ASCETICISM AND THE PRIMITIVE HUT137 The legendary story of Alexander meeting the so-called gymnosophists of India (called such because of their physical and yogic prowess) highlights this ambivalent appreciation of the primitive. A text ascribed to Pseudo-Callisthenes16 mentions the meeting of Alexander and the Brahmins of India: The Brahmins are not a people withdrawn from the world by choice, like monks, but have received this way of living from on high and from the judgment of God. They dwell by a river in a state of nature, living in nakedness. There is no four-footed beast among them, no agriculture, no iron, no building, no fire, no bread, no wine, no clothing, nor anything pertaining to the productive arts or pleasure. But they have a climate which is brisk and invigorating and in all respects very fair. Worshipping God and possessing wisdom (gnosis)—and this is to no small degree—and though they are not able to comprehend the reasons of Providence, yet they pray unceasingly. And when they pray, they look to Heaven, instead of the East.17 The apocryphal writer Pseudo-Callisthenes goes on to describe the habits and habitat of the gymnosophists: And they eat the fruits of the trees upon which they happen and wild vegetables, and they drink water, being wanderer in the woods, and they sleep on beds of leaves. . . . These men inhabit the ocean-side of the river Ganges. For this river flows into the Ocean. And their wives are on the other side of the Ganges, towards India [?]. And the men cross over to their wives in the months of July and August. These are their colder months [?]. Since at that time the sun is high above us and over the North. And these months are said to be more temperate and stimulating to procreation. When they have spent forty days with their wives, they return to their dwellings.18 In response to the issue of which social ideals are superior, the Brahmins tell Alexander, “Courage is to combat the rigors of the climate with naked body and to destroy the desires of the belly and to win battles rather on that field and not be conquered by desire in the hunger for reputation and wealth and pleasure.”19 In constructing the idea of the perfected ascetic, whether Greek, Christian, or Indic, the emulating of an ideal life manifests into certain concrete conditions: deliberate homelessness, nakedness or crude attire, and socially dissenting mannerisms. All the above conditions under the rubric of primitivism are semiotically charged by taking a common stand against contemporary society.
138THE HERMIT’S HUT ASCETIC PRIMITIVISM: A FOOL, A LUNATIC, A DEMON The idea of an articulated primitivism or wildness that disrupts the order of society is not new; in many societies it is often produced in a concerted or ritualized manner. Another encounter by Alexander with a radical renunciant, in this case with one at home, makes this obvious. The renunciant is Diogenes the Cynic, who is presumed to have lived between 400 and 323 BCE. Diogenes is the archrenunciant in Greek history; he has given up everything that is possible to give up and lives like a dog in an urban square (and hence the title “cynic,” from kyon, meaning “dog”), as naturally and without convention as possible, living off the leftovers of society. His unpredictable behavior—masturbating and defecating in public—is meant to thwart notions of social conventions. The only things he possesses are a cloak, purse, and bowl. At one point, he even breaks his bowl, preferring to use his hand to drink water as a way of being completely unmediated. Once when Alexander stands in front of the large jar that Diogenes has made his home, the Cynic asks the king brusquely to step aside because he is blocking the sun, for Diogenes wants no interruption between what one is and what one can receive without any mediation, even if that be a temporal sovereign. This unmediated state is evidently the goal in an ascetic context, in which primitivism is utilized in a deliberate and precise way to move toward that state. The specific ways in which primitivism is engaged and reproduced within ascetic discourse can be described as ascetic primitivism. In asceticism, a part of the practice is coterminous with the adoption of primitivist conditions as an