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The encounter between Himalayan communities and Buddhism is sometimes oversimplified both in ethnographic studies and in the autobiographical accounts of missionary lamas. Buddhism has come to Te not as a set of abstract moral and dogmatic precepts but through different clerical institutions. The religious needs of the community have long been served by Nyingmapa tantric priests from an adjacent settlement. The archives of two such families reveal the insecurities of certain prominent figures in their competition for patronage. The apprenticeship and the civic duties of these priests is examined. The Sakyapa school of Buddhism, the dominant monastic tradition in Mustang, was once influential in Te. However, the community of monks eventually lost its religious character and evolved into a class of traders.

This chapter looks into understandings of human personhood, and the kinds of knowledge the Tamang develop of their biodiverse environment through stages of life. It examines notions of the composition of the human body, and the ways that bodily differentiation and transformation operate in gender, clan, in the relational dimensions of shamans and Buddhist lamas, and in tales of animal communication and the Tamang ‘yeti’. Villagers face a conundrum in everyday experiences of power, to bring the state protectors of the environment into relationships built on some sense of dialogue across hierarchical social difference. The problem they face is not simply the same as in dealings with other high-caste Nepalis, as the officials vested with the task of policing the human/non-human divide in the name of conservation confront villagers with the additional enforcement fault lines of Nepalese caste society have received through the modern notion of the ecologically irresponsible peasant.

This chapter continues to look at the early twentieth century Buryats’ engagement with Tibet and its recent legacies. It introduces new materials on cross-ethnic reincarnation and tantric apprenticeship practices between Buryat and Tibetan lamas in the context of these communities’ expanding ties, despite the many restrictions on the circulation of Buddhist practices within Tibet. The reincarnated are, by design, highly mobile bodies imbued with an extraordinary status. In their status as border crossers, the chapter explores how they have become sites for the competing claims to sovereignty in light of changing geopolitical consciousness. Similar to reincarnation, religious apprenticeship, which constitutes quasi-kinship ties between Buddhist masters and their disciples, is also analyzed in terms of emerging postsocialist imaginaries. Case studies come from the author’s field research in Russia and India: with the Tibetan monks who are reincarnations of former Buryat lamas (at the Drepung Monastery in India) and naturalized Tibetan émigré lamas with “Buryat roots” (in Ulan-Ude, Buryatia). The latter part of the chapter examines how the debates around an “oboo” ritual became an arena through which competing notions of “roots” were expressed.

This chapter first describes certain individuals and through them begins to indicate the complexity of the lives of contemporary monks, the variety of ties they each maintain, and what holds them together as a group. It then provides historical information about the Urad Mongols and Buddhism in Mongolia necessary for readers to understand the major ideas and practices called on by lamas today.

This chapter discusses how Mergen Gegen laid the groundwork for a new subjectivity among his followers, a groundwork of both aesthetic and political dimensions. Mergen Gegen is credited not only with composing the supremely artistic form of the Mongolian liturgy, but also with a range of other abilities and accomplishments, including being able to see with his “third eye,” magical feats, establishing the “order of services and rules of monks” conduct, introducing wonderful objects of worship, and moral instruction for the laity.

This chapter first outlines the changeable matrix of relations in the monastery. It then describes the founding and history of Mergen, which illuminates the processes of gathering, housing, and dispersal and this leads to observations about Mongolian understandings of monastic life. The second half of the chapter deals with the local sense of sacred and occult forces, and the way in which the monastery is held to be a subject of fortune.

This chapter focuses on the 8th Mergen Gegen, particularly ideas concerning his transformation from a dead person into several different objects of worship, one of which was attributed with deadly power. It begins by discussing the great lama's life and times. It also considers the narratives about other people in the violent period through which he lived.

This chapter focuses on Sengge Lama, who spent almost thirty years of his life as a cadre under the communists. His talents and his life proved to be ideally matched for the particular character needed for the Mergen tradition, its language and music, its localization in cults of mountains, springs, and trees, its openness to the preoccupations of the herder. The chapter quotes extensively from Sengge, and conveys something of the range of ways of speaking available to people like him in China today.

