Note 1344 — Chapter XVI · —Influences Of A Mountain Environment

It is in the corrugated highland of Tibet, chilled to barrenness by an elevation of 12,000 feet or more (4000 meters), sterile and treeless from aridity, carved by cañon-cutting streams into deep gorges offering a modicum of arable soil for irrigation, that monasticism has developed into an effective system to keep down population. Buddhism, with its convents and lamaseries, naturally recommended itself to a country where asceticism was obviously expedient. The world shows nowhere else so large a celibate class. In Tibet, monks are estimated at 175,000 to 500,000 in a total population of three millions. Archibald Little estimates their number at one-third of the total male population.1344 Derge, which is the most productive district both agriculturally and industrially of eastern Tibet and is also most densely inhabited, counts at least 10,000 lamas in a total population of about 42,000.1345 Not less than one-sixth of the inhabitants of Ladak are in religious houses as monks and nuns.1346 Families in Tibet are small, yet each devotes one or more children to convent or monastic life.1347 In western Tibet, especially about Taklakot in the Himalayan border, one boy in every family is invariably devoted to the priesthood, and one or more daughters must become nuns. But the nun generally resides with her family or lives in some monastery—with unspeakable results.1348