Hello, everybody, and welcome to the 76th of the second time here in Oxford we call Hillary.
And today we're very offended to have Nicholas Hobhouse in the U.K. and present his research on contemporary education.
Nicole holds a Ph.D. and. Presidential Scholarship at the University of Hong Kong.
His Ph.D. research in the Centre of Buddhist Studies is supervised by Dr. Georges
Hultquist and focuses on the intellectual history of contemporary monastic education.
As part of his research in 2021,
he published an article in collaboration with Catherine Hardy entitled Shouldering His Group's Legacy Campus Culture and Logos.
Discourse in relation to Sangam after the death camps can be a prince of.
And in 2022, he presented a paper at the arts conference entitled The Meaning of Monastic Curriculum at La Linga,
a close reading of its structure, textual content and pedagogical influences.
So, Nico, if you wouldn't mind sharing your screen.
And without further ado, please take it away.
So thank you very much for welcoming me to be with you this evening.
And like I was just saying, actually, before and before we got going, I graduated from Oxford in 2015.
I studied classics as an undergraduate, so I really feel like I'm back among friends this evening.
And even though I'm here in Hong Kong, I very much feel like home with you over there.
And so just for some context, I'm currently at two and a half years.
Let me just so how has that changed as the slide changed?
Is that worked perfect? I am currently two and a half years into a four year PhD program.
In that time, I'd gotten to do quite a lot of specific information about the education at individual monasteries,
about individual educational leaders,
and about the different social, political and economic conditions in the various domains where human monasteries are found.
And so, however, I'm in the process, you could say, of trying to find a general big picture narrative that I can apply to the sect as a whole,
and that can serve as a frame on which to hang all of that specific information.
And what I'm going to present in the next 45 minutes or so is an attempt at an early attempt,
maybe at such a big picture narrative fleshed out with only some details given the limitations of time.
I invite you, please, to give as much criticism as you can because it is very much a work in progress.
I still got quite a lot of time in my Ph.D. and I would really appreciate any suggestion how I could really strengthen what I'm trying to say.
And so when I say I am researching contemporary monastic education,
I use the word contemporary to refer to the period from after the ruptures brought about by the Maoist invasion of Tibet in the 1950s,
up to the present day. If we look at the narrative education as it existed before that inflection point,
it's important to observe that systematic monastic education only took hold in the numerous act in the 19th century,
with the foundation of the shrieking Rashtra at Doctrine Monastery by L.S. Cantata in 1848.
In earlier history, there had, of course, been significant individual, almost lightning, temper and so on.
And moreover, monasteries like cattle and drilling had indeed at various times offered forms of education.
However, at no point had the numerous collectively and consistently engaged in scholasticism in the full institutional for Pioneer.
At some point I talk from the 11th century and richly developed in the Gaelic Saint especially and notably early on Marcus.
It primarily be concerned with tantra and had not put much collective effort into the study and
commentary and interpretation of the Sutra Corpus of Indian Treatises on the five major topics of media,
mankind, Army, Abbey, Dharma, Denier and Ramana.
It was not only with the foundation and subsequent development and documentary singers,
etc., that monastic education even established a foothold in the new respect.
After that beginning, however, it became more sophisticated and spread more widely.
This happened in part due to the activities of a number of key figures, most notably and me come from and kept pushing through on the slide.
The historical context of these changes included the Remain movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries,
during which Masters of Enigma continue and sacrosanct in Eastern Tibet collaborated
in preserving and reinvigorating their lineages in the face of Gaelic for Germany,
while upholding a non-sectarian ethos of respect for all Tibetan Buddhist lineages.
However, the development of monastic education in the Numa sect and indeed the increased emphasis on sincere
monasticism and more generally was at first isolated as a phenomenon in its own right by Jean Smith,
who labelled it with the umbrella term the demand movement.
Now, a key point I would like to make is that at the time of the Maoist invasion in the 1950s,
the evolutions triggered by the foundational of dictionaries in Rashtra a century before had not yet fully played themselves out.
