High Religion by Sherry B. Ortner

Author:Sherry B. Ortner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Big People Found the Monasteries: Legitimation and Self-Worth

I ARRIVE finally at the events that constitute the raison d’etre of this whole enterprise, the foundings of the first celibate monasteries in Solu-Khumbu in the early decades of the twentieth century.1 Having come quite far from chapter 1, it may be well to remind the reader of why the monastery foundings were so significant.

By the early twentieth century, the Sherpas had been in Nepal for almost four centuries. Although they had always (apparently) practiced Tibetan Buddhism, they belonged to the Nyingmapa sect, which probably had no celibate monasteries in the Sherpas’ home region of Kham at the time the Sherpas’ ancestors emigrated from that region in the sixteenth century (Snellgrove and Richardson 1968). Further, it seems reasonably certain that the early Sherpas in Nepal did not attempt to found celibate monasteries there either. And finally, although there are ethnically Tibetan groups similar to the Sherpas all across the northern border regions of Nepal, and although some of these have certain kinds of celibate arrangements, the Sherpa monastic system was to become the largest and most extensive among them.2 Thus the founding of celibate monasteries by the Sherpas in the early twentieth century represented a major institutional innovation, both for themselves and for the region.

The question for this book is, why did the monasteries get founded? But one must immediately put this question into the active voice. Why did certain people, at certain moments, find themselves moved to engage in this extraordinary—and it was and is considered extraordinary—activity? Most of the pieces for solving this puzzle are now in hand, but how they fit together remains to be seen.

I began by arguing that there is a fundamental contradiction in Sherpa society between an egalitarian ethic as seen in diverse manifestations (the equal inheritance rule, the lack of any heritable statuses, the stated equality of all unrelated males, and so forth), and a hierarchical ethic (seen in birth order seniority within the family, public status ranking within the village, and the charismatic authority of certain religious figures). The egalitarianism and the hierarchy constantly destabilize one another, making equality fragile and subject to hierarchical manipulation (as in the way in which, despite the equal inheritance rule, one brother often winds up with more), and making hierarchy weak and subject to challenge. In terms of actors’ experiences, this contradiction emerges as a chronic competitiveness in relations between brothers, a chronic competitiveness between political rivals, and a chronic mistrust of most claims of authority.

The general contradiction, and its specific variants within specific relational contexts, are at once reflected in, mediated by, and constituted through meaningful cultural forms. Thus I showed earlier that the Sherpas have stories and rituals that embody a common plot structure, or “schema,” in which the hero successfully negotiates one or another of these problematic relations. The contradictions and the schema together constitute a hegemony, a mutually sustaining universe of social experience and symbolic representation through which Sherpa actors would tend to understand themselves, their relationships, and their historical circumstances.

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