Navigating Belonging and Ethics: Two Charismas in an Indonesian Buddhist Community

ABSTRACT This article explores the coexistence of Buddhist charisma and para‐charisma through a Chinese Indonesian monk in a Tibetan Buddhist lineage. I demonstrate how the monk strategically calibrates his demeanor across different moral audiences: projecting warmth and intellectual attentiveness toward non‐disciples, while employing rebuke and anger toward his disciples as a deliberate spiritual pedagogical technique. Extending the account of charisma as structured around a good‐evil binary, I argue that these contrasting modalities perform distinct ethical functions for his followers. His public charisma counters forms of moral exclusion that render Chinese Indonesians socially and ethically suspect, particularly the racialized suspicion that they are primarily self‐interested and detached from the national common good, whereas his para‐charismatic anger confronts habitual dispositions such as selfishness, attachment, and spiritual complacency that obstruct ethical cultivation. Rather than being read as a failure of ethics, disciples interpret it as a doctrinally sanctioned and compassionately motivated moral force. These two modalities of charisma, I suggest, allow disciples to negotiate conditions of minority precarity while simultaneously engaging in projects of ethical self‐formation.