While certain approaches to conducting in monastic education had become very influential,
much was still contested and changes were still taking place and no settled equilibrium had been reached.
And even where consensus was emerging, perhaps its roots were maybe not yet that deep and had the potential to be reversed.
So. Let me give you just some illustrative examples of what was still somewhat in flux.
For one, the value of studying at a shadrack,
namely a designated semi-autonomous institution within a monastery with resident teachers
and students dedicated specifically to monastic education was still somewhat contested.
While there was a burst of scheduled construction in the first half of the 20th century, other approaches still existed within the new respect.
For example, a child, Agha,
took a room which gave both textual and meditative teachings within the less structured environment of a religious encampment,
a god where study and practice were more integrated.
While from biographical accounts from the period,
you get the sort of sense that there were a number of peripatetic teachers and students who were moving around in order to give and receive teachings.
And also, of course, the new workers continued to have a rich,
ongoing custom of yoga practice that did not engage much in monastic education in general.
Second on curricular questions. Even when there was a schedule.
The curriculum somewhat varied, as Chris Hiebert has shown in a recent PhD.
A characteristic feature of the tracing a shudder was that from from early on, its model curriculum, even if not always fully implemented in practice,
moved in a gradualist fashion from a foundation that included the study of Tibetan grammar through sultry topics up to temporary topics.
However, the catch all shredder, at least at the time of its foundation in 1906,
offered a curriculum often referred to in the sources as the 100 texts of catalogue issued whose precise content is currently unknown,
but which seems to have been focussed mainly on patriotic topics, not satiric topics.
Then, even if such topics were offered, there were often perhaps disagreements about which Indian root treatises exactly should be used to study them.
Now ten pushing to introduce an extremely influential rubric of the 13 great texts The Children
Jerusalem but of India wrote treatises worst studied not least soundtrack features Nadia and Tara,
the imagine to which Nippon wrote an important commentary.
And then even when there was agreement on the study of particular Socratic treatises.
The question of what commentary should be used remained contested.
Notably, Changa wrote deceptive annotation commentaries tendril to his 13 great texts that avoided the philosophical and
sectarian logical disputes that had animated into sectarian Tibetan scholastic debate for almost a millennium,
and instead went back to the words of the Indian Root text.
While me and his successors directly engaged in those Tibetan disputes and staked out a distinctively new position in relation to the Third.
Certain pedagogical issues were contested, most notably the role of debate as the name Shadrach reveals,
which one could literally translate as explanation, college or commentary or school.
This institution, the institution founded by the Alsatian,
entirely self-consciously contrasted itself to Gamecock and educational institutions where debate was the dominant pedagogy.
Indeed, it was a verb. Instead, it was verbal explanation, shaper of the root treatises that was emphasised.
Nevertheless, in a large part, due to the influence of me, power debate did start to gain at least some prestige within the numerous sect,
as his biography and writings attest me on occasion engaged in both verbal and written debates.
Perhaps most significantly, he wrote a commentary on Democrats each time a numéro B agreement on white hair and other related
works that brought the topic of prominent humour into the mainstream for the first time.
And I think since debate and respect for debaters and pedagogy is to a high degree
rooted in respectfully so teria logical of a manner as a topic of serious study.
The writing of this commentary was crucial, by contrast,
in pushing the place less emphasis on debates and did not include any criticism for Obama in his 13 great texts.
Now these are just some pertinent examples, but hopefully give you a flavour of the ongoing dynamism of the new media before the 1950s.
It is therefore fruitful, I think, to muse on what might have happened if the Maoist invasion had never taken place.
What the various issues I have just discussed have resolved themselves gradually.
And would the new mosques as a whole have converged on a fairly conform settled approach to monastic education,
perhaps centred on Dr. Ministry or a few other key monasteries?
I came to how the ghettos before the 1950s had a fairly settled system of monastic education dominated by the three seats the Dems have sought,
or what many issues have continued to be contested.
Would a diversity of approaches continue to have been seen?
With this question in mind. Let us turn to the new monastic education scene in the present day.
