ИСТИНА

One of the principal difficulties in studying history of monastic Buddhism in precolonial Burma is the limited source base. Despite a notable increase in research on Burmese Buddhism during the last twenty years, academic community still works basically with the same selection of sources that was printed in the late nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries. The majority of these sources was compiled in the nineteenth century and reflects agendas and beliefs specific to that period. When used to understand monastic activities of the earlier periods, the data of these sources may sometimes be more misleading than helpful. The paper illustrates this situation by analyzing the organization of Burmese monastic communities of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The existing scholarship identifies individual monasteries, sects and lineages as the key forms of monastic association and the loci of monastic activities. The paper challenges this view by drawing attention to a broader sample of evidence available in manuscripts and revealing a number of anomalies that the present knowledge can’t explain. It argues against the centrality of sects and lineages for the pre-nineteenth century Burmese samgha and discusses alternative ways of describing the structures of monasticism.