inherent and instrumental aspect of the process. Ascetic primitivism extols the primitivism of not the “first” human but the “essential” human, or what the ascetics might describe as the unmediated, unoriginated, or nonconditioned. The narratives of Indic ascetic ideology consider the essential human as an extraordinary figure; it is by having discovered, recovered, or attained the “essential being” that one acquires divine or suprahuman qualities. The Upaniṣadic theory of the unity of ātman (the individual self) and brāhman (the universal Self) posits that such a possibility is latent in all human beings until it is acquired or cultivated. Ascetic praxis is a recognized way of achieving this possibility. Primitivism in ascetic practices does not entail random or spontaneous acts but systematic methods and processes, a simultaneous abandonment of societal references and the adoption of primitive modalities. The latter is also substantially choreographed, which means that at every step of the way, primitive or quasi-primitive conditions are adopted or accepted within a knowledge of their emblematic and connotative values. At the same time, the adoption of primitive methods or practices
ASCETICISM AND THE PRIMITIVE HUT139 takes place in a theater of expressivity. As to be expected, the significance and meaning of the emblems vary from group to group and sect to sect, but what is important for all is the expressive content. It is in that sense Lomas Rishi may be seen as a theater of meanings. A Brahmanic example may help illustrate the expressive nature of primitivism. Consolidating earlier practices, the Pañcamāśrāmavidhāna, as a late Brahmanic tract on the rites of renunciation, describes the extreme emblem of primitivism, nakedness.20 Nakedness and its emblematic values are a disputed matter in Indic asceticism, as indicated earlier. Although it was quite common among the Indian ascetics, especially among the Jainas and Ājīvikas and the specific groups the Greeks encountered, it was clearly discouraged in Buddhism and most Brahmanical sects as well. But certain Brahmanical groups prescribed elaborate rituals for embracing nakedness, as the Pañcamāśrāmavidhāna attests. Buddhism does not condone nakedness; it has clear codes and stipulations on clothing. The nissaya rules regarding clothing address this matter categorically. The Visuddhimagga also discusses the paṃsucīvara, the rag robe to be worn by extreme ascetics. The Buddha, in the Mahāvagga (I.38.11), urges, If, monks, a former member of another sect comes naked, a robe belonging to a preceptor should be looked about for.21 And, certain Brahmanical texts simply implore, He shall wear a cloth to cover his nakedness.22 Nakedness, and the regulation on clothing, highlights the abiding presence of an existential imperative in asceticism. As with nakedness, clothing, personal possessions, and the dwelling remain key themes in constructed primitivism. Patrick Olivelle, in his study of Brahmanic asceticism, remarks that renunciation may be viewed as “the abandonment of practices associated with life-in-the-world,”23 which could be interpreted, in an obverse way, as the adoption of methods and practices of a primitive nature. If nakedness is seen as the other of sociality, there are intermediate positions between the two. In the Brahmanic context, the move from being a normative householder to a full-fledged renunciant proceeds through the rites of abandonment in a sequential manner; there are various stages in the progression, each marked by its own rituals, obligations, and emblems that take one eventually to the highest level, the paramahamsa. The paramahamsa, the swan, is a wonderfully suave bird that glides across and over the muddy water without being tainted by it and becomes a metaphorical appellation for the highest state