What immediately drops out is a striking pattern whereby most of the newer approaches
to monastic education in India and Nepal scheme in Bhutan are relatively similar,
whereas those in eastern Tibet show much more diversity.
From the same starting point, the still dynamic educational situation at the onset of the 1950s,
one world of monastic education seems to add up towards a sort of unity, whereas the other is much more diverse now.
Here you see a short list of all the chatter I've gathered information from in and what follows.
I will group India, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan together with the shorthand exile.
Even though, of course, and northern Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan were historically Tibetan Buddhist regions.
Even before large numbers of Tibetans came into exile from the 1950s onwards.
My reason for this is that the monastic education scene in those regions has been
strongly influenced by the developments in the wider Tibetan exile community.
So let us look at some details of this. The basis for what I will describe are official documents and interview
transcripts relating to Minister of Education gathered during fieldwork in Nepal,
Sikkim and India last summer, but also from contacts in eastern Tibet.
Currently, my knowledge of the situation in exile is more comprehensive and detailed, as you can probably see from that slide.
But I do already have enough information about Eastern Tibet to draw, I think,
meaningful conclusions and hope to supplement that information through fieldwork there this summer.
Here's a bit of a homemade map. You can really see yellow dots, but it will be very clear where basically the location of these, etc. are.
So you can see down all the way in South Indian Nebula Kupang, in northwest India, around Dharamsala,
Bear in Dehradun and in Nepal, mainly around Bodo in Kathmandu and Gangtok, and also a number in Bhutan.
And you might notice, interestingly, that the exile region is far more geographically spread out,
even though I'm going to argue that the educational effort is far more conformed to,
in fact, the Eastern Tibetan monasteries, at least on a map of this scale,
seem to be rather close together and yet are very often very different educations.
And here just, you know, that flavour is an example of what a curriculum document looks like.
This is from one angle, you know, I've got these sorts of things, you know, this one I think is from them don't show a monastery in India, you know.
So this is the sort of information I've been using for my sources.
So if I then move on.
So in examining the elements of the contemporary systems of monastic education,
one sort of helpful way of just organising the discussion is to group those elements
whose origin predates the 1950s together and those whose origin coast states that period.
Now, one might be tempted to further label those categories as traditional and modern.
However, caution should be exercised as Janet Jackson discusses, and those terms can be taken to imply various assumptions which must be questioned.
First, for example, the assumption that the traditional situation that existed in Tibet before the 1950s was static.
In fact, as I've already said, it was a period of quite dramatic change within new monastic education.
Second, the assumption that contemporary Tibetan Buddhist religious figures only exercise agency insofar as they seek to preserve a traditional past.
Well, modernity is conceived as a phenomenon that somehow imposes itself upon them from outside without their agency.
This assumption, too, must be questioned.
Nonetheless, I think there's still something potentially fruitful about thinking in terms of tradition of modernity,
even if only heuristic clearly, and for the purposes of sort of categorising what you see within a curriculum.
So I use the terms, but with with caution. Okay.
Interestingly, it's not uncommon to hear non monastic Tibetans both in exile and in eastern Tibet,
referring themselves to how traditional monastics in general are.
And moreover, monastics themselves often explicitly use the language of needing to adapt to the modern world.
Starting then with those elements whose origin predates the 1950s.
A Well, you know, the traditional elements in inverted commas.
A first fact to observe is that pretty much every large animal monastery in exile now has a shelter
and a permanent set of teachers and students whose primary responsibility is monastic education,
even if they also partake in ritual duties. So that's in exile in Eastern Tibet, too.
There are etc. The major modern monasteries function paleo cattle construction as well as at the key institution of Langa.
However, there's also the striking example of the doctrine, which has a population of thousands of monastics, including a majority of nuns,
but which largely eschews monastic education and instead focuses on tantric rituals and meditation from the preliminaries onwards.
Second, in exile, they shutter. Education is almost invariably fixed with a precise, clearly defined curriculum.
