ebin.pub_the-hermits-hut-architecture-and-asceticism-in-india-9780824839130

The Hermit’s Hut

Spatial Habitus: Making and Meaning in Asia’s Architecture Edited by Ronald G. Knapp and Xing Ruan House Home Family: Living and Being Chinese Edited by Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-Yin Lo Allegorical Architecture: Living Myth and Architectonics in Southern China Xing Ruan Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts Edited by Jeffrey W. Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Tony Atkin Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual Jiren Feng Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China Bianca Bosker China’s Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing Charles D. Musgrove Architecture and Urbanism in Modern Korea Inha Jung The Hermit’s Hut: Architecture and Asceticism in India Kazi K. Ashraf

The Hermit’s Hut Architecture and Asceticism in India KAZI K. ASHRAF University of Hawai‘i PressHonolulu spatial habitus

© 2013 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ashraf, Kazi Khaleed, author. The hermit’s hut : architecture and asceticism in India / Kazi K. Ashraf. pages cm. — (Spatial habitus) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3583-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Buddhist architecture—India.2. Asceticism—Buddhism. I. Title.II. Series: Spatial habitus (Series) NA6001.A862013 720.1'08—dc23 2013008705 This volume was published with the support of the School of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Hawai‘i. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by Integrated Composition Systems, Spokane, WA Printed by Edwards Brothers Malloy

Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction: The Architecture of Asceticism 1 1. Asceticism and Architecture 24 2. Home in the Ascetic Imagination 49 3. The Buddha’s House 77 4. The Two Houses: Body and Building in the Ascetic Imagination 105 5. Asceticism and the Primitive Hut 129 6. A Hut with Many Meanings 152 7. The End of Architecture 168 Notes 177 Glossary 205 Bibliography 207 Index 217

vii Illustrations I.1 Draupadi ratha, Mahabalipuram 4 I.2 Dharmaraja ratha, Mahabalipuram 5 I.3 Forest hermit in front of his paṇṇa-sāla, Rupar 5 I.4 Forest hut for a Brahmanical ascetic and an early Brahmanical dome-and-cornice shrine, Gandhāra 6 I.5 From the leaf-roof hut to double-dome shrines 6 I.6 Shore temple, Mahabalipuram 7 I.7 Buddhist dome-and-cornice shrine, Gandhāra 8 I.8 Buddhist shrine in dome-and-cornice form with caitya arch, Gandhāra 8 I.9 The Buddha inside a dome-and-cornice structure, Gandhāra 9 I.10 Brahmanic hermit in front of his hut, Mathurā 11 I.11 The Buddha visiting a Brahmanic ascetic in a woven hut, Gandhāra 12 I.12 Yogi in front of his hut 13 I.13 Śiva visiting the sage Vāsiṣṭa 13 I.14 Mughal emperor Akbar visiting the ascetic Baba Bilas 14 I.15 The Buddha seated in a tiered-roof structure, Gandhāra 15 I.16 Chashitsu, Kōdaiji temple, Kyoto 16 I.17 Elevation of a chashitsu, Taikyo-an, Kōetsuji temple, Kyoto 16 I.18 Bapukuṭī, Gandhi’s hut in Wardha, Nagpur 17 I.19 Interior of Bapukuṭī, Wardha, Nagpur 18

VIIIILLUSTRATIONS 1.1 Seal from Mohenjo Daro showing seated yogi 26 1.2 Standing ascetic, Nadan 27 1.3 The Buddha as a mahāpuruṣa 28 1.4 Forest scene of a hermit receiving a visitor, Chamba 32 1.5 Scene of Rama’s journey through various hermitages 33 1.6 Brahmanical hermit in front of his paṇṇa-sāla 39 1.7 Brahmanical ascetics sitting inside their huts, Gandhāra 39 1.8 Brahmanical ascetic Kāśyapa in his hut, Gandhāra 40 1.9 Hermit in front of his hut, Gandhāra 41 1.10 Scene from a jātaka tale showing ascetics around a fire, Goli 41 1.11 Scene of a forest hermitage belonging to Brahmanical ascetics, Sāñcī 42 1.12 Scene of a hermitage in a grove, Virūpākṣa Temple, Pattadakal 42 1.13 The Buddha meeting Brahmanical hermits, Amarāvatī 43 2.1 Siddhārtha in the palace, Gandhāra 50 2.2 Siddhārtha preparing to leave home, Gandhāra 51 2.3 Siddhārtha emerges outside the city gate, Amarāvatī 52 2.4 Scene of the Great Departure, Jamal-garhi 52 2.5 Representation of urban buildings, Bodh Gayā 53 2.6 Life in a palace; scene from a jātaka story, Ajaṇṭā 54 2.7 Life in a palace; scene from a jātaka story, Ajaṇṭā 54 2.8 Rāhula seeking paternal recognition, Cave 17, Ajaṇṭā 55 2.9 Scene of a Hindu marriage around a sacred fire, Rajasthan 59 2.10 Structure of a pavilion, Ajaṇṭā 60 2.11 Vihāras as cave dwellings, Cave 12, Ajaṇṭā 70 2.12 The Buddha sheltered by the nagā king, Cambodia 72 2.13 The Buddha sheltered by the nagā king, Cambodia 73 2.14 The Buddha protected by an acanthus leaf, Gandhāra 74 3.1 Siddhārtha meditating below the jambu tree, Gandhāra 80 3.2 Grass cutter offering grass for a mat to Siddhārtha, Pagan 81 3.3 The Buddha in cave at Uruvelā, Gandhāra 81 3.4 Residences for the Buddha at Jetavana ārāma, Bhārhut 84 3.5 Residences for the Buddha at Jetavana ārāma, Sāñcī 85

ILLUSTRATIONSIX 3.6 The Buddha’s house in Jetavana, Kanganhalli 86 3.7 The Buddha inside a possible gandhakuṭī, Mathurā 86 3.8 Swans “circumambulating” the gandhakuṭī, Mathurā 87 3.9 The Buddha under a trabeated roof structure, Gandhāra 87 3.10 The Buddha figure inside a shrine structure, Gandhāra 88 3.11 The Buddha in front of a hut and Sujata making him an offering, Borobudur 89 3.12 The Buddha seated in a chamber with a double roof, Pagan 89 3.13 The two gandhakuṭīs at Jetavana, Bhārhut 90 3.14 The Buddha under a caitya-arch structure, Gandhāra 90 3.15 Standing Buddha figures framed by caitya arch, Gandhāra 91 3.16 Caitya arch inside the harmikā of a stupa, Bhārhut 91 3.17 Caitya arch inside the harmikā of a stupa, Bhārhut 92 3.18 Image of a bodhighara showing a caitya arch, Mathurā 92 3.19 Queen Māyā carrying the unborn Siddhārtha in a caitya-shaped palanquin, Gandhāra 93 3.20 Triratna sheltered in a caitya arch, Gandhāra 93 3.21 Donor with votive object shaped as a caitya, Gandhāra 94 3.22 Caitya arch as a framing device, Gandhāra 95 3.23 The Buddha seated under a tree canopy flanked by bodhisattvas, Gandhāra 96 3.24 The Buddha under a canopy of floral pendants, Gandhāra 97 3.25 Fragments showing a floral canopy and woven parasol, Gandhāra 97 3.26 The Buddha with a mobile flower canopy, Gandhāra 98 3.27 Harmikā atop a votive stupa with caitya-arch openings, Bhājā 101 4.1 The Buddha in bhūmisparsha mudrā, Magadha 110 4.2 The Buddha framed in a rectangular niche, Cave 19, Ajaṇṭā 111 4.3 The Buddha in an arched frame, Cave 6, Ajaṇṭā 111 4.4 The Buddha in a columned structure with a leaf-roof dome, Gandhāra 112 4.5 The Buddha in a trefoil arch, Gandhāra 113 4.6 The Buddha in a trefoil arch, Gandhāra 114

XILLUSTRATIONS 4.7 Narrative scene with buddhas and bodhisattvas inside various architectural frames, Gandhāra 115 4.8 The Buddha inside a linear frame flanked by bodhisattvas in arches, Gandhāra 116 4.9 Three seated buddhas in a pillared structure, Gandhāra 116 4.10 The Buddha under a “distended lintel” at the time of his first sermon, Gandhāra 117 4.11 The Buddha under a “distended lintel” with bodhisattvas in pavilions, Gandhāra 118 4.12 The Buddha under a “distended lintel” in a domed pavilion, Gandhāra 118 4.13 Head of the Buddha, Gandhāra 119 4.14 The Buddha with a high, pointed uṣṇīṣa 119 4.15 Head of the Buddha with uṣṇīṣa indicating a flame, Thailand 121 4.16 The Buddha with uṣṇīṣa as an efflorescent tree, Orissa 122 4.17 Relief depicting a stupa with canopy-like emanations from the harmikā, Amarāvatī 122 5.1 Interior of Lomas Rishi Cave, Barabar Hills 130 5.2 Exterior of Lomas Rishi, Barabar Hills 130 5.3 Emaciated Siddhārtha, Gandhāra 131 5.4 Head of the fasting Buddha, Gandhāra 132 5.5 Scene of the Buddha’s tonsure, Pagan 133 5.6 Rama, Sita, and Lakhsman donning forest garb 141 5.7 Plans of various cave spaces 146 5.8 Interior of Sudāmā Cave, Barabar Hills 147 5.9 Interior showing stupa-shrine, Kondivte 147 5.10 Exterior view of cave at Guntupalli 148 5.11 Exterior of caitya cave, Kondane 148 5.12 Plans of vihāras, Ajaṇṭā 149 5.13 Façade and interior section of Cave 9, Ajaṇṭā 150 6.1 Copperplate showing Buddhist caityas, Mauryan period 153

xi Acknowledgments I t is hard to say when working from an architectural mainstream— modern architecture and design practice—I found myself in the ancient landscapes of India, and more particularly in the groves of the hermits and ascetics. It may appear paradoxical, but my general interest in the structure of “place” led me to that amazing group of humans who contemplated and practiced the most rigorous form of “placelessness” (or redefined it, as I was soon to understand). The brilliant writings of the Dutch Indologist Jan Gonda provided a turning point in my understanding of Vedic notions of space and scope of human habitation. The late and truly venerable professor Wilhelm Halbfass, who taught Indian philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, introduced me to that landscape and offered his generosity in fielding queries and requests from someone in the field of architecture wandering in the neighborhood of things ancient in India— history, philosophy, religion, and rituals. I remain profoundly indebted to him. An investigation of place evolved into a study of placeless beings and their habi tations. I discovered the practices of asceticism and renunciation. And, once I came face-to-face with the remarkable figure of the hermit-ascetic in the forest, I was compelled to follow him into his lair, which became, as I proceeded, increasingly enigmatic and expansive. This book is a document of that search expanding beyond the frontiers of architecture. A broadened sense of architecture that overflows itself and transgresses disciplines in order to proceed toward new regions of thought comes, of course, from my home base in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Architecture as a student of Joseph Rykwert’s. To

