Using ethnographic data collected in Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Region, Qinghai Province, People’s Republic of China and diasporic communities in India and Nepal from 2016 to 2020, this work argues for an understanding of Buddhism based on female lay practice. Examining religious labor of the body, speech and mind as performed by lay women of a small region in Yushu, this work frames Buddhism as an embodied and contextualized practice that is deeply intertwined with political and economic realities. This work specifically examines practices such as circumambulation (Chapter 2), prostration (Chapter 3), mantra recitation and funerary services (Chapter 4) and faith as a transformative tool (Chapter 5), in the contemporary moment and in relation to specific economic, political and social circumstances. This work pushes back against multiple definitions of Buddhism as an intellectual philosophy of the mind, as a non-violent cultural product outside politics and economics and as an institution with vast differences between monastic and lay practice. It argues instead that `lived’ and `vernacular’ understandings of religious realization are equally important in the analysis of religious definitions and boundaries, that these boundaries should be drawn by engaging with contemporary practitioners and that women are theorists of their own religious practice. Rather than understanding lay women as a unique demographic performing religious work in contrast with monastic practice, the research presented in this work suggests that the divisions drawn between lay and monastic populations are often tactical separations and not reflective of contemporary realities. This work theorizes women’s agency in a religious environment in which the idea of the self is ideologically unstable and considers what it means for women to labor, struggle and strive without a foundational belief in the stability of a self. This work argues that women conceive of religious labor as effective because it is transformative and that transformation of everyday realities into realization is the essential core of Tantric Buddhism in Tibet.
