Yeah no, as I stated in my last response - and in the nation sheet - the Jade Palace and the local Buddhist lamaseries are not the same. The monks had nothing to do with the Jade Palace until after they showed up out of nowhere.

To reiterate: The Jade Palace is occupying many of the lamaseries present in the Kunlun mountain range, but they are not monks. The Buddhists would not normally have any reason to affiliate with the Jade Palace (see my prior post) but are currently collaborating with them for the purposes of maintaining peace within the region. Despite this, they are not acting as militants, and are mostly serving management roles for the Kunlun settlements.

This is something of a contrast to how monks have responded to the efforts of governments to exploit their order in order to legitimize their own rule (Burma springs to mind), but this is, pointedly, the Apocalypse, and the Jade Palace's agenda seems to be genuine in their desire and efforts to protect the populace. The Kunlun mountain range is bordered by China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan - the last three were not the most stable of regions even before the world ended. If it weren't for the Jade Palace forces scouting the borders, directing people to settlements, and performing nominal peace-keeping roles - widespread looting and violence would have torn the region apart.

The relationship isn't a perfect one, due in part to Jade Palace 'requisitions' and 'drafts' (forced quartering and kidnapping respectively), but they aren't torturing or murdering people, and they mostly keep to themselves and let everybody in the settlements live however they want without interfering - and they supply a lot of useful information to the settlements through the Tibetan order.

I'm not under the delusion that Buddhists would find this sort of arrangement acceptable under normal conditions, but for the moment it is an acceptable improvement to an extremely bad situation.

Plus the other stuff I haven't mentioned, since there are a few facets of their relationship/politics I'd like to reserve for the actual IC. :E