Bringing together an international cohort of scholars from Bangladesh, Thailand, Canada, and the United States, this roundtable reflects on how Buddhist monastic communities mobilize ethical frameworks, ritual technologies, and disciplinary ideals to shape social life, negotiate authority, and enact religious reform across Buddhist regions. While monastic ethics are often imagined as inward‑facing or primarily concerned with internal discipline and maintaining monastic distance from lay society, the contributors discuss ways in which monastic ideals shape public life more broadly. From lineage reconstruction in nineteenth‑century Bengal, to robe controversies in pre‑modern Myanmar, to ritual technologies that blur lay–monastic boundaries in Vajrayāna communities, to the experiences of female renunciates ( thilashin) during the Japanese Occupation of Burma, to contemporary reform movements in Ladakh and the Indian Himalayas, these reflections reveal how monastic actors continually reinterpret ethical norms to address crisis, assert legitimacy, and bring monastic perspectives into debates shaping public spheres throughout Asia.
The Japanese occupation of Burma (1942-1945) is often invoked in Burmese as “khit-pyet,” an “era of disorder.” Histories of this period are primarily shaped by nationalist narratives put forth in the memoirs of Myanmar’s male political elite. Biographical writing by Buddhist female renunciants (thilashin), however, offer new perspectives on this era. This paper takes up narratives of khit-pyet voiced by women like Daw Malayi, whose nunnery was commandeered by the Kempetai, the military police of the Japanese army, and Daw Nyanacari, who welcomed refugees from the fall of Rangoon to her Myanaung nunnery while continuing to train her thilashin students preparing for their monastic exams. I bring these and other biographical accounts together to investigate how thilashin relied on practices of institutional maintenance and mental cultivation to deal with the violence, confusion, and deprivations of the occupation, and how the disorder of “khit-pyet” has shaped representations of Buddhist institutional history.
Myanmar’s conservative monastic bodies and associated government regulators have consistently argued that the bhikkhunī (higher ordained nun) lineage died out and therefore, according to the scriptures, it cannot be reinstated. And in fact, Myanmar’s nuns are not bhikkhunīs but a form of female renunciate called a thilashin. Yet in the early 1900s a thilashin named Daw Konmayi and the famous monk, the Maha Gandhayon Sayadaw of Sagaing, knew that in the absence of the Bhikkhunī Vinaya there needed to be rules to protect the thilashin, thereby creating a monastic code of conduct. In 1994, the State Saṅgha Mahā Nāyaka Committee, completed a revised version of these rules. This paper compares the two works and similar to Martin Seeger (2018), makes the case for looking at how these nuns have made a space for themselves in which scholars miss when focusing on the bhikkhunī debate.