In Eastern Tibet, by contrast, while some curriculum affixed,
there is also a continuation of what Baucher has described as the apprentice mode of monastic education,
where the relationship between the teacher and the student is deemed more important than the exact textual content of what
is studied and where there is greater flexibility for the teacher to decide what to teach in a fairly spontaneous fashion.
Then, even insofar as there is a more or less fixed curriculum in exile, there is notable conformity.
For one, the main curriculum at. Most set schedule, with only a couple of exceptions, has nine classes corresponding to nine years of study.
These tend to be structured with some crossover as one year foundational topics, including grammar and and Shante Davis Auditorium.
Atara. Sorry, has the screen changed? Is it back here as five years for trick topics and three years for tantric topics in Eastern Tibet?
However, while the panel curriculum has the same nine classes, the Soul Train curriculum has 13 classes.
While the longer curriculum, although grouped into seven classes, tends to take around 15 years to complete.
So again, the eastern Tibetan situation is far more varied than the situation in exile.
As the textual content in exile.
Most of the schedule curricula again quite similar in both the textual content and the order in which those texts are studied with minor differences,
often being the swapping in of want of a text from one's own specific lineage where there is a like for like alternative,
such as the you of Chechen Guilds, House, Dharma Histories, children, act structure and even a pool or the use of mingling.
Gilman's commentary on the abysmal encounter at meal drilling, notably at all exile,
etc. There is an integration of both my parents and Shinoda's commentaries.
Even if the precise, exact numbers of those commentaries vary.
However, in Eastern Tibet, there is a much greater range of choices in regard to this question.
Substantially similar uses several commentaries by Shen during the main curriculum, which is more than at most children in exile.
But Morrow does strikingly uses none of his sultry commentaries at all, while emphasising every one of me count me puns, my dynamical works,
and also having a much extended course dedicated to the study of the great perfection and catch up to shed English
commentaries on not used as the pedagogy in exile with some minor variation explanation shaped by still emphasised.
But debate certainly tends also to be practised in a designated evening session.
And there is the widespread study of debate manuals, such as the tactic by camp of children.
In the contemporary period, a number of tempos and locales across the Excel space and numbering especially have written introductory works for use
in educational settings on promote and debate such as can put some drew camp of problem share out can pay Musharraf,
the concurrent Arkansas and others in eastern Tibet.
By contrast, while debate is certainly practised practised, its value is, in some cases treated with more scepticism.
For example, General Onus, who runs the BBC now but was at up in the early 2000,
told me that the state that for a long period of time while writing his own Ph.D. and
told me that the meeting camp at that time too was sort of a temper thought that debate
adulterated the new it was a much later accretion and that the schedule was the minimal
way of doing things and that the schedule should not be its immediate family debate,
college and even Campeau such and Lodeiro.
Larranaga where debate issues writes in is so much sunshine is so the volume one monastic should not restate debate for the core of their practice.
So again, a bit more variety which to interject.
As for you know in this categorisation into traditional and modern as aspect development whose origins
postings the 1950s in exile one sees a type formalisation of bureaucratised systems of examination,
including written examinations, sets and marked in a blind,
impartial fashion leading to standardised qualifications and the official at the completion of various stages of the curriculum,
but authenticated by official certificates. I've got some different examples here taken from spread across India and Nepal.
Of course, however, formalisation is a matter of degree.
A structured, relatively fixed traditional education was offered doctrine tracing before the 1950s.
This highlights how careful we need to be with rigid categorisations of traditional and modern.
Anyway, in exile this strong tenet, a trend towards academic formalisation is interestingly treated with some caution.
For an example, for example, in an interview with me talking in my room,
the founder of Concentrated Living in Nepal warned about the risks of being attached
to degrees rather than to the study and practice of the Dharma as its own end.
Nonetheless, there is a very clear, strong trend in exile towards academic bureaucratisation.
In eastern Tibet the situation is much less tightly formalised as far as I'm currently aware.
There are rarely official certificates awarded at intermediate stages of scheduled curricula and even the title of temple,
while awarded in a relatively standard academic fashion.