XIIACKNOWLEDGMENTS Joseph, scholar extraordinaire, I owe much, most important, developing an abiding keenness for a way of inquiry that is neither chastened or hastened by disciplinary categories nor encumbered by contingencies of the time. I acknowledge the matchless privilege of being one of Joseph’s students. I thank the following for support that made the successful and seamless production of this book possible: David Leatherbarrow and Michael Meister, both at the University of Pennsylvania, for helping develop my early ideas on the topic; Francesco Pellizzi, editor of the journal RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Harvard Art Museums for permitting me to reprint my article, which appeared in volume 53/54 (2008) of the journal, in revised form in this book as the chapter “The Buddha’s House”; Vandana Sinha, academic director of the Center for Art & Archaeology, American Institute of Indian Studies, Gurgaon, for facilitating procuring images from the institute’s collection; various museums and archives in the United States and the United Kingdom, where I found similar support; Monica Ghosh, South Asia librarian at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, for her support in my research at the university’s Hamilton Library; and Katelyn Hudson, Cindy Nakagawa, and Raphael Tran, all in the School of Architecture at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, for producing the line drawings for the book and assisting in the research and scanning of images. I am, however, especially thankful to Dean Clark Llewellyn of the School of Architecture at the University of Hawai‘i for supporting the reproduction and editing expenses for the book. I am grateful to the editors of the University of Hawai‘i Press’ Spatial Habitus series, Ronald G. Knapp and Xing Ruan, the anonymous readers of the draft manuscript, and executive editor Patricia Crosby for supporting the project, improving its content, and ushering it to its destination. Patricia has my very special thanks for her advice and guidance in the production of the book. Amy Morgenstern worked furiously and meticulously in editing and helping develop the text to its final form. I am indebted to her for being not only a devoted and at times merciless editor but also an empathetic and generous friend. Finally, I am thankful to Mike Ashby for his keen and careful copyediting. As the book proceeded over the years, I have foisted various sections on friends and colleagues and gained priceless insights and clarifications in the process. I would like to thank Shilpa Mehta for reading a very primitive version of the text and Sonia Amin (Sonia Apa), professor of history at Dhaka University, for reading and helping in fine-tuning some key chapters in their final form. To Jyoti Puri, a caring friend and colleague, who read the developing text astutely and patiently, despite her house in a different discipline (sociology), and guided many parts

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSXIII of it toward a more refined and structured discourse, I am deeply grateful. For her meaningful persistence in reminding me to take the project to its conclusion, I am made aware of the value of an authentic camaraderie. Works as these are produced under the immense, sustaining canopy of a family even if its members are at times bewildered by the nature of the content. I treasure the patience and support, as well as samplings of irreverence, offered by Neelu, Oona, and Amit, and family in Dhaka. To Neelu, spouse, partner, and companion, verbal thanks are obviously not enough for suffering my quasi- ascetic wanderings. In the end, the book, or the story here, is for her.

1 Introduction The Architecture of Asceticism He looks at his house with (the words): Give us a house, O Fathers! —Gobila Gṛhya Sūtra1 I refuse a roof —Dhutaṇga practitioner2 With the declaration “Architect, you shall not build your house again,” Siddhārtha Gautama3 announces his arrival at the critical destination called nirvāṇa and acquires the qualities of a mahāsamana, a superascetic.4 Sid dhārtha, likening his ascetically charged body to a building, describes the inconceivable and ineffable moment of becoming the Buddha. In that pairing of body and building, architecture is positioned for a portentous destiny in the Buddhist imagination. This is made evident when the Buddha provides a cataclysmic scenario for the momentous turn of the building-body. “The roof rafters are shattered,” he announces, and “the roof is destroyed.” The metaphor, while narrating the engineering of the ascetic body, is also evidence of the deeply imbricated significance of architecture in ascetic discourse and practices. The image of a building has already come to haunt the imagination of asceticism. Six years earlier, the Buddha, then known as Siddhārtha, had awakened in his magnificent palace in Kapilavāstu and, like so many others before him motivated by a similar compulsion, stole out in the middle of the night, leaving home and family, the very core of dwelling. Thus ensues the operatic process of renuncia tion and asceticism. Searching for answers to burning existential questions and looking for liberation from suffering, Siddhārtha wandered through forests and glades, living under trees or in basic shelter and visiting the āśramas of sages and hermits. While the ascetic Siddhārtha eventually found his climactic answer, as conveyed in the narrative of the destroyed house-body, and went on to propound a world-turning philosophy and disciplined institution of monastic practices, he, as well as his disciples and followers after him, was vexed by the fundament that he began with, the matter of dwelling. After renouncing house and home, even the Buddha required some

2THE HERMIT’S HUT form of lodging. So did his followers. Dwelling for the superascetic included living under a tree, in a cave, or in a simple shelter. Each became the occasion for a continual debate and struggle in various ascetic circles on the nature of dwelling, its minimal requirements, and its implications in the life of an ascetic. Some of these deliberations, continuing for hundreds of years after the Buddha, formed the core of ritual and regulatory texts for monks. Prescribed with an ideal life of wandering and alms collecting, the earliest group of Buddhist monks encountered the exigency of dwelling during the rainy seasons of northern India. The monks were urged to interrupt their wandering to take up temporary residence for the rainy period. The practice of taking temporary shelter from the rain led to the formation of stable and permanent monasteries. Even the Buddha was thus assigned lodging and an address. Though he moved from city to city, teaching and preaching, he nonetheless stayed in particular compounds in each city and lived in a dedicated building. From what we know, such buildings were simple and unassuming compared with the elaborate houses in the city, but the house of the Buddha, known as the gandhakuṭī, or the fragrant hut, came to receive a focused attention from monks and laypeople and remains a source of didactic and philosophical reflection in Buddhist asceticism. It appears that the matter of dwelling, addressed as a house or hut, is a critical factor in the trajectory of the ascetic project. To put it another way, the narratives of asceticism are deeply etched by the profile of a hut. In the Mahāyāna story of Vimalakīrti, a transformation of a mansion emblematizes the profound and subtle notions around “emptiness.” The story relates how the ascetically empowered merchant Vimalakīrti, upon learning of the impending arrival of a large emissary from the Buddha to his grand house, divests it of everything, makes it empty so that it can hold multitudes.5 Vimalakīrti is most likely an apocryphal figure, and so is the narrative of the transformation of the house, but in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, the story of the magical mutation of the house from fullness to emptiness becomes a discourse on ascetic prerogatives and motivations. Little was anticipated of how the story of a well-to-do man of the world transforming his mansion in the city to a plain, empty house might impact the fabrication of dwelling. Vimalakīrti’s emptied house is neither a hut nor a hovel, but it imbues all such structures with a resolute significance that belongs to a very particular human type, the hermit, the ascetic, or the recluse.6 With the gandhakuṭī, or Vimalakīrti’s emptied house, we are already deep in ascetic territory, where the hut comes to represent the inner nature of the practice. We can never know when the hut—the dwelling— comes into focus in the ascetic consciousness and becomes an object of intense deliberation and narrativization for the first time. Before it be-

INTRODUCTION3 comes codified in doctrines and practices and subsequently gets subsumed in the building of monasteries, the hut-dwelling is part of an existential experience. Food and clothing are also two critical existential categories that define the parameters and practice of asceticism, but neither receives the wide range of discursive and conceptual treatment as the plain hut. The ascetic hut becomes critical because it is no mere object of reflection but a metonym of that reflection; the hut stands for how asceticism structures its intentions and practices. All these experiences began earlier, in the historical and sometimes fabulous period when people left home and society for a journey into the disciplined world of asceticism. Buildings belonging to hermits and ascetics have existed on the horizon since the first human walked from home to reconfigure his relationship to the world and gain an understanding of himself. Since then, these simple structures—huts, hovels, shacks, and other reductive forms—have played a critical yet paradoxical role in cultural imagination. While asceticism is understood as a practice of renunciation and reduction, it also involves intrinsically an architectural project with immediate implications of spatial rootedness and material embellishment. In fact, the ascetic hut, despite an inherent image of plainness and reduction, is implicated in the development of grand and monumental architecture. The magisterial cathedrals of Gothic Europe, the exquisite temples and gardens of Buddhist Japan, and the elaborate Hindu temples of India have all evolved, in one way or another, from a meditation on reductive dwellings. The minimal, ascetic hut seems to be, rather intriguingly, a source for an amplified architecture. The following chapters investigate how a hut belonging to the ascetic structures the world of elaboration. The geographical, historical, and phenomenological site of my study is ancient India and its traditions of asceticism, especially in the practices of Buddhism.7 With practices and ideological deliberations of asceticism centered on the hut, as noted, the structure remains as a repository of significances. However, in the historiography of Indian architecture, the ascetic hut has, for the most part, vanished from the horizon; there is little discussion of possible originary connections between elaborate temples and this mundane, nondescript structure. Far less discussed is how that connection may have augmented venerated architectural ideas or anthropological paradigms. The lacuna seems troubling when there is sufficient evidence that a simple building such as the hut formed the morphology and character of monumental architecture; it can be shown that an unremarkable space such as the ascetic dwelling informed the anthropological and symbolic contents of elaborate buildings. The disappearance of the hut also indicates that it has been absorbed in an increasingly refined architectural scheme or diffused in a world of ideas and imagination. With the presence of the hut confined

