Generosity’s Limits: Buddhist Excess and Waste in Northeast Tibet

This chapter explores the slippage of Buddhist material abundance into a form of Buddhist waste among Tibetans in northeast Tibet, where there has been a wave of temple building and escalating expenditure on Buddhist rituals and monastic events. Supporting the Sangha and building temples are ubiquitous forms of Buddhist generosity practice. Why then have some monks and laypeople been critical of such practices, perceiving them to be excessive and wasteful? Are there limits to how many temples a community should build or how big they should be? Caple situates these debates in relation to local responses to state developmentalism and market capitalism, exploring the specific contexts in which an impetus toward conspicuous generosity, embedded in Buddhist teachings, has become problematized. In contrast to external critiques of Tibetan Buddhism as corrupt and wasteful, she argues that emic concerns about material excess have more to do with a moralization of consumption than of Tibetan Buddhism.