importance of meditation. They are guru centric.
They're focussed on the Lama, who is the founder of that retreat site.
There is also then a greater emphasis on the commitments to Somalia that bind a Tajik family together.
And they're often written by a prelate for his own monastery,
and that's also a significant difference because when we look at later date
constitutions beginning especially in the 1840s and then continuing on from there,
we see instead concerted attempts to codify these arrangements that many of which I've already I've already referenced.
Curricula, tantric rituals, liturgy, administrative offices and responsibilities and many, many other things.
There's a greater emphasis on the importance of impartiality amongst officers.
They may make explicit reference to other more centrally located monasteries, thereby creating networks a relationship between institutions.
And finally, they're often composed for monasteries far away by lamas that do not necessarily have any direct relationship with that institution.
So they're not necessarily the founders of that institution or or have any sort of ownership.
They're not going back proprietors or anything of that monastery. And so what they are doing are creating guidelines for the running of a monastery.
In the absence of a lama of a guru guru's presence, right, instead they emphasise and strengthen the the institutional protocols.
Right. And this is the hallmark of bureaucracy.
So if we return to some of these points I drew from that Journal of the American Academy of Religion article about the corporate form they are,
how religious organisations that we should be paying attention to,
how organisations emphasise their contribution to the public good,
how organisations regularly present themselves or the organisation regularly presents itself as an entity that can and must endure forever,
representing the individual members as fungible.
And how organisations require intricate systems of management to, amongst other things, maintain a positive public image.
Well, then we might think of, for instance, this line that appears in many Gaelic monastic institutions.
And this one is taken from John Cobas Monastic Constitution for the General Sangha.
As it is said in the entrance, the way of the body shop that this is Shanti Davies body cardio about data,
the soul of medicine for the suffering of wondering beings, the source for all happiness may the teachings abide along with support and honour.
And when this appears and ends on Cuba's constitution, as it does in later Gaelic constitutions, is often followed by this as well.
This is a paraphrase taken from the Abbey Dharma Kosher.
That that is the teachings are twofold, as for all the teachings of scripture, they are found with certainty in the three collections this Topeka.
And as for the teachings of Practise, they are the three categories of precious trainings there.
Moreover, as for the training of discipline, it is the support of the it is the support of the other two.
It's the support of the growth, stability and flourishing of the other two trainings. The Buddha spoke thus on more than one occasion.
Therefore, here most importantly, we begin from the training of discipline.
So doing, one must speak about some of the rules that will serve to purify the behaviour of those who reside in our monasteries.
So what we get from this is an emphasis on an argument.
Me made that Buddhism as a whole depends upon the well running of these monasteries and that these constitutions are required for that.
Sometimes you see even more grandiose claims, such as this one.
The happiness of society depends upon the teachings of the Buddha, and the teachings depend upon centres of the Sangha.
Those, moreover, depend upon the firm establishment of order, even if there is a large Sangha without order.
It is of no benefit other than causing great destruction to the teachings. When I say grandiose, it's not really the right word here.
But what I'm referring to here is this the happiness of society that depending on the teachings of the Buddha,
that that's the added element here, that that all of society that's actually already present in this earlier example, right?
That the soul medicine for the suffering of all wondering beings that is dependent upon what it depending upon the teachings,
the teachings depend upon what they depend upon discipline and order and where it is discipline and order come from.
It comes from the proper running of monasteries. So we might think of some of these things,
or we might know how how the offices went in the monastery are said to transcend
the prerogatives of any individual who might be inhabiting that office at a time.
So back to this earlier point, then how an organisation regular presents itself as an entity that can and must endure forever,
representing individual members as fungible. One example of this is the disciplinarian.
He, the office, is given precedence over the disciplinarian himself, and there are various rules about how that is.
The individual occupying that office must abide by lest the office itself suffer.
Again, a hallmark of bureaucracy or we might think of.
Let's see, is this the quote I was looking for?
Right, so this has to do with favouritism, but it also has to do with has to do with the positive public image of the monastery.
There's a quote taken from a constitution written for DOONG Monastery.
Given that this monastery was newly established as the field for receiving offerings for all in this region,
the officers must be universally upright, not succumbing to one's personal favourites or partiality.