At some institutions like Leung College is often bestowed in a far less formal way by
other monasteries on the basis of esteem rather than measurable academic performance,
or in fact, more just with the traditional usage being the one who bestows the the nine vows.
A second modern development is the integration of new subjects, especially languages such as English and Chinese, and also science learning.
In fact, both in exile and in eastern Tibet. These subjects are rarely seen in the main curriculum, and indeed, if taught at all,
might only be taught in the school malhotra or a novice novice or be taught in an extracurricular fashion.
And in fact, I'm not. While I'm drawing this big contrast and between exile in Eastern Tibet,
I'm not able to state a clear contrast in regard to language in science subjects, as it seems quite often to be particular to individual monasteries.
So at least in this regard, not such a clear pattern of a standardised exile situation and the more diverse Eastern Tibetan one.
And the final well, I was just summarising some examples,
but a third model development one could talk about is the expansion of monastic education to nuns.
Now, this is very much an ongoing process.
I suggest that on this issue, the pattern I am highlighting does hold and that there is in fact notable conformity across the exile space,
whereas there's more diversity in eastern Tibet in exile than in the past have broadly speaking,
gone along with or even followed slightly behind developments for nuns in the Tibetan Buddhist media in exile,
more generally driven by the likes of the Dalai Lama or Tibetan nuns projects and even international organisations like I can detect.
The clear trajectory is that nuns are gradually becoming able to receive a very similar education to that of monks.
However, no new nun in exile has yet been awarded the title of Can Most Be Female Equivalent of Temple,
despite that very title being awarded for the first time by the Secular House last year
and the title objection MA being officially awarded in the Galaxy extent since 2012.
However, I get the impression from my fieldwork that when one new monastery, most notably nuns relief, finally does get around to awarding that title,
it will probably be taking it will be taken up in Mingma monasteries across the board, or at least to have a nunnery, by contrast, in Eastern Tibet.
Strikingly, that does not seem to be one approach to this topic.
While for most nuns there are precious few opportunities for rigorous monastic education had long gone,
Liang and Taylor have shown as this they have shown an educational program
culminating in the title of Campbell was introduced already back in the 1980s,
with the first graduates receiving the Canmore title in the 1990s.
So that summarises some of the large scale contrasts between the Myanmar state education in exile and in eastern Tibet in the contemporary period.
And of course, in such a quick summary, I've simplified a great deal and have glossed over what diversity does exist, even in exile.
But hopefully I've illuminated what I take to be the overall pattern.
So what might be the reasons for this large scale difference between the relatively
being educational milieu in exile and the relatively diverse media in Eastern Tibet?
I contend that the structures of collective leadership and organisation in exile have been a key factor maybe certainly not the only factor,
but a key factor that has allowed the monastic educational model brought to maturity at
one main monastery in particular to be widely adopted across the entire exile space.
While the absence of an equivalent system of organisation has prevented anything similar happening inside Eastern Tibet,
thus I do not believe that the relative consensus in exile is because the monastic leaders at separate
monasteries have all individually come to the same conclusion about the best way to combine the traditional,
traditional and modern aspects that serve as the ingredients from which a contemporary meaning of monastic educational system might be constructed.
Were it not for the collective organisation of the new members in exile,
I think you would see a much greater range of educational approaches akin to what is seen in eastern Tibet.
Indeed, mine drilling in India, which has a nine year formalised general curriculum.
A leading lama who I interviewed expressed worry that graduates of the shed are often neglected, mentioning ritual tradition,
leading me to speculate that if it was solely up to him, he would probably conduct this country in a very different way.
Let me spell out my argument by looking in more detail at the history of the contemporary period in exile.
Naturally, the monastery was founded by penury, became the throne holder of the pilgrimage to be occupied in South India in 1963.
It is notable that many of the modern monasteries of the numerous sect struggled to be re-established in exile at all,
partly due to the challenging conditions faced by the Tibetan refugees in general,
and partly due to factors specific to the individual monasteries such as that.
No senior figure capable of capable of reforming the monastery made it into exile thus of the ruling eventually,
which was founded in 1965, the Chechen army in 1982, the attack in 1984 and doctrine only in 1992.