140THE HERMIT’S HUT of a Brahmanic ascetic. As one moves up in this hierarchy, Olivelle explains, one becomes progressively freer from rules and abandons practices that are obligatory at the lower stages. The gradual abandonment of emblems of the lower levels includes cutting of the sikhā (topknot), discarding the yājñopavīta (sacrificial thread), giving up the begging bowl, and adopting pāṇipātrin, or using the hand instead, or being udarapātrin (eating from the ground like a cow). The staff is one of the most important signifiers of the Brahmanic ascetic-renouncer; like other emblems, the staff externalizes some inner quality of the renouncer. The staff represents wisdom, while the topknot represents knowledge, and the sacrificial thread signals meditation on the Self. The water pot carried by the ascetic makes external purification analogous to internal purity. The Pañcamāśrāmavidhāna rites begin with throwing the mūdras (strings tied in a special way around the staff of the ascetic) into a special fire tended by a Brahmin. The rites continue with abandoning the staff by cutting it into pieces and then throwing them into the fire, followed by discarding the water pot. Clothing is the last item to be given up. Olivelle notes in reference to the text: “He is naked both externally (without clothes) and internally (without possessions and desires). Henceforth he is expected to live alone totally dedicated to the contemplation of the Self.” And as the text points out, the renouncer now returns to his “condition at birth” (janmakāle yathā nagna vastraṃ), and his behavior is now so different from the norms of social conduct that he is considered a bālonmattapiśācavat, a fool, a lunatic, or a demon. He is now the primitive par excellence. The intentional primitiveness of the hermit-ascetic gives a clear impression of an extrasocial being, a bālonmattapiśācavat in the Brahmanic sense. The extrasocial character is further intensified by ritual and obligatory rules that sanction the divide between normative and ascetic culture. The divide also augments the social polarity of the householder and the hermit and the spatial polarity of the village and the wild forest, the latter becoming a natural geographic destination for hermits and ascetics of almost all creeds. Departure from society and the taking up of primitive habitat in a wild area are also thematized in nonascetic narratives. Both the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahā bhā rata are characterized by forest episodes in which the principal protagonists—exiled princes and royal personages—take up domicile in the wilderness and adopt primitive means (in terms of habits and habitats). In the Mahābhārata, for example, the Pāṇḍava brothers, before departing for their forest exile after losing everything to the Kaurava clan in the game of dice, set aside their royal attire and take on the garb of animal hide. This deliberate adoption of a primitive
ASCETICISM AND THE PRIMITIVE HUT141 quality (certainly primitive compared with their earlier regal and urbane life) represents the process of primitivism (fig. 5.6). The primitive clothing of the exiled brothers is not very different from that worn by hermits and ascetics of that time as described in the epics. It is the same with buildings. Similarly, the “Araṇyakānda” in the Rāmāyaṇa describes the construction of the forest hut of the Rāmayanic exiles—Rāma, Sītā, and Lakṣmaṇa. Rāma’s hut is an elementary construction not unlike the other dwellings in the forests belonging to hermits and ascetics. What appears to be a close, even natural, proximity between primitivism and asceticism needs also to be made distinctive. Primitivism and asceticism are coterminous to the extent that both have a common plan: to construct a distance from what is considered as civilizational accretions or societal apparatuses and arrive at a more basic condition. Both primitivist and ascetic strategies emerge from a set of dissatisfactions with normative society and a desire to establish an alternative norm. To put it in another way, primitivism and asceticism constitute a sort of restorative project, the former desiring to return to an original, paradisal unity and the latter to discover or uncover an essential condition of humanity. By adopting primitive clothing, habits, and dwellings and setting them in a forest space, the primitivist wishes to be prior to, and the ascetic wishes to be distanced from, civilizational excess. 5.6 Rama, Sita, and Lakhsman donning forest garb before heading out of the city (Guler, Ramayana series 1775/80, Himachal Pradesh, Museum Reitberg, Zürich, Collection of Konrad and Eva Seitz; photo © Rainer Wolfsberger).
