Tyler A. Lehrer

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Wesleyan College

This dissertation demonstrates how the creation and breakdown of initially friendly Buddhist monastic connectivity over dangerous Bay of Bengal waters in the mid-eighteenth century became a destabilizing conduit for political and commercial exploitation by the governors and merchants of the Dutch East India Company (hereafter VOC), together with th...

The kingdoms of Kandy (now Sri Lanka) and Ayutthaya (now Thailand) were briefly connected across Indian Ocean waters in the mid-eighteenth century by Dutch East India Company (hereafter VOC) traders, leading to the importation of valuable Siamese Buddhist monks and their ordination lineage to the island. Two series of events related to the VOC's se...

Kelaniya University (Sri Lanka) Journal of Social Sciences (New Series) 1, no 1 (2022).

Cornell University South Asia Program Bulletin (2021).

Since the late 1980s, in defiance of Sri Lanka’s major monastic fraternities (nik?yas) and the government, Buddhist women and men have begun to organize across distinctions of national boundary and Buddhist tradition to reinstate a defunct bhikkhun? ordination lineage for renunciant women. Drawing on fieldwork from the winter of 2015–16, this artic...

This thesis investigates many of the figures and events that have made full ordinations of Buddhist nuns (bhikkhunīs) both possible and contested in contemporary Sri Lanka. I draw on interviews and materials collected during the winter of 2015–16 to show how local actors cooperate across distinctions of nationality and Buddhist practice tradition t...