This point was made early on, incidentally, by Tara Ellingson and one of the first English language articles on Jike on monastic constitutions,
and he wrote the principle underlying such requirements of aesthetics and religions in religious practise
is that the life of the monastic community should embody a Jolan xaba or a beautiful path of practise.
And this is tied to the importance of appearing morally upright in the eyes of lady and potential patrons.
So this speaks to that earlier point about the intricacy of the of corporations and how that intricate management is.
What it does, amongst other things, is help to promote and advocate the end of the positive public image of the corporation itself.
Now, tantra does not escape the attention of the authors of constitutions.
It, too is institutionalised that. That's my argument. I think tantra naturally lends itself to an an an analysis of transmission.
After all, the heart of tantra is the guru disciple relationship and the unbroken chain of transmission of counter teachings.
However, when we think of Tantra, I think we often think first and foremost of the individual benefits of tantra and
the intrepid practitioner who seeks out his or her guru to seek transmission.
For example, the first John Young shaper and the second Zhangjiakou took to both from and travelled to song in Central Tibet,
western central Tibet, where they sought out initiation and training.
In that same tradition of the Typekit generation and completion stages of the deity goo the major,
the figure that ultimately gave them transmission was known as is known as gunshot air.
He was over 80 years old when they approached him,
and he had previously not found anybody suitable to whom he could bequeath these teachings on who has a major.
But then he did. Ultimately, in sixteen eighty give these teachings to the first young man shaped by and sixteen eighty one to Janja.
Afterwards, both both jumping ship and and the Janja, who both had a, I think,
a very understandable response, they wanted to go off and meditate and practise.
And when they told this to one of the disciples of the late Panchen Lama, there they were immediately reprimanded and told this.
Are you going to throw away the teachings of the victors on Cuba? Are you able to independently go your own way?
This is not fitting for great scholars who desire to maintain the correct philosophical viewpoint, such as yourselves.
In other words, they were told to go back and build institutions and teach others.
So when we think of torture, we often think of this sort of individual, though,
trekking out to find the teacher and meditating on that, or we might think of tantra in legitimising political power.
We might think, of course, of the Chilean relationship between political, donor and religious Dhoni.
But I think we often lose sight of the more fundamental role that Tantra has played in institutions,
in legitimising monastic institutions and in inner sectarian warfare.
So here I'm thinking, amongst other things,
of an episode that occurred in 16 11 when the punching lama requests tantric rights such as the sixty ritual cake
offerings of budget by Rama to be performed by Gaelic monks in their war with Islam and the Karmapa School.
I'm also thinking of and I recognise that he's in the audience today, so hopefully I'm not misquoting or misrepresenting.
I'm thinking of Mark Mills work and how in that that very complex work, amongst other things,
he argues for the essential nature of the tantric lama at the monastery.
There is no monastery just for monks.
There can't be, because, amongst other things, they play a foundational role and in the most important tantric rituals at the monastery,
such as the rituals focussed on the principle protectors of the monastery.
I would add then to that, of course, no modest, I don't know, no monastery, but arguably most monasteries, all monasteries, I don't know.
I'd like to hear what others think, how the founding myth involving the tantric taming of local spirits,
and I'm sure you all can list off several examples. Here are three that are that came to me as I was preparing for this this morning.
One is that Google Monastery and armed up and we read in the Chronicle the history of that monastery,
how a ad of who erected a statue of the Lord of Secrets.
But upon. And afterwards, the dreadful gods and spirits of this place were all tamed,
in particular in a Blackwell beneath what appeared like the genitals of a rock ogre led the pernicious serpent spirit.
It was only after that, of course, that going on could be founded, I think, to another modern day with which I'm most familiar.
Having spent most of my time in Orlando of Canton, which is a monastery in modern day Gansu province in the region known as Wadi Ore body and Ondo,
where it would all be, Dawjee came through in the early 14th century, taming lots of noxious serpent spirits along the way.
In this case, he is said to have also established 108 stupors, whereby he gave the monastery its current name short and dumb.
I think also of another small temple retreat actually in this same region known as Cesare, too.
And here Rope-A-Dope is again gone out of the gorge is said to have come through tamed a
local noxious spirit and defeated it with by throwing this particular red store at it.
