Discipline and Debate

Michael Lempert spent years doing fieldwork at Sera Monastery's Mey College in India, recording hundreds of hours of the ritualized debate, reprimand, and corporal punishment that shape Tibetan monks in exile. What he found — and what this book carefully analyzes — is how those disciplinary practices sit in genuine tension with the democratic liberal ideals the Dalai Lama promotes for the tradition's future. It's the first in-depth linguistic anthropological account of Tibetan monastic education, and for scholars in that space it breaks important ground. The honest limitation is audience: the specialized methodology and dense academic prose make this inaccessible to general readers, and the subject scope is narrow enough that even many scholars outside linguistic anthropology or Buddhist studies will find limited application. For the right reader, though, it's rigorous, fieldwork-grounded, and genuinely pioneering.