The main cattle cattle monastery has never been re-established in exile.
The Shadrack ruling was formally established in 1978 after a great deal of
hardship due in no small measure to the perseverance of Canario Che himself.
Previous to that formalised niemeyer education, both monastic and monastic had been established on a small scale for what is now the Seeking
Institute of Higher Numa studies and at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies.
But neither of these have the capacity to recreate full scale education.
Moreover, previous to 1978, both Mundelein and Metrolink sometimes invited peripatetic teachers to hold classes for a period of time.
One educationalist of particular note in that period was can potential of increasing her share in Tibet,
who came into exile and taught at all four of the institutions just mentioned,
culminating in serving as the founding temple of Drilling Chater in 1978 before dying prematurely a year later.
And put Sondra at Sondra, who was arguably the most important link in transmitting documentary singer a system of education into exile.
But that is not to say that the curricular established didn't exactly compete even in
its traditional elements what was taught its own country singer before the 1950s.
This is interestingly highlighted when you compare its curriculum to countries in Eastern Tibet today,
which of course is also based in part on what was taught that before the 1950s and see that they diverge in multiple way, multiple ways.
Thus, as Piercey discusses in a 2015 article, the Underlings curriculum was modelled upon its option curriculum,
but also drew upon other references both from pre and post the 1950s,
including the nine year structure of the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies academic curricula.
Moreover, remains educational system continue to develop in certain ways even after it was first established?
Panel reports, for example, seem to have kept pushing for improvements in Tibet as evidence, for example, by a speech he gave in 1999,
where he noted that some senior members did not support debating, but that he personally thought it was very important.
And I quote from conclusion on Che Wang's translation of this speech in a lump on the path and they said you should develop debating skills.
The capturing coaches of the new tradition are not happy with the debates.
The reason I initiated it and maintained it is because it helps one to develop the intellect and retain scriptural knowledge.
But then coming back to sort of the main point I'm making, why why didn't the education system spread so widely?
It probably owes a lot to the fact that became capitalist entrepreneur,
who is the first to supply a service for which there is a large pent up demand.
Demand and not willing.
Shandra cornered the monastic educational market at an manly stage, which meant that its population of both students and teachers grew quickly,
which meant that it claimed prestige and could attract greater financial support,
which allowed it to grow and improve its educational offerings further and thereby attract more students and teachers and so on.
However, as I've said, the factor I really wish to emphasise is the wider leadership and organisation of the university in exile.
So coming into exile, the Dalai Lama and the exile government to establish wanted a leader to represent each of the main sects of Tibetan Buddhism,
whereas the other sects had well-developed institutions of leadership, whether the second treason, the composition and and trippers.
The Myanmar has had no history of such institutional leadership and instead had historically
tended to gravitate towards charismatic figures regardless of their institutional status.
Especially treasure to review tension. And perhaps because he was such a figure in 1962,
during which he was chosen by the numerous to fulfil the required leadership role which he held until 1987.
After his death, Hugo Canto took the role until he died in 1991 and then contribute to the role until his retirement in 2001.
Crucially, all three of these figures gave strong support to the monk underlings in its early years,
thus giving that Cedras some manner of official status as a shadow of the Nygma powers in general.
Notably in 1978, Diego County Repertory, even before he became the head of the new sect,
gave the official name to the shadow of the immaculate tone of Don't look repaid your meddling.
Importantly, he made it a new institute, not a political institute.
A few years later, in 1984, during which he wrote a formal letter in his official capacity as the head of the numerous sect eulogising,
and giving his blessing to the Shadrack. And this letter is still printed in front of the official curriculum booklet and distributed individually.
And then, of course, I don't remember Che himself once and of the Namesake could continue to give that institutional support.
So from the top down,
the first three heads of the numerous sect in exile who commanded both the individual charismatic but also the newfound institutional authority,
all gave their official endorsement to the shadow or representative of the new must sector as a whole,
meaning that the leaders of any other shadow that might be established later would naturally look to Shadrach as the model to follow,
lest they might seem perhaps to be positioning themselves in opposition to the officially endorsed Numa approach.