4THE HERMIT’S HUT to allusions and fragments in architectural, literary, and ritual repositories, the recovery of the plan and profile of that hut requires a process akin to an archaeological excavation. THE PROFILE OF THE ASCETIC HUT In the matter of housing, the śramaṇa’s life is based on dwelling at the foot of a tree. Thus you must endeavor to live all your life. Cells, houses, mansions, and huts are extras.8 In considering an account of this dissolved hut, we could start somewhere midstream in the historical current by describing a well-known example of Brahmanical shrines from the seventh century CE, the rathas at Mahabalipuram (Mamallapuram). An unusual group of rock-cut shrines, the rathas mark a critical moment in the morphological formation of the Brahmanical temple at a time when Buddhist and Hindu architecture drew from similar pools of resources. The period is also critical in the general development of temple architecture in India since one thousand years prior to the carving of the rathas, in the period known as the Vedic, there was an absence of shrine or temple building in the Indian landscape. Instead of in prominently built temples and sanctuaries, Vedic religious rituals were carried out primarily around open-air fire altars. There was some shelter associated with the rituals but not in the form of a permanent shrine; 9 there may have been small shrines for the tree, fire, nāga (serpent), or yakṣa (mythical forest being) cults, for which, however, the only evidence is representations in Buddhist art.10 The rathas are one key in the mystery of how temple buildings may have evolved from a culture of open-air fire altars. The rathas (or, more precisely, vimānas)11 are an example of elaborate rock-cut architecture in which the hut is still clearly mobilized for visual, symbolic, and reified purposes. The shrines there vary from the singular form of the Draupadi ratha shaped like a thatch dwelling (fig. I.1) to the multilayered tower of the Dharmaraja ratha in which each layer is articulated by a series of miniature buildings, or what appears as hutlike structures (fig. I.2). Clearly, the hut is an important trope in this ensemble of shrines named after characters in the Mahābhārata. Signifying an important historical moment, I.1 Draupadi ratha, Mahabalipuram, seventh century (Fergusson and Burgess, Cave Temples of India, 116).

INTRODUCTION5 the rathas register a recognizable presence of the hut motif in the transformation of the shrine into the more elaborate and articulated configuration of later temples.12 The Draupadi ratha suggests the conversion of a simple hut into a shrine without much modulation to the hut-figure even if more pronounced elaborations had already happened by that time. A close link between the morphology and significance of a mundane dwelling and a shrine/temple is possible in a context in which the houses of villagers or hermits have earlier served as prototypes for the dwelling of deities or other suprahuman figures. The French historian Alfred Foucher made the earliest indication of how a “double-dome” shrine form may have developed from simple dwellings belonging to hermits.13 The architectural historian Ananda Coomaraswamy also pointed to that important process of morphological transformation by which the simple hut form acquired a special status, that is, became clearly and visually identified as a shrine. Coomaraswamy noted this unequivocal production in which the simple shape of a rounded thatched roof or a forest hut with a leaf roof, or paṇṇa-sāla, evolved into a “dome-and-cornice” structure through a deliberate mod ulation of its I.2 Dharmaraja ratha, Mahabalipuram, seventh century (Fergusson and Burgess, Cave Temples of India, 125). I.3 A forest hermit in front of his paṇṇa-sāla, located under a tree, from a stone disk from Rupar, third century BCE (Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi).

6THE HERMIT’S HUT form, especially by the reduplication of the roofing elements (figs. I.3 and I.4).14 A shrine depicted in the Gāṇgavatarana relief at Mahabalipuram represents just that: the roof has been “split” horizontally and expanded into a cornice above which rises a domed roof in the manner of a paṇṇasāla (fig. I.5). It is this basic strategy of duplication and tierification characterizing most of the rathas at Mahabalipuram that would be deployed later in a more elaborate manner to configure the complex superstructure of Hindu temples (fig. I.6). A similar practice is evident in the honorific buildings of early Buddhism (fig. I.7). One Gandhāra example shows the enshrining of a stupa in which the main structure is conceived as a dome-and-cornice form with a caitya archway; leaf motifs cover the dome-and-cornice (fig. I.8). In another example, also from Gandhāra, a seated Buddha is seen inside a pillared structure that has a similar tiered dome and cornice (fig. I.9). Temples are huts; either they have evolved morphologically from some elementary hutlike structure or they continue to be hutlike in the ideational sense of a shelter for a spiritual being. What is more critical here I.4 A forest hut for a Brahmanical ascetic (left) and an early Brahmanical domeand-cornice shrine, Gandhāra (Foucher, L’art gréco-bouddhique, 123). I.5 From the leaf-roof hut to double-dome shrines, with Buddhist shrine in center and Brahmanic shrine on right (drawing by Katelyn Hudson based on an image in Foucher, L’art grécobouddhique, 122).

INTRODUCTION7 is not the form of the rathas themselves and the historical development of that particular form, about which much has been written, but the elements therein that have received less attention: the little hutlike forms that populate the body of the temple and participate in its signification. The Dharmaraja ratha best illustrates that formation: rising over the square body of the pillared temple, the ratha exhibits a three-layered pyramidal form with a large dome as a finial (which seems to be a slightly more complex version of the Arjuna ratha in the same complex). Each layer indicates some sort of terrace whose periphery is marked by a series of detached miniature hutlike structures creating an encirclement.15 The structures are miniature because they are scaled down and carved in such a way as to preclude any actual use. What is the defining character of these miniature structures? Do they resemble pavilions on the roof terrace of a palace the way a vimāna (temple conceived as a palace or flying machine) is imagined? Or are these structures indicative of dwellings in a monastic complex? These are questions whose answers may help explain the mysterious gap, the move from altars to buildings. The profile and details of the miniaturized buildings do align them with characteristic I.6 Shore temple, Mahabalipuram, eighth century (American Institute of Indian Studies, University of Chicago).

8THE HERMIT’S HUT representations from earlier centuries that suggest dwellings, and more important, those situated in an ascetic context. It would not be enough to say that such a representation of huts is a matter of stylistic, decorative, or habitual reproduction of ordinary buildings. The inquiry at the heart of this book is of why huts should be magnified, and whose huts are these. Realizing that the aedicule or hut that rings the various planes of the temple does not do so as any prosaic structure but as a nod to an iconic treat ment of the her mit’s hut or other forms of ascetic dwelling, it represents a reified object embodying a wider world of cul tural imagination and ideations. Additionally, the crucial issue posed by Mahabalipuram is not only the morphological modulation of the hut form into a shrine but also the question of to whom the shrine belonged. What is the identity of the I.8 A Buddhist shrine in dome-and-cornice form with caitya arch, Gandhāra (drawing by Raphael Tran based on an image in Faccenna, Sculptures from the Sacred Area of Butkara I). I.7 A Buddhist domeand-cornice shrine, Gandhāra (Foucher, L’art gréco-bouddhique, 121).

INTRODUCTION9 indweller? Is she a resplendent goddess, or some suprahuman being? There is a mystery about when the freestanding temple or shrine began in the templeless Vedic world. When independent shrines do emerge, most evidence shows that the occupant of the structure was not a glorious god but a plain hermit or ascetic. An answer to the question facing the historian of Indian architecture—how does one proceed from the world of open-air Vedic fire altars to the grandiose temples of Buddhism and Brahmanism—may very well lie with the hermit in his hut. The hermit’s hut may provide a mediation between open-air altars and formidable temple buildings. IDEALIZATION AND IDEATION I am now sixty years old, and this hut in which I shall spend the last remaining years of my dew-like existence. . . . It is a cottage of quite a peculiar kind, for it is only ten feet square and less than seven feet high, . . . but in this little impermanent hut of mine all is calm and there is nothing to fear.16 My description of the shrines at Mahabalipuram has been intended to emphasize that the hut belonging to the hermit or the ascetic plays a significant part in the history of Indian architecture. Yet surprisingly little has been said about it elsewhere. Moreover, what has been discussed consists mostly of analyzing the visual morphology without exposing the full anthropological and ideational contents of the matter.17 An anthropological inquiry may decipher how an architectural space is occupied and inhabited by a particular human figure, and how that architectural configuration acquires a unique significance by that human occupation. To understand the property of that hut in light of the special figure of I.9 The Buddha inside a dome-and-cornice structure, Gandhāra (drawing by Katelyn Hudson based on an image in Faccenna, Sculptures from the Sacred Area of Butkara I, plate 512).

