1. Building a Religious Empire: Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy, and the Rise of the Gelukpa. By Brenton Sullivan. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 304 pages. $65.00 (cloth), $61.75 (e-book).
This work is a good start in mapping the institutional changes and constants of Gelukpa monasteries in Tibetan Buddhist regions. In the author’s own words, “This book is an argument for the importance of considering the mechanisms that Buddhist hierarchs stipulated for the administration of their vast system of monastic institutions and for the rhythm of the lives of those institutions’ residents” (172). I have intensively studied and worked with the genre of “monastic guidelines” (Tib. bca’ yig) for over a decade, and therefore it is a great pleasure to see that now other scholars have started to appreciate the genre of texts for their historical value. This book uses this genre extensively to paint a picture of how the Tibetan Buddhist school of the Gelukpa (Tib. dge lugs pa) was organized and how it maintained its success over the centuries. Additionally, Sullivan even asserts that these bca’ yig are “the primary vectors of Geluk monasticism” (50). He also attempts to explain the expansion, “the spiritual colonialism” as he provocatively calls it (2), of the Geluk school into regions evermore farther removed from Tibet’s religious center, Lhasa.