In addition to this, in part perhaps simply due to the straitened circumstances in exile and the need for cooperation,
but also important, no doubt because of the improved structures of collective organisation within the Negro sect.
Numbering schedule also became a key hub from which large numbers of teachers with a low or chemicals were sent out to monasteries across India,
Nepal seeking or Bhutan to help support the foundation of new children there,
or at least to help with less formalised types of teaching where resources were fewer over time.
Underlings good editorial department also produced standard textbooks in the debt problem and
page format that could help support the establishment of the non-trivial curriculum of study.
Example They look like this and I picked this up in a in a bookshop in Boulder, in Nepal.
So not necessarily. And this is one for me. It even describes a year of the courses for us for the fourth year of the course.
And this is me punch commentary on the team a drill so designated textbooks for a a curriculum that was then replicated and spread widely.
Such systems of leadership and organisation have not been as possible in eastern Tibet.
The case of language is particularly interesting since its foundation by Ken Cuccinelli puts up in 1980, it has played a role in Eastern Tibet.
That might sound somewhat similar to the role I just described for Nam, travelling in exile,
namely serving as a hub for training monastics who could then serve as teachers across eastern Tibet and indeed Tibet as a whole.
Indeed, for a time, Larranaga said that role not only for the new tradition, but for the other sects, too.
And grew to a size far greater than any monastery in exile in the house with its,
for example, with its population numbering 9300 in the year 2010, according to Capstone.
And that is also, I think, estimated to have increased even in subsequent years.
However, the conditions that have allowed Larranaga to play this role are very different from the situation for Nam drilling
and Longo's influence vis a vis the new matters across eastern Tibet has thus thus has a very different quality.
Notably, longer and poorer importance is derived not from any official status as the primary educational institute institution,
but to a high degree from the nimble way it is navigated the post-mao social political landscape.
First, as an encampment, a guard not subject to the same oversight as a monastery, and then later as a from 1987 as a Buddhist academy.
For sure, U.N. constrained, but also somewhat protected by government regulations.
However, the same political regime, regime in which lorem guard has been able to thrive relative to other institutions,
has also had a limiting effect on its ability to directly shape the education of other monasteries.
The Communist Party of China has tended to periodically clamp down on manifestations of Tibetan collective organisation in general,
while teachers trained at Lorengau have been involved in setting up institutions elsewhere.
This, as far as I can tell, has happened more informally than the process whereby no drilling officially
sends its own locals and campus to other institutions for designated periods.
On a slightly different note, but also related rivalries between monasteries in eastern Tibet arguably tend to be stronger anyway,
in part because these rivalries are also sometimes rooted in local regional identities.
In practice, what this is all added up to is that Longo's particular curriculum has not
seemingly been taken up as a replicable model by other leading English headdress.
Even when campus trained and armed guard have been involved in teaching.
But those other shooters and nor has the curriculum at any other one monastery been taken up in such a widespread way.
So I want to finish by reflecting on the implications of what I have said, what you know, what the implications might be for new movements,
for identity in general, especially, and especially for its scholastic and institutional identity.
Now, these really are very nascent thoughts, more sort of musings than fully formed ideas that I've only so fairly recently
started to sort of think about as significant in relation to my research.
But I'll sort of try some of them out and, and sort of see where they lead.
So there's lots of angles from which to attempt to answer this question.
The first point I would make is that both in exile and Eastern Tibet, it is notable that monastic education has been re-established at all.
The innovations of the so-called game movement were, as I said,
still relatively recent at the time of the great ruptures brought about by the Maoist invasion.
Given the enormous struggle it took to re-establish monastic education both in exile and in eastern Tibet.
The fact that so many institutions have indeed re-established,
etc. is notable and suggests that what began in the 19th century has changed the sex for good.
No longer, I contend, can it be said that the new markers should primarily be defined maybe by the fact of,
you know, upholding various tantric lineages in the category of both comma and Turner.
