Publications by Tyler A . Lehrer
Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions, 2022
The kingdoms of Kandy (now Sri Lanka) and Ayutthaya (now Thailand) were briefly connected across ... more The kingdoms of Kandy (now Sri Lanka) and Ayutthaya (now Thailand) were briefly connected across Indian Ocean waters in the mid-eighteenth century by Dutch East India Company (hereafter VOC) traders, leading to the importation of valuable Siamese Buddhist monks and their ordination lineage to the island. Two series of events related to the VOC's search for and delivery of these monks demonstrate that the patronage of connected religious dynamics—not just the contingencies of trade, land, labour, and statecraft—was an essential aspect of Company business. At the same time, mediating Buddhist connection was a dangerous, sometimes perilous undertaking. Analysing VOC records alongside Laṅkān and Siamese historical chronicles and travelogues reveals that what were initially friendly connections at first necessitated, and later intensified certain forms of danger. We begin with perilous shipwrecks and diplomatic impasses across monsoon waters that eventually led to the restoration of an important but defunct Kandyan Buddhist ordination lineage, and conclude with the aftermath of a failed assassination attempt in 1760 against the royal patron of that lineage transmission. I advance the notion of “dangerous friendships” to characterise how Buddhist courts and European traders worked together to first generate, and then exploit, friendly religious connections.
Journal of Social Sciences (New Series), Research Centre for Social Sciences, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2022
Kandyan historical chronicles and biographies of its influential monks and monarchs have tended t... more Kandyan historical chronicles and biographies of its influential monks and monarchs have tended to characterize the mid-eighteenth-century arrival of Ayutthayan monks, and the rescue of Laṅkā’s defunct Buddhist monastic lineage, as a singular instance of meritorious religious patronage carried out by wholly virtuous agents. This article aspires to interject a more complex apprehension of these activities and the experiences of king, bhikkhu, and Dutch trader, especially in the decade following three importations of Siamese monks and royals on Dutch East India Company (hereafter VOC) ships between 1753-1759. This article considers the failed assassination attempt against Kandy’s King Kīrti Śrī Rājasiṃha (r. 1747-1782) in 1760, plotted by disaffected courters together with Kandyan and Siamese monks, and especially its aftermath. I focus on the VOC’s extensive efforts to track down one of the Siamese plotters, a troublesome Ayutthayan monk-prince named Krommuang Thep Phiphit. Between 1760 and 1764, in the context of the Kandyan-Dutch war, the Company attempted twice to bring him back to the island and install him themselves as a puppet king. By engaging VOC colonial surveillance in both Kandy and Ayutthaya alongside Siamese historical chronicles, this article suggests that the tendentious and short-lived moment of religious diplomacy between two independent and predominantly Buddhist kingdoms and the VOC had the effect of magnifying destabilizing political intrigue and perilous personal animosity in addition to reviving a defunct monastic lineage for Kandyan Buddhist monks.
Buddhist Studies Review 36 (1), 2019
Since the late 1980s, in defiance of Sri Lanka's major monastic fraternities (nikāyas) and the go... more Since the late 1980s, in defiance of Sri Lanka's major monastic fraternities (nikāyas) and the government, Buddhist women and men have begun to organize across distinctions of national boundary and Buddhist tradition to reinstate a defunct bhikkhunī ordination lineage for renunciant women. Drawing on fieldwork from the winter of 2015-16, this article considers some of the strategies by which Sri Lanka's bhikkhunīs and their supporters constitute the burgeoning lineage(s) as both legitimate and necessary for the continued health and vitality of an otherwise ailing Buddhist sāsana. I argue that Sri Lanka's bhikkhunīs engage in highly-visible forms of adherence to vinaya rules and social expectations for ideal monastic behavior set against a popular discourse about the laxity of male renunciants. Such engagement is both political and soteriological; while it is aimed at fulfilling legitimizing gendered expectations of women's piety, it is expressed primarily in terms of the eradication of personal and societal suffering through forms of practice that accord with the ideal of a pious monastic. Thus, in contrast to discourses which locate bhikkhunīs as subjects whose presence weakens the sāsana's duration and strength, in this new discourse Sri Lanka's bhikkhunīs become virtuous agents of social service and moral restoration. The article concludes by identifying emerging connections between this discourse and an already-gendered xenophobic Buddhist nationalism.
Asian Ethnology 79 (2), 2020
Asian Ethnology 77 (1 and 2), 2018
(1) Nick Cheesman in Law and Society Review.
(2) Melissa Crouch in Asian Journal of Law and Soci... more (1) Nick Cheesman in Law and Society Review.