10THE HERMIT’S HUT the ascetic and the particularized occupation of the space, the ascetic and his spatial embodiment need to be discussed. This is a key obligation of a study of the architecture of asceticism. Considering that we are left with a dissolved object whose presence is encountered either in allusive terms or in fragments in archaeological, literary, or epigraphic sources, the topic of the ascetic hut requires more than an architectural investigation to recover its significance. The focus of this study is more on the anthropological scope of ascetic architecture, in which buildings and dwellings are considered from the lived practices in early asceticism and not only from the organized socialization of monasteries or the cosmological and symbolic attributes of formalized architecture (both aspects follow a little later in the history of Indian architecture). In response to the anticipated argument that the figure of the hut is absent because there is nothing much to it, or, when it does appear, it is nothing more than a compositional element in a conventionalized narrative, I am convinced otherwise. A key proposition in this book is that the trope of the hut or its analogue is not only a recurrent thematic presence in most Buddhist narratives but also central to the thinking and practice of asceticism. In the Buddhist script, home is the principal protagonist in the drama of life. With the itinerary of asceticism shaped by the very definition of home, the fundamental requirement of asceticism—the renunciation of home—takes on a doctrinal status in Buddhism in its counterthesis of “homelessness.” The reconfiguration of home produces a paradox: home, as much as it is the target of ascetic critique and the singular point of departure of the ascetic movement, is hard to relinquish. It appears and reappears in hauntingly recalcitrant ways, in readjusted, reformed, and recalibrated configurations. The hut as an object of a dichotomous discourse on home is the first theme in my discussion. In other words, while homelessness is literally the abandonment of architecture, dwellings and lodgings nonetheless remain key mandates for monastic ideologies and practices. This double imperative to leave home and acquire a home condition—mutually contradictory—is an inherent part of the ascetic weltanschauung. The Buddha’s statements, as well as various texts, are filled with descriptions of the ideal space for monastic habitation: spaces that are conducive to ascetic practices and those that are infractions of the rules of habitation. If texts or verbal invocations can be traced to the time of the Buddha or a little later, relief art, sculpture, and other kinds of depictions appearing a few centuries later show visual representations of those structures of habitation. Asceticism may thus appear as an architectural practice, but at the

INTRODUCTION11 same time the significance of the ascetic hut is revealed through the charismatic personality of the ascetic. Accordingly, the second important theme concerns the meaning of the hut arising through the pairing of the hut and the ascetic. This intimate relationship between the two fundamentally distinguishes the ascetic hut from other residential types, such as those belonging to a villager or peasant. Though ascetic spaces have also been the site of more than one inhabitant, it is the one-to-one relationship between body and building that forms the intimacy; when there is more than one occupant of a space, as may be expected in a villager’s dwelling, a different spatial ontology ensues. The earliest visual evidence of the ascetic hut, from the third century BCE (the period when representations start to proliferate), already points to a deliberate and conscious aim to create a narrative around that nondescript structure. Many images of both Buddhist and non-Buddhist content depict the hut with the dweller inside or in front of it, often in a forest setting, thus conveying an intimate, intertwined relationship (fig. I.10) in a thoughtful manner. A telling image from Gandhāra showing the Buddha visiting a Brahmanic ascetic represents not only this particular intimacy but also the kind of fine craftwork that went into the making of the hut (fig. I.11). Shapes of the huts also indicate a clear difference between those belonging to Brahmanic hermits and those assigned to the Buddha and his followers; the former are almost always shown with a rounded leaf roof or of reed construction natural to a forest environment, whereas the latter exhibit a more refined and articulated quality. There is evidently a meaning and purpose to this image—the hermit and the hut—that has been in circulation with a corresponding mythos for over two thousand years; such a scenario is recounted or reimagined in, for example, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century miniature paintings depicting the life of the I.10 A Brahmanic hermit in front of his hut in a forest setting, Mathurā (J. Ph. Vogel, La sculp ture de Mathurâ [Paris: van Gest, 1930], plate 16).

12THE HERMIT’S HUT glorious ascetic (fig. I.12), a god visiting a sage (fig. I.13), or a powerful king paying homage to an ascetic living in the wilderness (fig. I.14). This panorama of visual images beginning in the second century BCE and conventionalized by the eighth century or so conveys the production and circulation of a distinctive idea of dwelling encountered by the ascetic. One particular image found in literary, visual, and ideational forms, one that takes that idea to a paradigmatic level with Buddhist representations, shows the Buddha seated in a pavilion-like structure (fig. I.15). With the image of the ascetic and his hut codified before the time of the Buddha and definitely before the visualization of the Buddha’s house around the third century BCE, it is critical to focus on the moment just prior to the for mation of the elaborate monasteries, the time when the Buddha’s house begins its circulation as an “idea.” The intention of this study is to seek the architectural measure of a phenomenon that has primarily an ascetical genealogy and that constitutes itself and circulates as an autonomous idea. The crystallization of this idea is the third important aspect in this book. To demonstrate what is meant by the evolution and circulation of an architectural idea with an ascetical provenance, two more recent productions need to be visited: the Japanese chashitsu, the room or structure in which a tea ceremony is performed, as a cross-cultural example, and Gandhi’s dwelling in Nagpur, as a transhistorical reproduction. In what may appear to be disparate instances, there is a thread from the Buddha’s house through I.11 The Buddha visiting a Brahmanic ascetic seated in a woven hut, Gandhāra (Ingholt, Gandhāran Art in Pakistan, plate 54).

INTRODUCTION13 the chashitsu to Gandhi’s hut, making the latter two a reincarnation of the “original” house and, in that sense, something greater than their generally understood profiles. The Japanese chashitsu is an enigmatic structure, since it cannot be understood properly either as a shrine or as a religious space. It is also not quite a cosmological construct, as one would expect for an architecture of significance in the religion-infused environment of that time (figs. I.16 and I.17). As an aestheticization of the ascetic hut, the chashitsu is thematically related to early Indo-Buddhist models. One could even say that the chashitsu is haunted by the Buddha’s house, for its meaning and significance can be better comprehended by viewing it as a codified articulation of the phenomenological and anthropological properties of an ascetic hut from the early Buddhist period. More than an aesthetical artifice, the I.12 A yogi in front of his hut with various utensils, Mughal miniature painting (Chester Beatty Library, Dublin). I.13 Śiva visiting the sage Vāsiṣṭa, Mughal miniature painting (Chester Beatty Library, Dublin).

14THE HERMIT’S HUT chashitsu is a conceptual reconstruction of the anthropologically charged ascetic hut (although the writer Kakuzo Okakura saw the enjoyment of the chashitsu as an aesthetic one but premised on the strategy of deletion and reduction18). The architectural genealogy of the chashitsu points to three important sources: the peasant huts of rural Japan, the makeshift huts of forest recluses, and the Mahāyāna Buddhist imagery of the metaphysically constituted “emptied” house.19 The first two provide the physiognomy of the chashitsu, that is, its rustic, nondescript character, while the latter two provide its ideational significance. The emptied house refers to the fabulous house of Vimalakīrti and his magical emptying out of his mansion and, as mentioned, converting it into a pavilion to accommodate the arrival of multitudinous guests. The other aspects of the chashitsu—its stark interior space, the rules governing its dimensions,20 and the precise selection of materials for conveying the sense of “refined poverty”21—all contribute to consolidating this codification. The chashitsu ultimately derives its substance not only from its constructed space but also from a deliberate conjunction of the spatial, architectonic, and per formative elements, the latter referring to what goes on in it as an event or ritual. It is for these reasons that the sig nificance of the chashitsu cannot be understood through morphological or visual features alone; it is additionally a demonstration of the enigma of analyzing the ascetic hut. The fifteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyū, considered to have codified the space and rituals of tea, indicated what is important regarding the chashitsu by placing the human subject at the center of the space and formulating the practice and illumination of emptiness in accordance with, it was believed, the teachings of the Buddha.22 It is the literal and metaphorical expression of emptiness that makes the chashitsu a compelling exposition of asceticism. The literal emptiness is embodied in the display of poverty and a “spare and disciplined aesthetic,”23 echoing the metaphysical significance of Vimalakīrti’s emptying of his house. I.14 The Mughal emperor Akbar visiting the ascetic Baba Bilas, Mughal miniature painting (Chester Beatty Library, Dublin).

I.15 The Buddha seated in a tiered-roof structure, Gandhāra (© The Trustees of the British Museum, London).

16THE HERMIT’S HUT This significance is apparent in the personal reflections of the fourteenth-century recluse and writer Kamo no Chōmei, whose words introduce this section. However, it was not the construed poverty and plainness that revealed the ultimate meaning of the chashitsu; rather, the significance was conveyed by the man of society who came to dwell within it. This situation created a paradoxical juxtaposition of flamboyance and simplicity, or worldliness and emptiness. I.17 Chashitsu, Taikyo-an (literally, “Great Void Hut”), Kōetsuji Temple, Kyoto, Edo period (Yasunosuke Fukukita, Cha-no-yu [Tokyo: Maruzen, 1932], 104). I.16 Chashitsu, Kōdaiji Temple, Kyoto, Edo period (photo by author).

INTRODUCTION17 While an architecturally conceptualized and aesthetically formulated ascetic space may not have evolved in India in the manner of the chashitsu, there are examples of the sociological reincarnation of the type at various times. One notable modern example is the hut or dwelling belonging to Gandhi, called Bapukuṭī, built in the town of Wardha near Nagpur in 1934 (figs. I.18 and I.19). By itself, Bapukuṭī is an ordinary structure in an āśrama setting, but it acquired its elevated aura, to the point where it was described as the “capital of India,” by being the dwelling of a modern ascetic practitioner, that is, Gandhi.24 Located in a secluded, wooded area outside a small town, the house that started as a simple residence became a site for Gandhi’s various social experiments as well as the headquarters of the national movement he led. The first hut built there was a simple rectangular room made of wood, bamboo, and mud, reflecting Gandhi’s idea that materials used in the construction should be procured from within a five-mile radius.25 Gandhi’s dwelling also mimicked the condition of the ancient rishis (sages) living in a hut in the forest, often with their wives, in an āśrama community secluded outside the city limits. What makes Gandhi’s hut distinctive and modern is its socioethical program. The critical element about Bapukuṭī is its renunciatory project through redefining social engagement, an explicitly political architecture and thus unlike the chashitsu. Gandhi’s hut represents introspection made public, with the didactic intentionality of a seditious social reformer. Gandhi established his hut with the primary intention of changing the immediate lives of his companions, but with the larger goal of enlightening society with an example of a heightened or idealized living condition. Gandhi’s dwelling was a demonstration of a simple but scientific organization of the necessary business of living.26 Anticipating modern principles of sustainability, Gandhi offered a wholesome living based on a voluntary poverty; his advice was that life should be led as a villager living amid nature and sustaining oneself by the fruits of the soil and personal labor. While Gandhi’s par ticular approach to asceticism in vites closer scrutiny, especially in the equation I.18 Bapukuṭī, Gandhi’s hut in Wardha, Nagpur (photo by author).

