An economy of merit: Women and Buddhist monasticism in Zangskar, northwest Indi

This dissertation presents an ethnography of a local moral world created by the intersection of a nunnery, a monastery, and a village within the Zangskar region of Himalayan Kashmir. These three entities are related within an economy of merit constituted by institutional practices, socio-economic processes, as well as the lived flow of individual experiences. The thesis describes who becomes a nun, with what motivations, from what familial and social contexts, and by what kinds of ritual processes.;The dissertation privileges a view from a nunnery rather than the one from the monastery which has dominated Buddhist studies thus far. The perspective from the standpoint of those women who renounce the world may illuminate the contested nature of making merit. It appears that nuns make merit rather differently than monks do. While both male and female monastics who practice Tibetan Buddhism are expected to devote themselves to selfless compassion and asceticisms, most nuns compromise their ritual devotions with obligations to farm, field, and family. The contradictions between the household and monastic realms have shaped the historical development of the nun's and monks's orders in profoundly different ways. Nuns can no more renounce their roles as dutiful daughters than they can elude the female bodies defined as inferior and impure. A nun's celibacy is always constrained by local customs and classical doctrine which denies women the possibility of sexual renunciation permitted to monks.;The first two chapters situate the local lifeworld of the nunnery and its inhabitants within an economy of scarcity and solidarity in the Indo-Tibetan borderland. The third and fourth chapters chart a history of patronage and kingship which left the monasteries well endowed and nunneries relatively impoverished within Zangskar's economy of merit. The fifth and sixth chapters sketch the dynamics of subsistence at the nunnery and delineate who becomes a nun as well as how and why, drawing on theories of exchange and an experience near ethnography. The seventh chapter examines the three ritual stages a nun must pass through: tonsure, ordination, and joining a monastic assembly. The eight and ninth chapters delineate the historical denigration of women in Buddhist doctrine and local popular culture which have established the male Sangha as the highest field of merit.