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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 prevalent 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 Gandantegchenling 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 examples. 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. 328
