Word for Word: Celibate

I’m in a writers’ group that meets on Zoom, though before the pandemic we met in person. Every week, we do a writing prompt: someone gives a page number, and our organizer picks a word from a huge dictionary. We write for five minutes. In this example, the word is: celibate.

Drepung Monastery in Tibet

Tibet has a history of Buddhist monasteries for the celibate but also for married monastics. The latter were coed, with married couples living together and even having children living in the monastery. It depended on the sect — Tibetan Buddhism includes two celibate sects and two non-celibate sects. Monasteries or nunneries in Tibetan Buddhism are basically spiritual communes.

The Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s — because Chinese Communists were officially atheists — involved the dissolving of the monastic system. The invaders had zero respect for Buddhism. The coed monasteries where monks and nuns were married ceased to exist in Tibet.

To this day only celibate, gender-segregated monasteries and nunneries exist in Tibet, and the numbers of monastics are drastically smaller than they were before the Chinese invasion. China continues to occupy Tibet. As a tourist there in 2008, I saw monks at Sera Monastery in the courtyard practicing the traditional theological debates, but what tourists can’t tell (unless they’re fluent in Tibetan and practice Tibetan Buddhism) is that the…