142THE HERMIT’S HUT The comparison between primitivism and asceticism ends there, for there is also a fine distinction between the two. Without an initiation into the ascetic realm, that is, participating in some sort of ritual that marks an official break between a civilizational, socialized life and an apparently primitive one, the adoption of the latter remains dubious. Initiation involves accepting some primary ascetic obligations and confirming the maintenance of a principled ascetic goal. The epic struggle between the Pāṇḍavas and Kauravas in the Mahābhārata illustrates this point. When the Pāṇḍava brothers start for their forest exile in their newly acquired forest garb, they are taunted by one of their Kaurava adversaries, Duḥśāsana: “May not this increase in attire here of such proud men fall to your lot, O Kauravas: look at the hides worn by these mighty Pāṇḍavas, namely the hides are not consecrated.”24 Duḥśāsana is raising a critical question: the Pāṇḍavas may have taken on primitive garb, but are they ascetics? Putting on animal hides and departing for the forest required, in the Brahmanical context, a prior consecratory ceremony, the dīkṣā. Since the Pāṇḍava brothers have not done so and yet have adopted primitive clothing, they are not obligated to maintain ascetic practices; they are at best what S. A. Srinivasan has termed paraascetics.25 Events or rites of entry into the domain of asceticism are also found in Buddhism, from Siddhārtha’s self-propelled act of cutting off the social emblem of the topknot and giving up his princely attire for a rag to the reciting of the pāṭimokkha rules as a rite for an aspiring monk entering the world of homelessness.26 There is evidently a sequential relationship between primitivism and asceticism, the former being a preliminary and provisional stage for the latter, a necessary mediation in the move from a cultivated, socialized life to an ascetic one. THE PRIMITIVE HUT IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION Knowing of the place of primitivism in ascetic discourse helps in understanding the deliberate deployment of the former in architecture and eventually in understanding how the hut or dwelling plays a key role in both ascetic discourse and practice. In the architectural practice and narrative of asceticism, that hut is also devised as a primitive artifice. Even if the hut appears unequivocally as primitive and a move away from the cultivated cultural norm, the narrative is based on the larger premise that the ascetic’s hut is, in fact, a civilizational artifact. Returning to the account of the construction of two huts in Lomas Rishi, we can say that the lithified hut inside the cave is a primitive structure, since it clearly conveys a crudeness in comparison with the entrance hut. There is, however, a distinction between a dwelling expressly occupied by an ascetic or hermit and a structure that is con-
ASCETICISM AND THE PRIMITIVE HUT143 sidered as simply primitive with no ascetic identification. The correspondence between the two is purely visual and pragmatic; the ascetic dwelling is mostly a primitive hut, being constructed from and morphologically indebted to a prosaic building type of a particular region. Such a hut does not propose a tectonic distinction, nor does it present any advancement in the general problem of dwelling; the significance of this hut lies wholly in its participation in an ascetic discourse. Recalling that there is really no hermit’s hut without the hermit, the characterization of a hut as an ascetic structure is integrally connected with the dweller. The hut is occupied by a special person who is more or less a self-absorbed being but operating within a more defined and clearer sense of ideology, intellection, and purpose than a straightforward renegade or escapee from society. Primitive tectonics or morphology may be the common denominator, but the ultimate significance of the ascetic hut lies not in the constructional condition but in the engagement of an idea that makes the primitive structure part of the ascetic weltanschauung. The ascetic hut is not just a sheltering structure; it is the site of ascesis, or srāma, a place of assiduous labor, where the ascetic is not engaged in mundane or socially normative activities but in an exertion of himself in order to produce an alchemical transformation of body and self. With śrama regarded as leading to the extraordinary or superhuman goal of enlightenment, it is natural that the site of śrama may become an object of veneration from the vantage point of the lay community. Lomas Rishi offers compelling evidence of how the primitive ethos may have become enshrined in an ascetic context (figs. 5.1 and 5.2). The cave consists of an excavated space with a stark and rather rough interior containing a chamber (10 m by 5.8 m), at the end of which is clearly the hutlike object introduced earlier. At the entrance to the cave, on the outside, is the exquisitely carved doorway in the form of a wooden building. The cave may have been used as an assembly space for Ājīvika ascetics, with the crudely hewn inner