Of course, that aspect of the English sect is still prominent outside of the Shastra,
whether in the wider monastery, in retreat centres or in caves in the mountains.
And indeed, it's a still an important part of the monastic identity.
However, engagement in scholastic pursuits is now also firmly entrenched.
The elevation of power to a status arguably equal to such unquestioned new
luminaries as long term power is both a cause and a symptom of this transformation.
Have this transformation in his lifetime me power as a respected scholar practitioner,
but he did not have the prestige of being a reincarnate Lama or Turton.
However, after his death already in the first half of the 20th century and continuing into the contempt.
Period. His star has only risen.
This has happened in part due to the activities of influential disciples and devotees of hip such as Campbell, Jemmy, Potter, but also,
I'm sure due to the increase in monastic education's relative importance in relation to the mass sector as a whole,
May Palm's rise in the rise of monastic education as a key component of animal identity are interrelated.
However, as monastic education increases in relative importance from the numerous.
So probably just the significance of differences in the details of monastic education.
What do the patterns are described reveal about the present and future identity of the numerous sect?
And what are the implications for identity of the institutional structures that I've said underpin those patterns?
On one level, it's probably too soon to say how the effects of the foundation of Free Lanka was still playing themselves out over 100 years later.
How much more of the effects of the Maoist invasion?
However, some searching questions I suppose might be posed Will the exile and eastern Tibetan domains converge?
While I've argued that the two tracks have mainly developed separately, in parallel,
there have been some small crossovers, and especially when there has been a monastery of the same lineage.
In both domains, the connections can be illuminating.
In the case of NAM, drilling in India and drilling in India and the Sister Palau monastery in Tibet,
there are fairly strong links and the same education is offered in both places due to the fact that they must share up.
The senior campus spent some years at Palau in the 1990 and establish this shelter there.
So that might suggest that convergence may be the pattern, but slightly differently in the face of actually leaving campus of the monastery in Nepal.
My children, who himself spent many years at a monastery in eastern Tibet, told me that our two monasteries are connected emotionally, academically.
I think we are separate and difference.
Again, in the case of adoption, the monastery we found in South India and the monastery in eastern Tibet are almost totally separate,
in part due to the two monasteries recognising different men as the authentic.
So Chen Rinpoche.
Probably overall convergence between the two domains will only take place on a large scale if the Tibetan political situation changes.
If not, it's possible that the two new worlds which exist in very different social, political and economic conditions will further diverge.
However, even if the two domains converged, what would the convergence mainly manifest on the level of individual monasteries and the numerous sects?
The whole Rifat revert to being a loosely bound family of distinct lineages,
monasteries and charismatic individuals without tight institutional organisation or
with the unprecedented degree of institutional unity seen in exile become the norm.
It is, of course, hard to say, but I will finish by noting that there are signs the institutional organisation,
seen in the first few decades of exile, is already starting to fray.
After the comparatively stable era of institutional leadership from 1960 to the early 2000.
The new markers have entered a period of instability.
First,
a succession of elderly rent control Supreme Court in central membership of the first generation in exile who are appointed the head of the sect,
usually on the basis of spiritual authority, died in relatively quick succession.
Then in 2015, and the time when the baton needed to be handed down to a new generation, no single candidate stood out.
So a compromise was reached whereby the heads of the modern monasteries in exile
would be appointed the supreme head of the sect as a whole in three year rotations.
Then that model in turn collapsed in 2018 when the next, you know, the next in line in the rotation refused to take up the position,
meaning that there is now a leadership vacuum with the committee in charge of organising the new liminal and prayer festival.
A practical technocrat, even though it's a committee given the title of head of the sect.
But with the reality being some sort of stasis, perhaps the page has already turned on an exceptional era,
and the classic Nehemiah trope of distaste for institutions, politics and centralised authority is reasserting itself once more.
Indeed, while some of my interviews interviewees expressed exasperation with the current leadership situation,
some seem to think it was no bad thing at all.
And with that, I think I will finish. So thank you very much.
Thank you.