18THE HERMIT’S HUT between the austerity of the ascetic and the poverty of the villager, his ideas and practices can be said to be strongly inflected by an ascetic philosophy. The morphology and materiality of Gandhi’s house gain significance only when considering the ethical-spiritual program embodied by the special resident of the house. More important, Gandhi’s dwelling presents a challenge to the very nature of home with its concomitant social form, the family, and by doing so, invites a shadow of the Buddha’s house onto its horizon. This modern hut is therefore an illustration of the deliberate production of an idea from within the heart of asceticism. In the manner of the Buddha’s house, Gandhi’s plain dwelling is another provocative paradigm of a radical socio philosophical project that disrupts and rearranges the ideas of home and habitation. SCOPE OF THE BOOK They make holy wherever they dwell, in village or forest, on land or at sea. With their senses at peace and minds full of joy, they make the forests holy.27 Although Buddhist archaeological, epigraphic, and literary materials comprise a rich archive, there is scant description of an architectural narrative of asceticism. The historiography of Buddhist architecture continues to focus on the production of well-built monasteries, temples, and stupas; even there, however, one finds neglect; as Gregory Schopen has observed, “a good history of the Buddhist monastery in India has yet to be written.”28 An inherent claim of this book is that such “a good history” will have to be premised by narratives of architecture and asceticism with a focus on the ascetic hut, for a spatial topic more fundamental than the monastery is the ascetic dwelling, and in the case of Buddhist discourse, the Buddha’s house. An inquiry into the ascetic dwelling presents a number of challenges. First, there is a complex identification between the ascetic and his dwelling, especially when it comes to an extraordinary figure such as the Buddha. Consequently, in reflecting on the Buddha’s house, one is inI.19 Interior of Bapukuṭī, Wardha, Nagpur (photo by author).

INTRODUCTION19 terested not only in the architecture of the house but also in employing the architectural structure to understand what it means to be related to such a house. The Buddha’s house becomes what Joseph Rykwert has described for such architecture in a different context, “a kind of paradigm, almost as a sympathetic-magical model of society,”29 the aim being a reform of society envisioned in a kind of purer architecture. Yet the meaning of such a building paradigm, whether it belongs to the Buddha or Gandhi, is to be derived finally from a conjoined relationship of the ascetic with the dwelling, especially when the ascetic himself is a kind of paradigmatic figure. Understood in this way, the ascetic or hermit’s hut becomes a particular building type engendered by the identity of its domiciled hermit. Accordingly, it is necessary to define who the ascetic is before attending to his dwelling. Chapter 1 thus concerns the historic and ideational features of the ascetic in the Indic context as an exploration of the critical relationship between the hermit and his hut. The subsequent chapters take up and elaborate on a particular feature of that conjoined relationship. Chapter 2 offers an understanding of the literal and conceptual point of departure for asceticism: home. The elemental hut, the center of ascetic architecture, is a principal trope in a discourse that engages various meanings of dwellings, fundamental to which is the idea of the hut as surrogate home. The hut as a hieroglyph of home is not addressed via the elaborate monasteries and resplendent temples but rather in the intimate, singular space of the cell—the ascetic’s dwelling. At the same time, what might appear with renunciation as the simple relinquishment of home will actually become a formidable and sustained topic in the new movement. It appears that the hermit’s dwelling or the ascetic’s hut, when it occurs, is neither a home nor a place. In the matter of articulating the nature of dwelling and redefining the constitution of home, an irreconcilable panorama appears on the ascetic horizon; a paradox is revealed: home, as much as it is the recipient of ascetic opprobrium and constitutes the singular point of departure of the ascetic movement, is hard to relinquish. It appears and reappears in hauntingly recalcitrant ways, in readjusted, reformed, and recalibrated configurations; the fate of asceticism is steered by the very definition of home. What is discussed regarding home in a broader anthropological and sociological sense in chapter 2 is investigated with more architectural and descriptive particularities in chapter 3 by giving attention to the house of the Buddha. Already indicated is the centrality of that house in the Buddhist ascetic imagination even beyond the time of the Buddha. There are two impulses for tracing the plan of such a house. First, the house—the idea of the house as well as its physical construction—

20THE HERMIT’S HUT becomes a potent site for reflecting on renunciation and its social, existential, and philosophical dimensions. Second, in Buddhist conceptual thinking, the final battle of renunciation takes place within the geometric framework of the body, which is visualized in unequivocal terms as a dwelling. The Buddha, after all, was an archascetic whose life practice comprises both the giving up of the normative home as an insignia of being-in-the-world and the relocating of that condition in new spatial arrangements. The Buddha’s house therefore is an emblem of this overall inquiry; it locates the focus and horizon of the investigation. The matter of the intimacy of the hermit and his hut, explored in the account of the Buddha’s house, segues naturally into the topic of mutuality between body and building. That the matter at hand is much larger than architecture becomes clear when the two most intimately related aspects of ascetic existence—body and building—are conceptualized within a single discourse. In fact, the one-to-one relationship of body and building constitutes a particular ontology and a symbolic landscape in ascetic discourse. One implication of the mirroring of body and building is that they share attributes of home and become sites of domiciliary reflections. The idea of two human habitations provides a compelling imagery of the hut as the image of self and home, and it provides the major clue as to why a nondescript structure should provide an ideation of the self. Chapter 4 tracks some of the complex proliferations of that theme. Asceticism is not only a practice but also an expression formed by rhetorical and semantic devices. Chapter 5 engages the way in which that expressive framework, with primitivism as a conceptual datum, involves a construction of contraries. A constructed poverty or construed primitiveness, inherent in the fundamentals of almost all ascetic compulsions, proposes and adopts some kind of method or manner that can be described, in reference to a fundamental act of abandonment, as being contrary to the culturally dominant practices. The primary task on the ascetic path is the renouncement of the vestiges of civilization and society, such as the normative home, and, at the same time, the adoption of conditions that can be described, in reference to what has been renounced, as primitive or elemental. The exercise is not simply about renunciation but also about building a narrative of juxtaposed contraries based on a dialectic between the normative and the primitive while making the dialectic a critical aspect of the choreographed and spatialized expression of ascetic architecture. With the preceding chapters providing a proviso for condensing the profile of the ascetic hut, chapters 6 and 7 return to two themes that inform this profiling: theorizing the primitive and configuring dwelling as the “last hut.”

INTRODUCTION21 THE LAST HUT Birth is finished, the holy life has been led, done is what had to be done, there is nothing further here.30 This book focuses on the ascetic body-hut as the site and instrument of demonstrating an existentially reorganized life. Despite the intimacy indicated between the ascetic and his dwelling, this study also takes into account the lack of a clear, symmetric relation between the two. The intimacy and inseparability between the hermit and his dwelling are both problematic and challenging. With a domain broader than that of architectural history, the narrative of the hermit’s hut encompasses phenomenological descriptions, religious ideas, yogic practices, sociological formation, metaphysical constructs, and fabrications of home and homelessness. It is precisely this breadth that poses a challenge to the interpretation of buildings, for it brings into question the limits of an architectural inquiry and at the same time highlights the ambiguous and complex relationship between architectural form and its significations. Questions of hermeneutical nature emerge here: What can we understand about the hermit-ascetic and his hut? How much can we interpret for the hermit when he himself is generally silent about it? If a momentous finality—“arriving at a nonconditioned mode of existence,” in the glorious words of ascetic practitioners—is the central goal in Indic asceticism, the image of a terminal hut provides its most compelling visualization and ideation. The last hut incorporates the critical struggles of the ascetic-renouncer with the vestiges of civilization, ranging from the pragmatic issue of shelter to the purely mental efforts of the ascetic to liberate himself from the fetters of social life. The prosaic sense of the last hut stems from the idea of home and the home life, of being in a socialized and normative lifeworld. The last hut in this primary sense is the familial dwelling that must be renounced before ascetic homelessness can begin. In this preliminary condition, the last hut could be seen as the process of dismantling the symbol of being-in-the-world in its most literal and sociological sense. Still, having renounced the initial home, the novitiate-ascetic is not completely freed from the need for lodging or dwelling, even if realized in a cave or under a tree. Thus ensues an intermediate and process-related struggle, an existential quandary between complete abandonment of and a fundamental need for shelter. Through this quandary, architecture also reveals the aporia of asceticism, of a resolution that is constantly postponed or mediated. The struggle for termination or finality continues in codified practices until the moment of the ascetic climax, when (and since then) the last hut takes on a completely ideational character by becoming analogous

