Thomas Peter/Reuters
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Senior monks teach young monks. Some families in Tibet have a tradition of sending one of their young sons to a local monastery to live a celibate life as a monk.
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Nationalgeographic.co.id-Life celibate or not marrying and remaining single is the path chosen by few. The reason for the choice is usually related to religion.
Researchers at University College London (UCL) are curious about the impact of this celibacy. Reports of their studies that have been published in journals Royal Society Proceedings B recently revealed the fascinating and surprising nature of lifelong religious celibacy in monasteries Buddha Tibet.
Until now, it is common and has become tradition for some families in Tibet to send one of their young sons to a local monastery to become monk lifelong celibacy. Historically, up to one in seven boys became a monk. Families usually cite religious motives for having a monk in the family. But are economic and reproductive considerations also involved?
“With our collaborators from Lanzhou University in China, we interviewed 530 households in 21 villages in the eastern part of the Tibetan plateau, in Gansu province. We reconstructed the family tree, gathering information about each person’s family history and whether any of their family members had become a monk,” wrote Ruth Mace, Professor of Anthropology at UCL, and Alberto Micheletti, Research Fellow at UCL, in an article in The Conversation.
These villages are inhabited by patriarchal Amdo Tibetans who raise yaks and goats, and farm small plots of land. Their wealth is generally descended from the male line in this community.
“We found that men with a brother who was a monk were wealthier, had more yaks. But there was little or no benefit to the sisters of the monks. That may be because brothers compete for parental resources, land, and livestock.”
Since the monks could not own property, by sending one of their sons to the monastery, the parents ended this fraternal conflict. The eldest son generally inherits the parent’s household, while the monks are usually the second or later born son.
“Surprisingly, we also found that men with a monk brother had more children than men with a non-celibate brother; and their wives tended to have children at an earlier age. Grandparents with a monk son also had more grandchildren, because sons their uncelibate sons face little or no competition with their brethren.”
“Therefore, the practice of sending sons to monasteries, far from being expensive to parents, is in line with the reproductive interests of the parents,” conclude the researchers.
These findings suggest that celibacy could have evolved through natural selection. “To find out more about the details of how this happened, we constructed a mathematical model of the evolution of celibacy, in which we studied the consequences of being a monk on the evolutionary fitness of a man, his brothers and other village members,” the researchers wrote.
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