hut functioning as some sort of cultic shrine. The claim by some modern writers that the inner structure was never completed does not alter the fact that the structure was formed as a hut. The configuration at the entrance represents in sculpted rock the form of wooden dwellings of the time, translating the façade of a free-standing building into stone, as Benjamin Rowland described it.27 The image in relief also appears as a flattening of the volume of a freestanding structure into a more or less planar doorway. Questions may arise as to whether the represented dwelling is of urban or rural provenance, or what social class it belonged to, and whether the two huts were built at the same time. What is clear, however, is that the lithic rendition is of an exquisitely detailed dwelling, confirming that the building represented at the entrance reflects a sophisticated
144THE HERMIT’S HUT building tradition of the region.28 The emblematic elements on the doorway, especially the elephants on the frieze configured toward the central element of a stupa, are of additional importance, as well as the mākara, a mythological, crocodilian animal.29 On the other hand, the inner carving resembles an ovoid structure intended to be a primitive hut with a thatch roof. Not being a pragmatic dwelling for an ascetic but only representing one in its formation, the carved structure behaves more as a metaphoric hut (a similar carving is seen inside Sudāmā cave but without any elaborate system on the outside). The stupalike30 configuration of a hut structure entertains not so much the pragmatic sheltering aspect of a hut but signifies a burial relic (it is possible that the hut may have held a relic article), or glorifies a deceased ascetic. The valorization of the inner hut results in the representation’s taking a monumental turn. The monumentalization rests not on a singular architectural configuration but on the position and location of the hut in the spatial and narratival matrix produced by the two huts, where one is assuredly primitive and the other clearly sophisticated. Even if we are not fully certain about the purpose of the inner hutlike object, it appears that the conjunction of the two huts presents a spatial, visual, and possibly ritual demonstration of the ascetic ideology. With sequential stages as key constructs in any ascetic method, the idea of a portal or gateway remains an important element in the architectural repertoire of asceticism. The experience at Lomas Rishi is clearly structured around the idea of a critical portal with the additional, and important, point that the doorway at the entrance made in the form of a hut exceeds the function of a mere door. The hut portal serves a double purpose in the ascetic milieu. The reference of a portal suggests an entrance or initiation that is supposed to lead from one level to another, that is, from the social world to the space of the cave. This is echoed both symbolically and spatially. The symbolic value of the portal is heightened by specific motifs on the lintel frieze—elephants flanking the stupa and the mākara. The mākara is an aquatic, chthonic animal whose face over doorways represents “death for the ignorant but a Gate of Life for Comprehensors.”31 And as kālamākara, the “devourer of time,” it is the sign of the Sun Door, something that is apotropaic to the unworthy but deliverer for those who are prepared.32 In spatial terms, the presence of a conventional, generic hut at the entrance is a reference to the world (society) that has been renounced, the point of origin of the ascetic journey. The space of the cave is a stage on which the hut is a principal player in a narrative that turns that inert, cavernous space into an allegorical place. It is possible, even though we do not have Ājīvika evidence to support this, that what gets inscribed in this allegory is the idea of asceticism as
ASCETICISM AND THE PRIMITIVE HUT145 a journey, of initiation and crossing the threshold and arriving at some kind of termination or apex. There is also a clear oscillation here between two architectural types: the round primitive hut with domed roof in the interior and the seemingly oblong hut on the outside with its pointed barrel roof. It is not certain that the two were placed there systematically to propound a duality, but the presence of the two in this particular condition impels us toward that conclusion. The rectangular, barrel-vaulted hut, standing for normative abodes, seems to be more conducive to domestic and pragmatic purposes. The circular hut, on the other hand, while also serving prosaic necessities, seems to be better suited to the metaphysical system developed around centralized or centrifugal structures such as stupas or round shrines. This double rendering and reciprocity are confirmed and further amplified in more elaborate Buddhist rock-cut architecture from a little after Lomas Rishi, such as Bhājā and Kārlī, where the exterior zone of the cave is represented by a barrel-vault motif (the caitya window) and the interior by the centralized, circular stupa (although under a barrel roof ). There, too, the outside is elaborate, depicting a condensed panorama of the city or a palace, while the interior is austere and reductive. The two huts, more than suggesting a tension or oscillation, portray a gradual primitivism, a sequence or journey from a rather sophisticated “hut” (a portal to that journey) to a cruder and distinctively primitive one. The latter is, however, the focus or destination. In the ascetic narrative, the sequence is analogical to a renunciatory journey, of departing from a societally sanctioned home and entering a life of contemplative labor and finally reaching some kind of climactic breakthrough. It is in that sense that the second hut represents the apex of the journey. The outer and inner huts in conjunction are a perfect illumination of the ascetic ideal—of being of the world and simultaneously engineering a release or transcendence of it. A SPATIAL NARRATIVE: PASSAGE AND PRIMITIVISM With the conjunction of the two huts, one plainer and the other more elaborate, Lomas Rishi constitutes a compressed spatial narrative. The presence of the two huts does not produce simply a doubling, one mirroring the other, but a modulated movement from a social world, one understandably prosaic and mundane, to a sacred or spiritual realm. In a mere mirroring, there would be a symmetry of significance between the two huts. The placement of the inner hut at the apex of an axis of movement and its signified property as a valorized object create a superior spatial connotation for the plain hut. Even if there is an
146THE HERMIT’S HUT absence of any epigraphic or literary evidence to affirm this explanation, we do not have to abandon the consideration that there is possibly a systematic development from the rock-cut cave to the variety of later architecture and ritual practices. This spatial characterization of Lomas Rishi places it at an important junction in the development of cave architecture in India. Historians have commented upon the developmental link between the early caves in eastern India, which includes Lomas Rishi, Sudāmā, Guṇṭu palli, and Kondivte (figs. 5.7–5.10), and the more elaborate and prolific ones in western India in the form of excavated caitya halls (assembly spaces) and vihāras (monastic cells)33 (figs. 5.11–5.12). Some key questions remain unanswered, especially regarding the ideational source of the excavated caves.34 If the fourth-century rock-cut shrines of Mahabalipuram represent a morphological development of the temple form with the ascetic hut as a trope, the early caves represent a spatial construct that informs the significance of later caitya halls and stupas. Although historians have sought in Lomas Rishi a spatial prototype for later caves, they have not quite recognized the trope of the hut as a crucial component in the development. While the overall motif of the later caitya-hall entrance, as a complex con flation of architectural façades, may have been a derivative of Lomas Rishi, it is not clear whether the one at Lomas Rishi itself is an archway or a hut, even if it performs as a literal, as well as a symbolic, doorway.35 The structure that is represented at the entrance is an unequivocal image of an original hutlike building, complete with its drooping and projecting roof over a slanted-wall system that contains the real doorway, showing tectonic and construction elements in detail, such as the layered roof membranes, the roof finial, and rafters of a wooden structure. A more plausible explanation has been given about the plan form of Lomas Rishi and Sudāmā exerting an influence on the development of the later caitya hall.36 Chronologically, Lomas Rishi is an earlier excavation, followed by the caitya halls in western India, with Bhājā, Kondāne, and Pitalkhorā belonging to an earlier period, and Kārlī and Kanheri to 5.7 Plans of various cave spaces, clockwise from top left: GopiNagarjuni, Vapiya, Lomas Rishi, Karna Chopar, Viswamitra, and Sudāmā (Vasudeva Agrawala, Indian Art [Varanasi: Prithivi Prakashan, 1965]).
ASCETICISM AND THE PRIMITIVE HUT147 a later period.37 The prototypical plan form shows an articulated entrance to a main cave chamber that was most likely used for the assembly of ascetics or monks, and a pronounced locus lying on axis to that space. In the Lomas Rishi and Sudāmā group, the locus is either a hut form or some kind of stupalike object, whereas in the caitya hall, it is clearly a stupa. Though the orientation of the assembly space in eastern Indian caves is parallel to the cave front, the space in the caitya hall is axial to the entrance. Nonetheless, the plan indicates an entrance threshold either as a compressed hut as in Lomas Rishi or as an elaborate porchlike condition at most of the Buddhist caityas, from where one is led to the main assembly chamber and the shrine locus at the far end. In the semantic world of rock-cut 5.8 Interior of Sudāmā Cave, Barabar Hills, Gaya, ca. 261 BCE (American Institute of Indian Studies, University of Chicago). 5.9 Interior showing stupa-shrine, Kondivte, ca. 100–199 CE (American Institute of Indian Studies, University of Chicago).
