Presenter
Salgado Nirmala S. - Augustana College, Augustana College, Rock Island, United StatesPanel
123 – Child ascetics in historical and contemporary South Asian Jain and Buddhist communitiesAbstract
Senior nuns who head monastic schools in Sri Lanka have limited experience in disciplining and raising children. Acclimated to living in small hermitages, and engaged in meditative and daily renunciant practices, they face unanticipated circumstances in their interactions with young nuns in a larger communal setting. Relations with the younger nuns may be further complicated when a parent or guardian is absent or incapacitated. Inculcating proper monastic discipline among young nuns who live in larger monastic centers and away from their own ordaining-teacher nun raises new and unanticipated questions requiring attention.
This paper, based on research conducted in the past decade in Sri Lanka, will focus on how senior nun-teacherswho lead monastic schoolsattend to the disciplinary questions they face in training and educating novices to become full-fledged monastics, while living in larger educational monastic centers and in a cultural context in which forms of physical discipline are occasionally considered acceptable.
What limitations are present in meting out physical punishment to monastic children? To what extent do Buddhist sensibilities such as loving-kindness, compassion, and the development of moral cultivation shape the lives of nuns at a monastic school? This paper will engage such questions and discuss how senior nuns address them in the training and education of novice nuns at monastic centers in Sri Lanka.