This chapter looks at Mönghebatu, the Chorji Lama, and the dilemmas of inheritance. From early childhood he was singled out as an heir in at least two different ways: he was the eldest son of Sechingge, born in the noble family that had become Mergen Monastery's most important patron, and he was the 6th incarnation of the lineage of Chorji Lamas.

The chapter looks at the use of the court system to handle cases against Buddhist lamas during the 1930s. The chapter examines three cases. In the first, dating from 1936, lamas were accused of deceiving workers through organizing a religious festival (tsam). The second, also from 1936, dealt with children taking part in religious ceremonies. In the last case, from 1937, a lama was accused of poisoning people by using Tibetan medicine. The first case touches on the boundary of public action and private belief. The second brings in the issue of education and recruitment to the monasteries, while the last case is noteworthy because it took place during the period of the closure of monasteries and the execution of monks as counter-revolutionaries. These cases highlight the measures taken against the Buddhist establishment as the socialist state sought to answer “the question of the lamas.”

This chapter discusses how local Buddhist lamas have become involved in the gold rush. Within Mahayana Buddhism, mining is considered emblematic of violent acts and self-interest that infringe upon the desired relationship between people and the environment. Ninjas thus often call upon monastic religious specialists to carry out appeasement ceremonies and other rituals in the gold mines and in the village monastery. With most of their ritual services now directly related to the extraction of minerals, the monastery receives large amounts of gold money. This wealth is much welcomed as it helps sustain the village monastery to an extent that the monastery has never experienced before. Yet as junior lamas struggle to afford their monastic service, they have started to raise the issue of money's distribution within the monastery.

This chapter discusses the rise of the Tibetan trülku as head of society in the seventeenth century. Drawing on the concept of the “union of religion and politics,” the clerical elite further developed the idea of the “two systems” (luknyi), and the distinction between the religious and the secular spheres became more and more blurred. Charismatic Buddhist hierarchs and their followers used historical precedent to legitimize the political rule of Buddhist clerics. Because the lamas who exercised secular power were now also trülku, emanations of transcendent bodhisattvas or buddhas, the “ union of religion and politics” from the seventeenth to the twentieth century can be classified as a kind of sacred kingship.

Chapter 5 focuses on the controversy over intervention that arose at the Sixth Pan-American Conference (1928) held in Havana and the hemispheric impact of the projects for the codification of international law advanced by the American Institute of International Law (AIIL). It analyzes in detail James Brown Scott’s engagement with the Peruvian jurist Víctor Manuel Maúrtua, which led to the final displacement of Alejandro Alvarez from the secretariat of the AIIL. It also examines the challenges that the Anti-War Treaty of Saavedra Lamas posed to Scott and the very existence of the AIIL, which eventually led to the crisis of the organization.

Chapter 6 concentrates on the role of Saavedra Lamas at the Seventh Pan-American Conference held in Montevideo (1933), the impact of his Anti-War Treaty, and the rise of a multilateral Inter-American System by 1933 with the institutionalization of the principles of nonintervention and sovereign equality and autonomy. It also analyzes the crisis of the American Institute of International Law (AIIL) in 1933, the interruption of its activities for several years in the 1930s, and the final dissolution of the organization in the early 1940s. It was no coincidence that an organization such as the AIIL with a US-led imperial and missionary legal project of civilizing Latin America through the promotion of the international rule of law was dissolved when the principles of non-intervention and sovereign equality were institutionalized under a new multilateral Inter-American System and the Platt Amendment finally derogated in Cuba.

As the Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism spread throughout Inner Asia, it flourished in the territories of what is now Inner Mongolia for 400 years. However, Buddhism in Inner Mongolia is virtually unstudied by anthropologists. This chapter shows the complexity of popular Buddhist practice in eastern Inner Mongolia. What is the relationship between lamas and laity? What are Mongolian interpretations of Buddhist cosmology and the concept of nirv›˚a? How has Buddhism coexisted with other religious beliefs in Inner Mongolia? The chapter includes a case study of one Inner Mongolian monastery, the Khulustai Monastery in Naiman Banner of Tongliao Municipality (Jirim league) and its lay communities. The material relates mostly to the period of the 1940s to 1960s, using the author’s observations and interviews with senior lamas, older generations of the laity, published materials, and Japanese data of that period.