22THE HERMIT’S HUT to the ascetic body. In that ultimate equivalence of body and building, the body itself is home, the last vestige of worldliness. A verse by the ancient poet Kuṭīviharin describes this coincidence: “This was your old hut; you desire another, new, hut.€/€Discard the hope of a hut; a new hut will be painful again.”31 The Buddha extols the virtue of a brāhman (sage) as having reached the supreme goal of life: “he has received his last body.”32 The most vivid, and certainly dramatic, expression of taking the hut-body to its last throes comes from the Buddha in the cataclysmic imagery of shattering the roof of the hut-body at the moment of enlightenment. It has already been stated that the articulation of dwelling, whether it is a physical or ideated one, embodies diverse encounters, negotiations, and mediations of asceticism. But how should the various connotations and significations, the fluid and fluctuating apparitions of the ascetic dwelling, be traced in all the doctrinal, rhetorical, and didactic narratives? Still more critically: how much can we interpret for the hermit when he himself is quiet about it? The subject comes into focus only when an inquiry is made from outside the ascetic realm. The hermit-ascetic him self is completely engrossed in his task at hand, his mind in deep con centration for the project of “inconceivable liberation.” The hut is almost inconsequential in the ascetic scheme of things. Since the ascetic is detached from considering any material or physical object, thinking about something such as the hut would constitute a breach of the ascetic vow unless that object is an instrument for gaining his final goal. Approached by way of two levels of inquiry, a study of the hermit’s hut shows that the conditions and aspirations of the ascetic project are not esoteric but actually expressed through ideals that are glorified by laypeople as well as by ascetics. The structure of ideation comes to be embodied in an architectural framework such as the hut for both didactic and expressive reasons. Here begins the first level of inquiry on how the idealization and valorization of ascetic themes are constituted in the various figural and representational norms of shoring up the hermit’s hut. The inquiry requires a historiography of forms and anthropology of means. The hermit’s hut is also, after all, about how a hermit-ascetic dwells in a space, occupying it for everyday and practical purposes. The second level of inquiry involves understanding the fundamental nature of dwelling, including the implicit relationship between place and human identity. If the central purpose of the hermit-ascetic is to free himself from the world, then there is something paradoxical about an engagement with dwelling. The hermit-ascetic has given up his name, his family ties, his worldly possessions; what is he going to do with his shelter, with shelter? If the house is an emblem of being-in-the-world,

INTRODUCTION23 and if the ascetic goal is to renounce all ties to being-in-the-world, then architecture—the hermit’s hut—assumes a very critical role indeed. Since the architectural idea followed in this study becomes apparent only through hints and allusions, and only sometimes with a clear contour, a hermeneutical method offers a restitution of the object of pursuit. This interpretive method allows one to penetrate the blurred or subsumed profile of the ascetic hut and tease out its ontological substratum, a process that is analogous to an archaeological dig. The object remains blurred because of disciplinary and methodological protocols. Instead of treating the blur as the product of some kind of allegorical overplay not worthy of an in-depth inquiry, one needs to take the contrary position that if there is a blur, it may be an unfocused image of something substantive. Hermeneutics as “the disciplined exercise of the imagination”33 can help in unraveling the significance of the vexingly ambiguous ascetic hut. As mentioned, the architecture of asceticism in India has not been the focus of architectural and art history studies; in addition, however, most historians of Buddhist doctrines and ideologies have not found it necessary to elaborate on the anthropological nature of ascetic dwellings and their architectural import.34 It is thus the intent of this architectural exegesis, at the risk of chastisement from both art historians and scholars of religion, to undertake an archaeology of the ascetic hut. The ascetic hut may not offer ruins, but it is part of a vast landscape filled with narratival, allegorical, and phantasmic residues. While a historical understanding is necessary, what the hermeneutical approach provides is a fuller view of the materials before us and consequently an opportunity to rehabilitate or reinhabit, in our terms or times, what lies behind that allegorical fog. This study turns the objects toward us, not as inert or neutral objects of study but as those appealing to our situations more expansively and provocatively than would be true with other approaches. What is crucial in this kind of interplay is the possibility of a “fusion of horizons” among the array of materials in the study and our own situations, producing possibly a richer, more encompassing circle of meanings radiating from the plain ascetic hut.35

24 CHAPTER 1 Asceticism and Architecture Although the concept of asceticism has wide-ranging significations and orientations, its fundamental ethos involves a common practice of disciplined labor. This ethos underpins Buddhist as much as it does Christian practice, if one is to cite two major ascetic traditions; what differentiates one form from the other is the methods and goals of this structured exertion. Such dedicated labor may involve varying configurations of meditational, contemplative, or physiological methods, yet all are nonetheless aimed at engineering a transformation of the psychophysiological potential of the practitioner. The word “ascetic” derives from the Greek askesis, meaning a rigorous, laborious exercise. Askesis, in turn, is synonymous with the ancient Indian term śrama (labor).1 Given the labor-intensive practices of various ascetic cultures in India—from yoga to meditation—these efforts are aptly named śrama and their practitioners śramana (ascetics). Accordingly, the gathering space for śramanas practicing their labor was originally known as an aśrama (place of retreat). At the time of the Buddha, śramana was the more widely used term for an ascetic before the shift to bhikhhu (mendicant). An assessment of asceticism as a project of reduction and renunciation may lead one to believe that it has no bearing on the construction of buildings and spaces. Indeed, the inaugural ascetic act of rejecting house and home can easily lead to the assumption that asceticism and architecture are antagonistically related. Yet further exploration of ascetic themes reveals a deeper relationship between the two. In fact, the very practices of asceticism are played out in ways that are fundamentally architectural and spatial in character. The mutuality between architecture and asceticism has neither been

ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE25 fully addressed by scholars of Buddhism and architectural historians nor been considered from an aesthetic, tectonic, or anthropological vantage point. Asceticism is not simply an abstraction conceived in metaphysical or allegorical terms; its literal rejection of life comprises a more complex itinerary or unfolding. Although perhaps not immediately evident, the essence of asceticism—rigorous corporeal exertion—is understood more precisely as a lived practice involving a situated body in a tense and fractious relationship with a sociospatial context. Certain fundamental questions of an architectural nature play themselves out from this spatial condition. How much? And how little? These questions, which form the existential, ethical, and didactic content of Buddhism, are taken up abundantly in its discourse and practices, both architecturally and nonarchitecturally. While the theme of the ascetic body in its rigorous practice and ascetic architecture as a site of the practice seem to have taken up distinct and parallel trajectories, there is an intractable intertwining that informs the characterization of each. Key moments of that intimacy are identified and tracked in the following. THE IDENTITY OF THE ASCETIC It cannot be ascertained with unanimity when the ascetic first appears in the broader Indian consciousness. The issue remains unsettled, especially considering the point of view that asceticism is an inherent part of being human.2 The matter is also compounded by the different strands of ascetic practices in Indian history, where the ascetic has been conceptualized and represented in multiple ways. However, what we can look for in that diversity are common recognitions of asceticism, or indications of a shared propensity. The earliest presence of the ascetic figure is found in various texts from the Vedic period, making it evident that the ascetic figure had become an important persona in Vedic society as early as around the eighth century BCE.3 There is an even earlier reference, although a questionable one, the well-known seal from the Indus Valley that seems to show an upright seated figure in a posture indicative of yoga (fig. 1.1).4 Ascetics, hermits, and shamans of various types begin to populate lit erary narratives more definitively from the late Vedic period. A secondcentury representation of a sculptural figure of a standing ascetic may be seen as a reproduction of such ancient characters (figs 1.2). Texts from that period describe distinctly differentiated types of ascetics, such as the ṛṣi, muni, vratāpa, śramana, parivrājaka, saṃnyāsin, tāpasvin, vānaprasthi, arahan, bhikkhu, and yogin, form ing quite a populous group of social dissenters. Each type characterizes a particular

26THE HERMIT’S HUT method and purpose of the laborious practice, indicative of a high degree of specialization and differentiation in ascetic culture. But broadly speak ing, the diverse types have been described under two main categories, with both establishing a recalibrated relationship with society: the renouncer and the ascetic.5 The renouncer is better described by such terms as saṃnyāsin (renouncer), parivrājaka (wanderer), vairāgi (dissenter), and bhikkhu (monk or alms receiver, but as some writers have pointed out, neither is an appropriate translation). The term “ascetic” is represented in the Indian usages by śramana, tāpasvin, arahan, and yogin, all of which may be described as engaged in the project of the metamorphosis of self. The later Vedic world, corresponding to the production of the Upaniṣads, is often described as a glorious period of ṛṣis and munis, or the forest-dwelling sages and hermits; ṛṣis are described as sages and munis as the “silent ones.” While texts describe the prowess of these extraordinary human beings, they do not elaborate on the nature of their asceticism. What is evident, in any case, is that by this time, the ascetic has emerged as a powerful figure in cultural consciousness. The ascetic is not a social deviant but a significant personality and a force to reckon with. In popular and critical estimation, the capabilities of the ascetic match even those of the gods. But what is most important is that the ascetics have acquired their extraordinary faculties from human resourcefulness without any divine gift or intervention. This is an important aspect of Indic asceticism and one of the key reasons for its subsequent and persistent hold on popular imagination. There are also renouncers who might more appropriately be described as pre-Vedic or extra-Vedic, since their roles are outside the structure of Vedic society. They form an assorted group that includes sorcerers, magic men, shamans, and others, or, as they are described in early Vedic texts, the keśin, yātis, vrātyas, and so on. Although all these types do represent unconventional figures in society, it is not obvious whether they can be termed renouncers in the technical sense (the meaning of many of these terms remains vague). On the other hand, it is clear who 1.1 Seal from Mohenjo Daro showing seated yogi, 2100–1750 BCE (The Hunting ton Archive, The Ohio State University, Columbus).

ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE27 the Vedic renouncers were. They were, according to Romila Thapar, those “who had deliberately chosen to dissociate themselves from the beliefs, rituals, and social obligations of a complex society with the aim of discovering an alternate path to salvation because of disillusionment with the existing ways.”6 In other words, the Vedic renouncers are identified by their taking an oppositional stand against existing social norms. That becomes, moreover, the modus operandi of the evolution of renunciation. While the distinction between the ascetic and the renouncer, as articulated by Thapar,7 helps us to understand the purpose and the social context of each, I see an incontrovertible relationship between the two. In many instances, the two terms can be used in conjunction. As paired concepts, renunciation and asceticism point to a logical sequence of events involving, first, an abandonment of social and familial conditions and, eventually, an increasing annulment of social conditioning, and, second, the deliberate adoption of a life of striving or labor or a set of rigorous practices in order to effect the transformation of the self. Renunciation achieves little unless the renouncer embraces some form of the rigorous practice of an ascetic.8 It is from that point the life of the renunciant acquires a laborious aspect, whether of a physiological or a contemplative nature, whereby he becomes a śramana, an ascetic laborer. The status of the ascetic rises substantially around the sixth century BCE, the time of a widespread movement in northern and eastern India that presents the śramana as a paradigmatic figure in society. Unlike the Vedic period, when ascetic narratives are often of a legendary nature, the phenomenon of this period is more historicized and socialized. This period, which has been characterized by Louis Dumont as the age of vairāgya (renouncement), marks a break in India’s social and religious systems by producing the “true” individual.9 The movement proffered a person “at the edge of society, this first ‘individual-outside-the-world,’€” or the highest evolution of the human.10 In a sociological sense, this time marks the “emergence of a New World” in which the old theological and ideological values based on sacrificial and domestic rites are reversed or revised by ascetic critiques.11 This is no less than a radical movement redefining self and society. The emergent ascetic ideology soon becomes more codified, and a number of interrelated groups articulate the ascetic goal along with 1.2 A standing ascetic, considered the earliest freestanding figure, Nadan, second to third centuries (Col lection of Government Museum, Mathurā, acc. no. 77.4; photo from American Institute of Indian Studies, University of Chicago).