And then on the right, we have the meditation cave where he is said to have meditated.
So there's lots of these myths about that that signal the really essential nature of the tantric adept of the Lama at a monastery.
I'd also add that to go back to Martin Mills book again,
his particular case study in that book of a certain goomba monastery in Ladakh demonstrates
the pattern of high ranking lamas coming from more centrally located monasteries,
usually and often in Lhasa, to more remote peripheral ones to officiate over tantric rites,
and that this leads to official and unofficial root branch relationships.
And more importantly, it ensured a level of ritual, orthodoxy and consistency across a very vast, dense distances.
All of these examples, I think all of the all of these examples, I think push us,
encourage us to think about touch and not just as an individual pursuit, not just as in its relationship with quote unquote secular political powers,
but also in its institutional setting and then specifically in monasteries.
Of course, the Gaelic, but did not invent the association between tantra and monasteries.
So returning to the title of my talk today, the Gaelic domestication of tantra,
what is it that the Gaelic deity uniquely and my answer focuses on two historical phenomena.
The establishment of Tantra Colleges Group at that time and the movement across the plateau of very prolific lamas.
And then in analysing those historical phenomena, I think there are two observations that can be made.
One is that what we see is the establishment of institutions that are specialising in the study and practise of tantra, amongst other things.
And this specialisation is a hallmark of bureaucracy and to.
The standardisation of Typekit study and practise what an observation we can make and draw
is that what we see is the standardisation of study and practise across Tibet and Mongolia.
So there's consistency being formed across again, very vast distances.
Now this wasn't done exclusively or even primarily through Jake or monastic constitutions, for instance, to go back to Jiang Janja,
who took to who I was just talking about a moment ago,
how he sought out the the sage tradition of tantric practises on Buddhism Marjah and wanted to then going into retreat meditate.
But it was reprimanded and sent back. Well, afterwards.
Not surprisingly, he wrote a a tract on the practises of these practises that he has since learnt.
And these, of course, are one of the primary ways by which Tantra and its orthodoxy would be disseminated.
Likewise, we see here in the case of the third two one loss on Chicken Ima, he wrote for his home monastery of Goolagong in Amado.
This track the manner for offering the day to day trauma or the Seder to host an llamo the glorious goddess.
And in that particular track, he he attempts to he claims to be correcting misunderstandings about vocabulary,
ritual substances and various other omissions and errors that monks at his home monastery were making.
The one goes on to claim further that his ritual manual is an unmodified presentation of the ritual that was introduced to the monastery
by its founder in the early 17th century and that that itself was a practise laid down earlier by the second third Dalai Lama.
So again, what we see is there are other various means by which ritual orthodoxy proxy is established and these connexions,
these networks between institutions are drawn. But the Jake.
Give us a bird's eye view of how this took place. And.
They they they give us a bird's eye view of it, and they they do so.
And with a focus on the institution, sintering the institution, these constitutions are for institutions unlike, say,
the ritual manuals here, which are not necessarily specific they can be, but they're not necessarily specific to an institutional context.
So as for these constitutions?
I've seen very few. That deal with.
Let me back up for a second. I've seen very few that deal with Typekit colleges, in fact, there's only one I've had been able to see and read,
and that's the $7 Dalai almost monastic constitution for a gumbo monastery in Ondo.
It's likely there are more, but that they're just kept in secret.
For instance, it said that the founder of gunmen was minus guns Hunter College,
who is the jungle and shaped by the first championship from LeBron Monastery,
that he delivered a disciplinary sermon, a ticktum for the newly established Hunter College,
and then later that was required to be memorised by monks enrolled in that college.
So they took time. Incidentally, this disciplinary sermons disciplinary sermons are often delivered based on Jake.
And so whatever it is this time was or is, and that monks were required to memorise this very likely like a constitution.
Unfortunately, again, I haven't been able to see it.
So where did the impetus for this institutionalisation and standardisation via constitutions come from?
Well, like so many other things, it starts with the great fifth Dalai Lama.
He was the most prolific author of monastic constitutions, second only to the second man shaped commando.
His two constitutions for to cajole monastery in southern Tibet, I think,
illustrate the degree to which he went to specify specialised places and specialised times for the performance of Tantra.
