"We must make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness and deny its necessity."
— Foucault, "Friendship as a Way of Life"
It has often rightly been stated that Michel Foucault's analysis privileges European contexts, obscuring the relevance of colonialism in forging categories such as sexuality.[1] Moreover when Foucault does address Asia, the analysis can be superficial like the binary between scientia sexualis and ars erotica, which posits an unconvincing bifurcation between western knowledge of sexuality and eastern enjoyment of pleasure.[2] Based on such limits to Foucault's analysis, Kuan-Hsing Chen in Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization critiques Foucault among other western scholars as engaging in a project that should more properly be recognized as "European studies."[3]
While recognizing, incorporating (and crucially not seeking to mount a defense against) the depth of this scholarship pointing out Foucault's elisions with regard to Asian contexts, this paper takes a slightly different approach. As Malcolm Voyce suggests in a book that analyzes the Buddhist monastic code through a Foucauldian lens, "the importance to be derived from Foucault's work in general is not necessarily to be found in his occasional reflections about the Orient, but in his method, which may throw a different light on Buddhism."[4]
What might be gained from tracing Buddhist monasticism in light of Foucault's work? As Daniel Defert states in reference to Confessions of the Flesh, Foucault was in this later work "attempting to shift his history of sexuality by several centuries."[5] Reorienting attention to monastic discourses (already a concern in the first volume of History of Sexuality), enables attention also to Buddhist monastic discourses, which as it turns out do not resemble ars erotica so much as scientia sexualis, in that these Buddhist discourses feature a set of complex taxonomies for sexuality and gender deviance.[6] However, despite lip-service to Foucault, scholarship in Buddhist studies has often failed to appreciate his theories, as with scholars like José Ignacio Cabezón who treat monastic discourses as having purely repressive rather than productive effects.[7]
Applying Foucauldian understandings of sexuality, governmentality, and subjectivation to Buddhist studies, this paper asks: How do Buddhist monasteries discipline their subjects, including through regulating sexuality? My analysis centers on the Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, which after being founded by Tsongkhapa (1357-1419) came to rule much of Tibet over the ensuing centuries through one of the most famous of the incarnation lines: the Dalai Lama. Tsongkhapa offered innovatively strict regulations regarding sex between men, highlighting the impropriety of sexual release through intercrural sex (non-penetrative, between the thighs).[8] However, when western and Japanese observers began depicting Tibetan Buddhism in late 19th and early 20th century Orientalist scholarship, the Gelugpa school was often singled out for a reputation of homosexual permissiveness.[9] I address this seeming contradiction not in terms of a narrative of moral and ethical decline, but rather through examining the productive aspects of power.
An important mechanism in the monastic context, and one typical of the Geluk school, was the practice of confession. This practice deeply impacted Gelukpa monastic life. Drawing on Foucault, Branton Sullivan notes how such confessional practices dovetailed with monastics' relationship to their "personal teacher" and the monastery's disciplinarian, overall creating "practices of discipline and surveillance" that related to the monk's ongoing subjectivation and incorporation of norms.[10] Yet these norms often implied transgression, as "monks were (and are) taught to run and hide from the disciplinarian should one encounter him in the streets of the monastery."[11] Sullivan's monograph shows how the practices of mass-monasticism in the Gelukpa school align with some scholarly notions of the modern state that make "administration and bureaucracy—an area where the Gelukpa excelled—key components of that definition [of the modern state]."[12] While largely remaining outside of western influence until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tibetan Buddhist development suggests an intriguing parallel to Foucault's delineation of the links between monastic practice and modern subjectivity.
This paper argues for the utility of a Foucauldian lens for Buddhist studies, while also drawing attention to how Buddhist histories complicate and expand Foucault's methods. While Foucault is often rightly criticized for focusing on western contexts, this paper suggests that some of the operations of power that he analyzed found parallels in central Asian contexts. If mechanisms of confession and surveillance apply, so too do creative practices of "self-fashioning."[13] While some scholars emphasize linguistic differences that create an incommensurable rift between Buddhist and Christian monasticisms, other scholars emphasize resonance. As Donovan O. Schafer notes in a riff on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on Tibetan Buddhism, "Do all human bodies fear death in the same way? No, but we all fear or have feared."[14] This subtle balance of resonance and rift across cultural contexts enables us to trace how Foucault's analysis of the history of sexuality allows us to theorize not only Buddhism's ancient monastic codes and their incitements to discourse, but also how these codes were applied in Tibetan-specific configurations of emerging modernity.
[1] Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 105.
[2] Valerie Traub, “The Past Is a Foreign Country? The Times and Spaces of Islamicate Sexuality Studies,” in Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Temporal Geographies of Desire, ed. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 17.
[3] Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia As Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.
[4] Malcolm Voyce, Foucault, Buddhism and Disciplinary Rules (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), 9.
[5] Michel Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh: The History of Sexuality, Volume 4, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2021).
[6] José Ignacio Cabezón, Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2017).
[7] Learned Foote, “‘What Have We To Do With That?’ Queer Kinship and the Buddhist Monastery,” in Queer Kinship and Comparative Literature: New Approaches, ed. Anchit Sathi and Alice Ferrebe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 48.
[8] Cabezón, Sexuality, 510.
[9] Foote, “Queer Kinship,” 37, 48.
[10] Brenton Sullivan, Building a Religious Empire: Tibetan Buddhism, Bureaucracy, and the Rise of the Gelukpa (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 61.
[11] Sullivan, 61.
[12] Sullivan, 62.
[13] Voyce, Foucault, Buddhism and Disciplinary Rules, 126–28.
[14] Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 57.
This paper argues for the utility of a Foucauldian lens for Buddhist studies, while also drawing attention to how Buddhist histories complicate and expand Foucault's methods. While Foucault is often rightly criticized for focusing on western contexts, this paper suggests that some of the operations of power that he analyzed found parallels in central Asian contexts. If mechanisms of confession and surveillance apply, so too do creative practices of "self-fashioning. Examining resonance and rift across cultural contexts enables us to trace how Foucault's analysis of the history of sexuality allows us to think not only about Buddhist's ancient monastic codes and their incitements to discourse, but also how these codes were applied in Tibetan-specific configurations of emerging modernity.