Monastic Visibility: Monasteries, Tourism, and Outreach in the Buddhist Himalayas

This paper introduces the term monastic visibility to understand a contemporary mode of operation of Buddhist monasteries in the Indian Himalayas. This mode involves monasteries making an outreach to the public by participating in the religious tourism industry, staging performances of monastery festivals, constructing infrastructures like guesthouses, libraries, and museums that are open to visitors, and conducting religious tours and teachings. To understand this development as Buddhist tourism alone would be to underplay the scope of monastic visibility that emerges through infrastructural forms, festival performances, and community outreach. Monastic visibility offers a way to understand how monasteries in the Himalayan borderlands are equipping themselves to engage with the modern by incorporating infrastructures and technologies of tourism as well as through community work, and thereby, making an outreach to both Buddhist and non-Buddhist publics. This paper is based on ethnographic work conducted in the Vajrayana Buddhist monastery sites in Arunachal Pradesh, India, in 2022–23, and supplemented by previous work done in the field site.