28THE HERMIT’S HUT the requisites and techniques necessary to achieve it. The practices of this period produce the renowned teachers and leaders of major ascetic groups: Śākyamuni, Mahāvīra, and Makkali Gośāla. Such figures receive the title of mahāsamana or mahāpuruṣa, indicating qualities of a suprahuman personality or “perfected being.”12 Such descriptions also reflect the powerful reception of the accomplished ascetic by society (fig. 1.3). The idea of a perfected being who has evolved from human stock is very much an ascetic concept, at least as far as the discourse of Indian asceticism and culture is concerned. Each ascetic group in ancient India saw its goal as achieving the highest human potential, for which forms of ascesis are prerequisites and instruments. Sectarian differences on how to get there are many, but the ascetic who has reached a climactic state—and the most important thing is that it is reachable—whether described as nirvāṇa or samādhi, is then considered as a perfected being. From the viewpoint of the ascetic, the attainment of such a state is possible, as interpreted through the modern voice of Mircea Eliade, by means of a transmutation of normal or profane consciousness into other, generally yogin states through a combination of physiological, parapsychological, and contemplative exercises.13 And from the perspective of the lay community, inscribed in its religious or devotional practice, the perfected ascetic marks the nexus of humanity and divinity. He represents the fullest potential of humanity, sometimes achieving an aura more powerful than that of the gods. The ascetic, “through the endurance of self-inflicted sufferings,” in Heinrich Zimmer’s lyrical description, “accumulates an immense treasure of psychic and physical energy. In him the universal life force becomes concentrated to such a focus of blazing incandescence that it melts the resistance of the cosmic divine powers, as personified in the divinities.”14 It is for this reason successful ascetics like the Buddha and the Jina “were regarded, and represented, as filled with the afflatus of truth, not intrinsically different from the divine.” Arahan and paccekabuddhā represent specific categories that developed from within the diverse schools of Buddhist asceticism. Arahan (Skt. arahant) names 1.3 The Buddha as a mahāpuruṣa (K. Codrington, Ancient India, plate 21).

ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE29 a Hināyāna Buddhist concept of a supremely perfected being and joins the rank of other glorified figures such as buddhas, bodhisattvas, and pacceka buddhās. Although the term arahan is of ancient origin, denoting in the Vedic period a being deserving veneration, praise, or respect,15 it came to mean, in early Buddhism, a person of exalted status. The arahan, as I. B. Horner described it, is someone who “with mind alert, having attained to freedom of heart and mind, to insight and knowledge is an adept (asekha), is perfect, a finished product; one who has crossed over the flood and gone beyond (paragata); who has rooted out craving and cut off desire . . . who has won excellence in the thirty-seven things associated with enlightenment; who has attained nibbāna.”16 In short, it is a fig ure who “has attained the Summum Bonum of religious aspiration (nibbāna).”17 From these qualities, the arahan is also known as an oghatiṇna, someone “who has crossed over the flood,” and a pāraṇgatā, someone who is “going or gone beyond.” Horner also interpreted the arahan as a figure who, by reaching that finality, has achieved a “static condition”: he is now beyond the workings of the law of causation, he has no need of further development, of further progress.18 The qualities of the arahan bring into focus the nature of idealization sought in ascetic traditions and thought. The Buddha and Mahāvīra are perfected beings, having arrived at their supreme condition through various psychological, physiological, and moral means, and in the end they are special personalities viewed worthy of idolization and veneration by laypeople. What is also crucial in asceticism’s interplay with culture is what principles and methods are offered for general practitioners and aspirants of perfection. The concept of the arahan offers and prescribes an actualizable ascetic path from a human point of view that is devoid of mythological or miraculous attributes, one that can take an individual to breaking the cycle of the world in order to gain what is generally translated and described as immortality.19 The paccekabuddhā (Skt. pratyēkabuddhā) is another member in the elite class of enlightened persons but one who emerges from notions of strong individualism that was evident in early Buddhism. The word pratyēka refers to “single, individual, personal, private” and describes the practice of a monachos, solitary monk, in contrast to the cenobite, who finds his relevance in a community of practitioners. The paccekabuddhā summons his powers by himself and by living in isolation; he is, in the description of Edward Conze, “a Buddha for himself alone, who, unlike the Arhat, as ‘one self-begotten’ (svayambhū), won his enlightenment by his own effort without instruction from others, but who, unlike the Buddhas, does not proclaim the truth to others.”20 The excessive form of self-absorption and individualism of the paccekabuddhā instigated the Mahayanists to seek other forms of enlightened figures, such as the

30THE HERMIT’S HUT bodhisattva, which brought an end to the individualistic practice. The figure of the paccekabuddhā is mentioned to point out the tension within Buddhist asceticism itself related to the different ways of defining a perfected being and of achieving that status. The more common and popular type of Buddhist ascetic is that represented by the designation śramana, a term that retains the fundamental ethos of embracing and maintaining a laborious life. Patrick Olivelle, in tracing its semantic history, suggests two, interrelated meanings for śrama: “weariness” and “labor.”21 The first sense, implying the undertaking of something that one does not accept willingly or endure patiently, has been frequently used in the context of traveling and wandering. In the legend of Śunaḥśepa, śrama is associated with a life of wandering away from human habitats, an association that may anticipate the later association of śramana with wandering ascetics.22 The connection of śrama with wilderness and wandering, Olivelle has suggested, has significant implications for the semantic history of both śramana and aśrama, the latter, as may be recalled, referring to a place of retreat. Patrick Olivelle has described śramana as a figure laboring toward an objective and aśrama as the process of doing so, and eventually the place where śramanas gathered came to be known as an aśrama.23 The second meaning of śrama, providing śramana its essential meaning, implies strenuous exercise or activity directed at achieving a positive result for which a reward is expected. This approximates the Greek sense of the term askese. The term is used frequently in Vedic literature to express the toil inherent in religious rituals involving exertions. Śrama is closely related to the Vedic sacrifice, yājña, and is frequently associated with two other ritual activities, tāpas, or “austerity,” and arcana, or “praise.” It is in the context of sacrificial toil that the Rig Veda declares that when toil is absent, the gods are not inclined to friendship.24 In post-Vedic literature, the term śramana refers for the most part to nonBrahmanical ascetics, particularly the Buddhist and Jaina, but includes the Brahmanical as well. In some Aśokan inscriptions, the compound word śramana-brāhmana is used to indicate two types of religious figures: the śramana as the ascetic religious type, and the brāhmana as the priestly religious type.25 Śramana thus has a wider connotation then the specific sense of a Buddhist ascetic. The term implies an extraordinary person within the Brahmanic fold, a toiling, laboring figure who might have taken the fire ritual from the site of the village to the forest. The śramana is, however, a central figure in the Buddhist and Jaina ascetic ideologies, considered as a contemplative, active ascetic who has abandoned the Brahmanically ordered social rites, including the fire rituals. What is important for now is to foreground the equivalence between Vedic sacrificial rituals and

ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE31 Buddhist asceticism through a shared connotation of śrama, and to consider the generation of tāpas (“heat,” or ascetic austerity) in ascetic practice, a topic I return to in discussing the range of significance of the perfected ascetic. THE HOUSEHOLDER AND THE FOREST DWELLER The evolution of such differentiated categories of ascetics, finely articulating their distinctiveness, is evidence of a rich discourse on the ascetic figure. The imbricated nature of asceticism implies in the discourse its other: mainstream society or dominant culture. I have already mentioned an overlapping between renunciation and asceticism. Asceticism presupposes renunciation at various levels, and renunciation lends itself in practice as asceticism. Nonetheless, a question remains: why renounce? And what is being renounced? There is also a more fundamental issue that I can only touch on here without going into detail: is the ascetic-renunciatory impulse a consequence of a particular societal circumstance, or is it, as Raimundo Panikkar has pondered, a universal human urge?26 Even if we consider the possibility of a universality for ascetic imperatives, it is obvious that the practices and their consequences are produced in localized terms, within actual sociopolitical situations. Whether the ascetic movement during the Buddha’s time was precipitated by a “crisis” in society27 or accelerated by the “discovery” of the individual,28 the phenomenon of social abandonment and settling in the forest to devote oneself to meditational practices was forecast by the earlier Upaniṣadic critique of sacrificial ideology. The paired practice of renunciation and asceticism involves, first, the abandonment of social and familial conditions with the goal of full and final annulment of all social conditionings, and, second, the adoption of a life of śrama, or a set of rigorous practices intended to induce a transformation of the self. The ascetic-renunciatory lifeworld manifests as a polarization between two human types: the householder, or gaha pati, and the hermit-renouncer, or vānaprasthi, the former embodying the civilized and socialized space of the village or town (grāma) and the latter the wild space of the forest (vana). In this polarized framework, the ascetic-renouncer marks a critical opposition to established societal norms and rituals and consequently defines a new edge to civilization. The social polarity of the householder and the hermit is analogous to a set of other polarities in existence at that time: the spatial polarity of the village and forest, the religious polarity of sacrificial ritualism (yājña) and individuated exercises (yoga), and the metaphysical polarity of social and cosmic order (dharma) and individuated freedom (mokṣa). Grāma, or “the village,” is unequivocally the world of the normative,

