This is a major anthropological study of contemporary Tibetan Buddhist monasticism and tantric ritual in the Ladakh region of North-West India and of the role of tantric ritual in the formation and maintenance of traditional forms of state structure and political consciousness in Tibet. Based on nineteen months of fieldwork in Ladakh, the ethnography centres on Kumbum monastery, a local Gelukpa Order monastery in the village of Lingshed, Southern Ladakh. The book draws upon this and comparative ethnography from the Tibetan cultural area to develop a theoretical overview of ritual life and religious authority in Tibetan Buddhist monasticism, its religious and economic relationships with surrounding society, and the nature of the pre-1950 Tibetan state. Containing detailed descriptions and analyses of monastic ritual, the work builds up a picture of Tibetan tantric traditions as they interact with more localised understandings of bodily identity and territorial cosmology, to produce a substantial re-interpretation of the place of monks as ritual performers and peripheral householders in Ladakh.
The work also examines the central and indispensable role of incarnate lamas, such as the Dalai Lama, in the religious life of Tibetan Buddhists. Utilising modern anthropological theory of ritual, knowledge and the body, this workseeks to go beyond existing perspectives on Buddhism as a system of beliefs or detached moral philosophy, and examines the role of tantra as an embodied system of truth, authority and power. The work is intended for specialist and non-specialist alike, and assumes no substantial prior knowledge of Buddhism or anthropology. It is primarily intended for two readerships: firstly anthropologists and sociologists with particular interests in religion, ritual and the state; secondly readers with both a general and specialised interest in Buddhism in particular, and religious studies as a whole.