(2) Melissa Crouch in Asian Journal of Law and Society
(3) Tamir Moustafa in the Law and Politics Book Review
(4) Jaclyn Neo in International Journal of Constitutional Law
(5) Tyler A. Lehrer in Asian Ethnology
Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture Across History, 2019
Thesis and Dissertation by Tyler A . Lehrer
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (University of Wisconsin–Madison), 2024
This dissertation demonstrates how the creation and breakdown of initially friendly Buddhist mona... more This dissertation demonstrates how the creation and breakdown of initially friendly Buddhist monastic connectivity over dangerous Bay of Bengal waters in the mid-eighteenth century became a destabilizing conduit for political and commercial exploitation by the governors and merchants of the Dutch East India Company (hereafter VOC), together with the Śrī Laṅkān and Siamese Buddhist monks, courtiers, and monarchs with whom they contended. Between the 1740s and 1760s, Buddhist maritime connectivity gave rise to destabilizing, fraught, and consequential forms of disintegration, rather than networked connectivity as previous scholars of Indian Ocean Buddhism have asserted. Śrī Laṅkān Kandyan and Siamese Ayutthayan Buddhist monks, envoys, courtiers, kings, and princes, together with the VOC’s governors, merchants, soldiers, sailors, and spies engaged one another in complex, tendentious, and ultimately short-lived projects of connected religious diplomacy motivated by each party’s changing economic, political, and religious demands, desires, and projections of power. While they called one another “friend,” they destroyed as much as they built. Charting new forms of affiliation and belonging, building new templates for merging religious and political power, and occasioning the disintegration of those templates, they created unprecedented opportunities for the Dutch company to experiment with both mollifying, and later attempting to replace, indigenous monarchs precisely because its governors and merchants came to appreciate the centrality of Buddhist monastic lineage to the exercise and legitimacy of political power. I argue that friendship not only necessitated various forms of danger, but created the possibility for a range of dangerous political destabilizations. The forging of friendship across the early modern Bay of Bengal necessitated the danger of putting Buddhist diplomacy in the hands of European intermediaries, facing the many dangers of traveling the open seas, and the dangers of utilizing Buddhist lineage as a tool of economic and political triangulation by self-consciously foreign-derived kings. Friendship also made life more dangerous. With the arrival in Kandy of ordination-granting monks from the heart of Siam came unprecedented opportunities for ambitious courtiers, monks, and Dutch governors to ally themselves in unexpected ways and undermine the templates of political power and sovereignty so critical to the legitimacy of Kandy’s Buddhist monarchs, courtiers, and monks.
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (University of Colorado Boulder), 2016
This thesis investigates many of the figures and events that have made full ordinations of Buddhi... more This thesis investigates many of the figures and events that have made full ordinations of Buddhist nuns (bhikkhunīs) both possible and contested in contemporary Sri Lanka. I draw on interviews and materials collected during the winter of 2015–16 to show how local actors cooperate across distinctions of nationality and Buddhist practice tradition to revive a defunct lineage. I argue that some of the previous scholarship on women’s renunciation in contemporary Sri Lanka conflates ‘international’ with ‘western,’ and privileges the local while forestalling a more nuanced analysis of the local-translocal exchange of speech and activism which constitutes one of the defining characteristics of the revival. I argue that these studies, while championing the voices of ten precept nuns and their everyday practices of renunciation, problematically assert that the current bhikkhunī ordination initiative represents the foreign incursion of western feminist speech which is at odds with the self-conception of Lankan renunciant women.In addition, I cast light on an emerging dimension of the bhikkhunī ordination mobilization not yet articulated in previous studies: the interrelationship between an already-gendered Islamophobic Buddhist nationalist discourse and support for nuns’ ordination as an integral step toward rescuing a Buddhist sāsana in decline. Although my findings here are still preliminary, I reveal a complex entanglement between geopolitical ethnic antagonism and the visibility of gender and gender roles in contemporary Sri Lanka through which the bhikkhunī ordination dispute is brought into visibility in a new way. Rather than as subjects to be rescued by western feminism, in this new discourse, Sri Lanka’s bhikkhunīs become agents of social service and moral restoration in local villages.Taken together, the central characteristics of these overlapping projects which enable and support bhikkhunī ordination suggest new ways of conceptualizing the enterprise with global implications and local sites of engagement, activism, and contestation. Through this, the themes of transnational cooperation, strategies of localization, and ethno-religious antagonism update our view of the contemporary revival and open up new questions for further analysis.
Collaborations by Tyler A . Lehrer
Uploads
Publications by Tyler A . Lehrer
(2) Melissa Crouch in Asian Journal of Law and Society
(3) Tamir Moustafa in the Law and Politics Book Review
(4) Jaclyn Neo in International Journal of Constitutional Law
(5) Tyler A. Lehrer in Asian Ethnology
Thesis and Dissertation by Tyler A . Lehrer
Collaborations by Tyler A . Lehrer
(2) Melissa Crouch in Asian Journal of Law and Society
(3) Tamir Moustafa in the Law and Politics Book Review
(4) Jaclyn Neo in International Journal of Constitutional Law
(5) Tyler A. Lehrer in Asian Ethnology