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VESNA A. WALLACE
mischievous monks who masqueraded as laymen by putting on layman’s clothing in
order to freely visit laypeople’s settlements. All this gave rise of the monastic decline
narrative, which began during the autonomous monarchial period and proliferated
throughout the revolutionary and socialist times.
Neither these new regulations nor the previous laws succeeded to remove monastic
sexual misconduct or even more so to repress sexuality in the same sex predicated
monasticism. The heterosexual specificity of the discussed codes of laws is undeniable,
as they make no references to monks’ sexual misconduct other than that with women.
They also place equal de-emphasis on monastic sexual misconduct in comparison to
other disciplinary issues such as monks’ rebellion against government, disrespect for
the nobility, murder, theft, and the like.
In contemporary Mongolia, where Buddhism is still in a phase of revitalization,
sexually active monks in rural and urban areas have once again become the most preva¬
lent among monastically ordained. Despite some early, public criticisms instigated by
Tibetan Buddhist missionaries in Mongolia in the late 1990s, the number of monks
with wives or female partners grew and the society as a whole became increasingly
lenient toward that lifestyle. The internal regulations charted by the administrations
of the main monasteries in Mongolia do not strictly dictate celibacy for monks other
than for their abbots. Private monasteries and temples do not require celibacy even
for their abbots. To remedy this, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama composed the book of
Regulations for Mongolian Monasteries (sog yul gyi dgon sde rnams kyi bca’ khrims
bzhugs so), published in both languages Tibetan and Mongolian by Gandantegchen¬
ling monastery in Ulaanbaatar in 2006. The document contains only one explicit rule
regarding monks’ sexual conduct, which stipulates that a monk avoids staying in the
same home with an unmarried woman who is not his relative, a misdemeanor most
common among Mongolian monks. Ifa monk commits this downfall, his offense must
be announced in the presence of many monks, he is to read the dünsag (Tib. /tung
bshags, “confessional prayer’), and be punished with appropriate penalty. In the same
document, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama also asks from Mongolian monasteries’ abbots
and high-ranking lamas that they themselves keep a monastic discipline and impose
proper penalties for those who break it,”' since the abbots of private monasteries are
themselves married men with children. So far, his regulations do not appear to have
had any effect on contemporary Mongolian monasticism modeled on the past exam¬
ples. The reasons for which the majority of contemporary Mongolian Gelugpa monks,
including the monasteries’ high-ranking lamas, continue to keep wives are not merely
socio-economic, but also cultural, steeped in their pastoral and nomadic mentality that
withstands the institutionalization of sexuality and that remains dominant even among
urban Mongols. When I asked the abbot of one of the two main monasteries in the
21 XIV. Dalai Lam Danjanjamts: Sog yul gyi dgon sde rnams kyi bca’ khrims bzhugs so. Gandantegéenlin
xid, Ulanbatar 2006, pp. 34-35.
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