How to Constitute a Field of Merit: Structure and Flexibility in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery’s Curriculum

by Dominique Townsend

The written curriculum of Tibet’s prestigious Mindrölling monastery, composed in 1689, marries a firm pedagogical structure with flexibility for individual students. This reflects the monastery’s balance of institutional priorities, shaped by its religious, cultural, and political climate. The curriculum’s author was Terdak Lingpa, a charismatic visionary and systematizer of the “Ancient” or Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism who forged alliances with the Fifth Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa starting in the seventeenth century. As part of Mindrölling’s formal constitutional document, the curriculum commits students and teachers to a distinctive approach to Buddhist training and helps to constitute the monastery and its members as a Buddhist “field of merit.” As such, Mindrölling is presented as a worthy recipient of support and protection from patrons and of respect from the community. The curriculum reflects a variety of overarching priorities for a relatively diverse student body over time and therefore calls for individual flexibility within a reliable and sustainable institutional structure. In this way, the curriculum demonstrates Mindrölling’s identity as a bridge between the potentially competing values of the Tibetan Buddhist schools of the author’s day.

21 pages, ebook

Published September 7, 2017

About the author

Dominique Townsend, Ph.D. (Buddhist Studies, Columbia University, 2012; MTS, Buddhist Studies, Harvard Divinity School), is the Jey Tsong Khapa Associate Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism in the Department of Religion at Columbia University—a chair which was previously held by Robert Thurman. Before joining the faculty at Columbia in July 2024, she was Associate Professor of Religion at Bard College, and prior to that she served as Head of Interpretation at the Rubin Museum of Art.