"This book focuses on the story of the Geluk (Tibetan Dge lugs) school of Tibetan Buddhism, the most widespread school of Tibetan Buddhism, best known through its symbolic head, the Dalai Lama. The vast majority of the monasteries in Tibet and Inner Mongolia-a landscape that makes up a third of the territory of today's China-as well as those in Mongolia are Geluk monasteries. Historically, these monasteries were some of the largest in the world, and even today some of the largest Geluk monasteries house thousands of monks both in Tibet and in exile in India. To understand how this came to pass, this book reveals the compulsive efforts by Geluk lamas in the early modern period to prescribe and control a proper way of living the life of a Buddhist monk and to define a proper way of administering the monastery. These lamas drew on the sort of administrative techniques usually associated with state-making-standardization, record-keeping, the conscription of young males, the concentration of manpower in central cores, and so on-thereby earning the moniker "lama official" or "Buddhist bureaucrat" (Tibetan bla dpon). They also thereby succeeded in establishing a relatively uniform and resilient network of monasteries stretching from Ladakh to Lake Baikal, from Beijing to the Caspian Sea"-- Provided by publisher.