Now to gel, it's an it's an excuse me,
it's an exceptional monastery since it was founded by the second Dalai Lama and therefore is recognised as the Personal Monastery of the Dalai Lama.
But it can nonetheless really illustrate the organising and codifying intentions behind the fifth Dalai Lama's composition.
So he actually wrote two two monastic constitutions for court job one in 16:45 and another six years later,
and sixteen fifty one not coincidentally in the intervening years.
The Dalai Lama had composed a ritual manual for invoking the protectors of the monastery.
And for this, I'm very, very much depend upon the work of Chris Bell, amongst others,
for drawing my attention to some of the best sources for understanding that history.
So. He had composed a ritual manual for invoking the protectors of the monastery.
And so the second constitution is meant to direct its readers and the residents of Chicago to follow his the Dalai Lama's ritual programme.
What is this? Is it a pretty lengthy text and so I've only taken out two passages, one I quote in the next, it's just a paraphrase.
Here's one quote taken from this second monastic constitution directing the reader,
directing the residents of Chicago to follow his Ritual Typekit programme.
Maintain the detailed schedule of ritual text to be memorised, the ancient restoration ritual manuals from before.
For three headed McCollough by Saravana in the mock storm,
a glorious goddess called in come together with the newly compiled manuals for restoration rituals,
ritual cake offerings, praises and exhortations for Pinjarra McCollough and for Face Makhachkala and their two messages Putra indexing.
Later in this same constitution,
he specifies the specific dates and groves or places for the periodic and monthly rituals dedicated to Gaelic protector duties.
So back say, for instance, his worship in the Cool Grove on the 5th of each month.
Punjab McCullough on the 4th is McCullough are worshipped in the Cool Grove on the 8th and 23rd of each month.
The monks are glorious. Goddess is worshipped at the Goddess Palace on the 15th and 25th of each month.
The former Hakala and several others are in our worship at the protected palace on the 9th and 19th of each month and so on.
Now, the Dalai Lama, I mentioned he was the most prolific author of monastic constitutions.
Up until the 18th century, and he wrote many for monasteries.
Across the plateau, for instance, he wrote one for content who took the Rapture,
and in that particular constitution, he tells us that to take on Colbert's own charters as one's base.
And then he additionally instructs monks to adhere to specific country instructions by John Colbert by Tom Colbert,
disciple by the second Dalai Lama and by the Dalai Lama's disciple.
And to worship and visualise the three principal patron deities of the Gaelic school, as well as by two economy types and many other gods here.
So he instructs he here he is, building and disseminating a programme focussed on the principal architects of the Gaelic School,
its founder, the Dalai Lama's those figures disciples. That same liturgy of tantric rituals, including schedules,
is then repeated almost verbatim for the monastic constitution of NetOne Monastery and calm and Bach and independent.
And also in come. After the fifth Dalai Lama.
Others followed suit. So.
Some of these practises are literally carried to other more peripheral monasteries and installed there,
so recall my earlier reference to two one loss on chicken Nima and how he had written a ritual manual meant to
correct omissions and mistakes in the performance of that said or date trauma at his own home monastery of Gulam.
Trampling in that same manual to one tells us that the monasteries founder in the early 17th century had brought to gun on a
drawing of the glorious goddess that had been used by generations of the Dalai Lama's and that it now served that schoolrooms.
Inner sacra. It's not been. In addition,
he writes that the young or contour tones and music of that right of the day they talk
the or at Gunung are modelled on those implemented at Cajal by the second Dalai Lama.
A tradition that itself is said to have spread throughout all of the song, though, and come.
So in some cases, these are literally carried. But these later these ritual programmes are literally carried to other places on their periphery,
but often to these climates were composing monastic constitutions of their own.
One monastery that I've spent a lot of time studying over the years is going on chaplain.
Here's an image of its Hunter College. It's Hunter College was founded in 1710, a full century after the monastery itself was founded.
Incidentally, when the monastery was founded,
it was recognised as two distinct groups one living a few miles up the valley at a hermitage that was known as the Duke Day.
The practise group and then down here was the shape of the exegesis group.
This Hunter College again, was founded about a century after that time in 1710,
and it may have been founded with financial support from the XI emperor.
