Worldly Engagements

The Tai Lue of Sipsong Panna, located in China’s southern Yunnan province, are the largest community of Theravada Buddhists in a country where the Mahayana tradition is historically and overwhelmingly dominant. Following years of repression during the Maoist era, in the 1980s Buddhism among the Lue recovered and even thrived. In recent decades, and in light of ever-increasing global connectivity and visibility online, the public participation of Tai Lue novices and monks in practices such as eating in the afternoon, drinking alcohol, having girlfriends, and competing in sports—all considered unfitting, even unacceptable, behavior for Buddhist monastics in China and Southeast Asia—has been censured and evidenced as proof of the inadequacies and backwardness of this minority religious community. Worldly Engagements places such alleged misconduct by Lue monastics at the center of its enquiry to demonstrate that, far from characterizing a degraded or corrupt form of practice, it represents an essential part of the monasticism traditionally prevalent in the region, an all-encompassing and amphibious technology of self-mastery inextricably embedded in the mundane and the non-religious—that is, a vernacular discipline concerned mainly with making boys into men.

Based on long-term ethnographic research in Sipsong Panna and earlier work conducted on mainland Southeast Asia, Worldly Engagements offers a comprehensive and innovative view of temporary Buddhist ordination among the Tai Lue as a key element in the contemporary configuration of localized manhood. It expands on conventional understandings of monasticism by focusing on religious specialists’ daily routines—from the moment they enter the temple as novices to their disrobing—paying attention to the socially embedded and individually embodied aspects of a journey determined by the dynamics of gender performance. The result is a rich portrayal of the temple experience as a site for Lue youths to negotiate competing demands from families, religious superiors, and peers, as well as navigate the challenges presented by national models of successful masculinity and the powerful influence of Thai Buddhism.