Buddhist monks are almost always imagined as ascetic spiritual practitioners, indifferent to mundane concerns. In fact, however, like any other institution, a monastery must be governed and the burden of these administrative duties necessarily falls on monks. This raises the interesting question of the status of monastic administrators. Looked at in one light, they are at the top of the monastic hierarchy. From another perspective, however, they are divorced from the main purpose of monastic life. In this book, Jonathan Silk examines the way in which this question was debated in the formative years of Indian Buddhism. He shows how various texts reveal ambivalent and controversial attitudes towards monastic administrators.
The paradigmatic Buddhist is the monk. It is well known that ideally Buddhist monks are expected to meditate and study-to engage in religious practice. The institutional structure which makes this concentration on spiritual cultivation possible is the monastery. But as a bureaucratic institution, the monastery requires administrators to organize and manage its functions, to prepare quiet spots for meditation, arrange audiences for sermons, or simply to make sure food is available, and rooms and bedding provided. The valuations placed on such organizational roles were, however, a subject of considerable controversy among Indian Buddhist writers, with some considering them significantly less praiseworthy than meditative concentration or teaching and study, while others more highly appreciated their importance. Managing Monks, as the first major study of the administrative offices of Indian Buddhist monasticism and of those who hold them, explores literary sources, inscriptions and other materials in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan and Chinese in order to explore this tension and paint a picture of the internal workings of the Buddhist monastic institution in India, highlighting the ambivalent and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward administrators revealed in various sources.
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