This is actually similar to Joseph Cobb. His son has written about Sarah Sarah, Monasteries Hunter College in Lhasa.
He says that that Hunter College is the youngest of Sarah's three colleges founded in the early 18th century.
As the Personal Ritual College of the ruler of Tibet left Hong Kong.
So. As I mentioned earlier. I've not seen the Constitution or discipline disciplinary sermon before going on to college here,
but we can get a sense of what the makeup of that college was like from other historical sources.
Recall earlier the story of Georgia, the second Georgia going on with John Young Schaper to Zong to seek out the same tradition of has a
major practise after these two were reprimanded and returned to Ondo upon John George's request.
The young man shaped from LeBron founded Go amongst Hunter College again in 1710 and gave the transmission and exegesis of the four part commentary.
And that's a major. This is a text by its own. And he gave a black protection cord of the same lineage by Jeff Holder to the abbot of Gorman,
to the former abbot of Long and to other elders at the monastery and then a former abbot.
The former Abbott of Goodman was appointed as the head of the Hunter College,
and then another figure was made the ritual head, or the Lama Uzi of the Hunter College.
Now, if we stop and think about what that moment represents, we can say, yes, there's transmission right there,
is this transmission of this, say teachings out of don't call us the four part commentary and us a major.
But what we don't see is this being exclusively given to quote unquote cart disciples, right?
We don't see, as was the case for Janja and G.M. when they sought out these teachings in song from Jakarta.
He was 80 on his on death's door had not yet bequeathed its teachings anyone.
Now, instead, we're in an institutional context where the recipients of these teachings are residents in the monastic in the Hunter College.
We also see that the figures who receive these black protection cords are not heart disciples rather than monastic officers.
They are the lama of the Hunter College, the head and then the ritual head of the Hunter College.
We also see that we also know that in this Hunter College,
it going on a commemoration day a day or two was established for the founder of the Hunter College.
Right. So the founder of the college, not of this say tradition, but rather of the college himself,
as elevated to such a point that he has his own commemoration day within the annual calendar of the institution.
And then finally, we also know that later Ritual Heads, the alumni USA of the Hunter College were chosen based on a very,
very bureaucratic criterion, namely attendance how often they attended.
Now, the one constitution, I have seen that. I don't know that I have actually images in these later slides, I ran out of time.
There's one image, a few images, but maybe I can just stop sharing my screen for a moment or two.
So the one constitution for ritual college that I have seen is the seventh Dalai Lama's view,
but that's the seventh under the most constitution for the give, but that's long ago boom and armado.
And I think the thing that most jumps out when you do look at that particular monastic college is how
similar it is to other monastic constitutions written for monasteries or philosophical colleges.
He doesn't. The Typekit College is described as having its own courtyard, its own kitchen, its own,
its own hall for assembling it had a full staff of specialised offices and officers such as the again the head of the Hunter Carmel College,
the llama. The original had the llama whimsy, the disciplinarian all the way down to the functionaries that blow on the corn they don't can.
The Constitution specifies an elaborate routine of ritual and worship.
It specifies the responsibilities that all these officers and functionaries are to carry out.
There's a curriculum complete with the same pedagogical techniques seen in the philosophical colleges.
And there's a calendar and specified salaries for the monks enrolled in the college.
So in short, the teacher in this case is not really something special.
It's simply another institutional option within the larger monastic complex.
And on that note,
I can say to that the Hunter College operated as part of a very orchestrated monastery wide programme that included the other institutions within it,
so the philosophical college, a medical college protector's hall and so on.
So Tantra has become part of the monastery.
Tantra also serves to protect the to protect and promote the monastery and the wider Gaelic school.
And another way, I think this is a pretty conspicuous example if you look at the evening assemblies at monasteries often referred to as good in.
Sarcophagus subject in these obstacle clearing is siblings George Dreyfus has referred to as the main ritual of the day.
And this is corroborated in the monastic constitutions that I've looked at to where they say,
if you've missed some of the earlier assemblies of the day,
you can make it up by going to the evening when the in the evening one is the principle of monastic constitution of the day.
The main function of this assembly appears to be protecting the well-being and integrity of the monastery, as well as the health of the monks.