32THE HERMIT’S HUT socialized human in Vedic society as distinct from vana, which is the world of gods, beasts, and various supernatural beings (figs. 1.4 and 1.5). At the center of the grāma-based life is the householder, a central figure in Vedic society. In that societal setting, grāma is characterized by the pursuit of wealth, or artha, and desire, or kāma, but also as the crucial site for maintaining the social and cosmic order, or dharma. Dharma is a complex term (appropriated later in Buddhist usage) that in the VedicBrahmanical context incorporates sacrifice, procreation, and study as a foundation of society. In Vedic-Brahmanical thought, society is a mirror image of the larger cosmos; thus, the three practices mentioned ultimately maintain the order of the cosmos. In this context, the married householder represents the ideal figure of the Vedic universe, someone who defines and performs the role of the perfect religious life. He is, by definition, the twice-born Arya, clearly a male person, who, following an initiation, studies the Vedas as a “mock renunciant” (brahmacārin) at the house of his teacher. After the critical period of being a secluded brahmacārin, the Vedic man returns as a man and formally establishes gṛhya (home) by marrying a woman and inaugurating his sacred fires. The fires are literally the focus and foundation of his obligatory domesticity. Furthermore, as part of his continuing social and familial obligations, he begets offspring, especially sons, by his legitimate wife, performs sacrifices throughout his life, recites the Vedas, and gives offerings to his deceased ancestors.29 Most of the ritualized performances of the Vedic man are conducted around the sacred fires, the literal focus of the familial, socialized life. 1.4 A forest scene showing a hermit receiving a visitor, from the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa series, Chamba, ca. 1850 (George P. Bickford Collection, The Cleveland Museum of Art).

ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE33 The fire rituals did not require a specific sanctuary; the rites were performed in the house of the sacrificer or in a space nearby.30 This key feature made the Vedic house like a temple, the sanctum sanctorum of Vedic social and religious life. The hermit-ascetic evolved in this clearly articulated social scenario. The prescriptions and regulations that structured the Vedic world, with its social and religious fabric centered around the Vedic man in his house, came to be challenged, rejected, or modified by the ascetic movement of the fifth century BCE. And in place of the householder, the suprahuman ascetic emerged as a contending ideal, and in lieu of the familiar, socialized space of grāma, the alternative space of the forest and wilderness came to be valorized by the ascetics. The qualities of this idealized figure that emerged in the new sociospatial scenario were already predicted in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad: The great unborn self, indeed, is he who among the senses consists of knowledge. In the space within the heart lies the controller of all, the lord of all, the ruler of all. He does not increase by good acts (karman) or decrease by evil acts. He is the lord of all, he is the ruler of beings, and he is the protector of beings. He is the causeway that separates and keeps these worlds apart. It is him that Brahmins seek to know by reciting the Vedas, by sacrifices, by gifts, by penance, and by fasting. It is he, on knowing whom, one becomes a silent sage (muni). It is he, desiring whom as their world, wandering ascetics wander forth. When they 1.5 A scene of Rama’s journey through various hermitages (B. N. Goswamy and Eberhard Fischer, Pahari Masters [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 164).

34THE HERMIT’S HUT came to know this, indeed, the men of old had no desire for offspring: “We possess this Self, this world; what is the use for us of offspring.” Rising above the desire for sons, the desire for wealth, and the desire for worlds, they lead a mendicant life.31 Three features—celibacy, homeless wandering, and mendicancy— defined the new ascetics. The goal was, in the words of the forest Upaniṣads, to aspire toward knowledge of the “Self.”32 In contrast to the sacrificial ideology that presented the married householder as the paragon of religious and social life, the new worldview of the ascetics minimized or undermined the cosmic significance of marriage and instead advocated celibacy and control of sexual passion. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, in reflecting on the topic, contrasts the two ideologies, explaining that those who live in the wilderness “do not return,” while those who aspire to gain benefits by sacrifice return the same way they went.33 “Return” is a metaphor for rebirth that occurs frequently in ascetic discourse. The activities of those who live in the realm of gṛhysṭa (at home in a village) are preoccupied with return, that is, with the prolongation of rebirth or continuation of the web of life, or what is called saṃsāra. But those who live in the forest after having given up home and village have the potential for terminating that process. This is the striking realization of the ascetic: marital life, sacrifice, and procreation, which are the cornerstones of Vedic life, will not bring about the ideal of liberation. Even the idea of immortality is no longer conceived of through procreation, since that only prolongs saṃsāra. The ascetic path is considered the desirable and proper avenue for gaining immortality. The rejection of the supremacy of the householder’s life is a widespread phenomenon shared by all ascetic traditions. In Buddhism, Jainism, and Ajivikism, the rejection is clear, whereas Brahmanism held a more mediatory position toward preexisting practices. Buddhist literature is particularly emphatic in its rejection of the value of both the householder’s life and the culture of sacrifice. Buddhist texts declare, “The household life is a dusty path full of hindrances, while the ascetic path is like the open sky. It is not easy for a man who lives at home to practice the holy life (brahmacariya) in all its fullness, in all its purity, in all its bright perfection.”34 The Buddha categorically states that he knows of no householder who has achieved an end of his suffering without having given up the life of the householder.35 VANA: THE SPACE OF DISCONTENT The forest, as a consequence of the tension between the village (grāma) and the forest (vana), is reoriented as a spatial laboratory for this new

ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE35 breed of human type. The idea of counterpoising the village or city with wilderness or forest is an ancient one and present in many Indo-European cultures. The idea is best encapsulated by the dualism of domi-fori in the Latin language.36 The widespread perception of the forest is as a space of the wild, savage, or barbarous but where primordial socialization and civilization have incubated.37 From the first-century Roman writer Vitruvius to the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, the origin of society is conceived as a mythological forest event—the first fire and the assembly of the human.38 “This was the order of human institutions,” Vico writes in delineating a societal chronology, “first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies.”39 This time line places the forest as a first space from which human society evolved and increasingly became civilized. The outright opposition of the village and forest is also evident in most literatures and interpretations in the Indian context. Patrick Olivelle has written of the significance of the ascetic-renouncer’s reinhabiting the forest: The revaluation of the wilderness symbolizes the revaluation of a wide spectrum of places, practices, and life styles. In every case the value system of the Vedic world is inverted: wilderness over village, celibacy over marriage, economic inactivity over economic productivity, ritual inactivity over ritual per formance, instability over stable residence, inner virtue and experience over outward observance. Both in ideology and life style these reversals represented a radical challenge to the Vedic world.40 Despite the predominant sense of opposition between village and forest, the significance of the forest in the Indian context is more ambiguous. This is distinct from the common Indo-European notion of the forest as wild and savage, as codified in that sharply dualistic term domi-fori.41 In Indian usages, though both araṇya and vana represent the opposite of the village, there is a distinction between what is truly wilderness, conveyed by the term araṇya, and the tree-filled but possibly inhabitable space of vana (forest).42 The speculation of the forest as an originary primitive condition is also treated differently in the Indian context. If the forest/wilderness is at all an originary space in the Indian imagination, as found in many mythological narratives, it is in the sense of a divine ground where the gods play, suffer, and enact the cosmic drama.43 These mythological and didactic tales persisted well into the fourth and fifth centuries CE, the period when the writings of the epics were concluded. These forest scenarios were

36THE HERMIT’S HUT imagined not to invoke a picturesque landscape but create a particular space that enabled suprahuman performances. Referring to the enigmatic Indus Valley seal mentioned earlier, the protoyogic figure represented there surrounded by animals perhaps emblematizes that property. The taking over of the forest space by human renouncers and ascetics also has a political dimension signifying the usurpation of a social space. In Brahmanic epic literature and mythology, the forest is inhabited primarily by gods, goddesses, and various supernatural beings and is consequently seen as a space of sacred potency. At the same time, many forest spaces were populated by autochthonous and, in comparison with the village community, “primitivistic” peoples. This points to an uneven growth of communities in the same region in ancient India. It is in the matrix of these social spaces that the hermit-ascetic appears as a renegade from the town or village to set up an alternative base in the forest and proceeds to establish there a different worldview. The hermit-ascetic is an arriviste who appropriates the significance of both types of forest inhabitant: the supernatural aura of the gods and the primitivist albeit subjugated power of the autochthons. The relationship between village and forest is more complex than a characterization of a simple opposition between the two. The distinction and distance between grāma and vana are not absolutes, for the two together constituted the human landscape of India, its lived world, and provided, in the words of Charles Malamoud, an inhabitable totality. 44 The forest, as Malamoud has noted, is the horizon of the village and in a certain way integrated into the civilized world of the latter such that the figure of the gṛhysṭa (householder) and that of the saṃnyāsin (renouncer) are not irrevocably antithetical.45 The intertwined relationship between forest and village is illustrated by numerous examples. The formation and legitimacy of kingship, the highest societal institution of the Vedic period, had to contend with the wilderness in various forms. The ancient Vedic ritual of aśvamedhá, a ceremony performed for legitimizing kingship, required a sacrificial horse to wander over the territory that was to come under the rule of the king.46 This territory included both populated areas and wilderness. In other examples, the winning or retaining of the throne was aided by legitimacy garnered from forest or wilderness attributes. Shrines belonging to yakṣas, popular tree spirits of the Vedic time located in the wilderness, were tended to by kings since kingship was deemed to depend on such attendance. A homology was drawn between the throne of the king and the reified seat of the forest yakṣa.47 There is a telling Buddhist jātaka (tale) in which a defeated yakṣa is installed as a gatekeeper of the royal city (the status of the yakṣa changes in Buddhist mythography from a glorified being to a subordinate figure).48 The