So at Google, when you look at the the liturgical makeup of that evening assembly,
it's filled with a poster of basic rights meant to ward off evil meant to ward off disease and harm,
such as the white umbrella, the God, the Torah, the Heart Sutra, and it's a picture perfect recitation.
And the fourth punch in Lamas sangoma the lion faced when.
One finds that exact same literature, and right now I'm speaking principally about the as an example, I'm talking about the good in the evening.
Simply, I go to a monastery, but one finds the exact same programme of even an assembly at a Mongol monastery in the Sunni banner of Inner Mongolia.
And this is not a coincidence this because to go out in the third to callous and to Geneva
wrote a monastic constitution from his home and go along for that inner Mongolian monastery.
So perhaps you've noticed, maybe not, maybe it's confused, but perhaps you've noticed that I've been going in a somewhat chronological order,
starting with the fifth Dalai Lama,
his monastic constitutions and moving forward in time to figures like taekwondo's and shooting him out in the 18th century.
And I've also been moving from centre to periphery, from Lhasa to Ondo to Inner Mongolia.
And this has been my method in researching this book more generally.
First, we know that the gabled school came to dominate the religious and political landscape beginning in the 17th century.
It was centred first in Lhasa and from there spread outward, especially into Ondo Mongolia and the Manchu King Court.
And second, some of the largest Gaelic monasteries were located in Ondo.
And those ultimately became. Centres in their own right.
Spreading Caillou teachings tantra outward from there.
Many of these had extensive properties, states, satellite temples and so forth.
Go along, for example, is said to have had anywhere between 42 and 49 satellite monasteries.
Most of them are in the same region where it's located. But some of them are as far away as changeable.
And so my methodology has been trying to track down whenever possible constitutions
or other ritual texts composed by lamas associated with these new peripheral centres,
if you will, like Gurnam written for its branch monasteries or monasteries even farther afield in Mongolia.
And I've found several examples of this. So one is the constitution that I just mentioned.
They just alluded to that to go us. I'm choosing whom I wrote for a monastery and Suneet banner.
And so sometimes identifying these, the the dissemination of a tantric programme is interpretive, in other words,
it's looking literally sending them side by side and just looking at comparing them and seeing whether or not they
are the same as was the case with good long evening assembly and this Inner Mongolia monastery in Stoneybatter,
which were entirely the same. In other cases, though, it's just very explicit.
For instance, Armados LeBron Monastery, it's Hunter College, was founded in 1769, shortly after it was.
The monastery itself was founded, and just a couple of years after that, in 1719, the first jumping ship composed a constitution for his monastery.
And in that he tells us quote that well,
he tells us that tantra is said to be quote bound to the tradition of contour tones and melodic chants at the glorious Lower Hunter College.
Do you, me and Lisa go along also explicitly said to be modelled on you and Lisa another.
The bottom height the South Monastery in Alaska that I showed an image of at the very outset that two is said to be modelled on you,
me and Lhasa, as well as actually a shallow monastery.
So we see. This movement outward, further and further outward.
Another example is one of Google's branch monasteries.
There. The local farmer who had trained at the Long Goes to this branch monastery and establishes
the territory the first day trauma offering to Lama quote like that going on.
So again, it's a very explicit reference here that what we see as a mapping,
a modelling of what peripheral monasteries are more centrally located once.
The final example I'll give of this movement outwards, this process of standardisation and dissemination.
Actually, you know, I see that we're running short on time.
When I was going to point to the last example is of Byton Height, the South Monastery in Alaska.
That constitution written by this the third John.
So the rebirth of the figure who had gone to Zong and sought out the sage tradition of Typekit teachings.
He, sometime after the founding of Barton Heights, or sometime after 1757, composed a monastic constitution for this Mongol monastery in Alaska.
And it's a thoroughly tantric constitution and the main takeaway amongst many things.
There's a very long constitution too, but very explicitly in that constitution.
It says that the practises there are to be modelled on the Duma in Lhasa and shallow as well.
So. Those are that that's the main methodology I followed in trying to map out this process of standardising monastic practises,
standardising monastic administration and then disseminating it outward so as to
build what I somewhat provocatively call in my book title of Buddhist empire,
right? A cohesive, a cohesive Buddhist system.
I'll stop there. Thank you. Very much of.