5.10 Exterior view of cave at Guntupalli (drawing by Raphael Tran). 5.11 Exterior of caitya cave, Kondane (James Burgess, Report on the Buddhist Cave Temples [London: Trubner & Co., 1883]).
ASCETICISM AND THE PRIMITIVE HUT149 architecture, the articulated entrance threshold is positioned as a key signifier. In the elaborate caitya halls, the exterior caitya window side is fabricated as a pronounced porch with representation in rock-cut relief of actual structural and developed buildings. The contrived façade contains a diversity of architectural elements, from various opening types, including caitya-shaped ones, to multistoried balconies, latticework panels and railings, doorways, architectonic details from wooden originals, and sometimes sculptural figures. The interiors, on the other hand, with some minor exceptions,38 are simpler and starker in treatment, with the central stupa rendered largely in a restrained manner. The exterior scene is quite diverse, from actual openings to simulated ones, creating a visual panoply of a busy and variegated world, an allusion to an urban setting. In short, the spatial analysis does reveal a clear contrast between a stark interior with an introspective quality and an elaborate façade simulating an urban context (fig. 5.13). The entrance configuration is both a literal threshold of and a reference to the world of social engagement. From the entrance to the stupa, one can perceive of a passage that is both actual and connotative. In the interior, a shrine occupies the central place, whether it is represented as a hutlike structure or a stupa. While it is unambiguously evident that the shrine in Buddhist caitya halls is a stupa, it cannot be said so with definitiveness in the case of Lomas Rishi and Sudāmā. The object at the locus of Lomas Rishi, certainly a shrine form more than being the abstract hemispherical form of a stupa, clearly purports to be a hutlike shape with an interior space. The hutlike features are affirmed by the overall form, with an overhanging roof and simple wall (features that are neither evident nor relevant for a stupa). The most important question to ponder here is why a shrine should be conceived as a hut. While most historians have made important observations on the morphological development of caityas, they do not quite discern the distinction between the hut and a stupa-as-shrine and certainly do not explain the significance of the hut motif in the spatial matrix of the cave. Ananda Coomaraswamy traced the origin of early 5.12 Plans of vihāras, Ajaṇṭā (James Burgess, Report on the Buddhist Cave Temples [London: Trubner & Co., 1883], plate 34).
150THE HERMIT’S HUT shrines in the reified hut of the ascetic and identified the transformation of the leaf hut of an ascetic to the double-tiered roof of a shrine structure.39 Lomas Rishi presents a rather unequivocal presence of a valorized hut: a crude hut form enshrined as a cultic object. Since the cave was dedicated to the Ājīvika ascetics, it would not be unreasonable to guess that the hut was associated with a significant ascetic. The act of such enshrining carries an untraceable history of an important ascetic in his original freestanding dwelling that came to be revered and soon attained a ritual and cultic potency. Moreover, if the rock-cut re-creations refer to earlier, freestanding structures, there is a distinction in reference between the caitya halls and the cave huts. The structures embodied on the caitya front as well as the structure at the entrance of Lomas Rishi represent prosaic architecture without any special connotation other than an architecture of the habitual, social world. The represented interior huts of the eastern caves suggest a different genealogy. They do not point right away to a normative condition; with their reified position in the cave, as huts with spaces in front or around them, they might suggest dwellings in a forest clearing with an important ascetic in residence. These huts are important evidence of the cultic treatment of a hut itself, operating not merely as a framing or sheltering device for some vague spiritual potency but as the dwelling for something or somebody with a distinctive ascetic pedigree.40 In Coomaraswamy’s estimation, the double-tiered shrine did not indicate any spiritual figure but very specifically the in-dwelling ascetic. 5.13 Façade and interior section of Cave 9, Ajaṇṭā (James Burgess, Report on the Buddhist Cave Temples [London: Trubner & Co., 1883], plate 17).
ASCETICISM AND THE PRIMITIVE HUT151 From the Ājīvikas at Lomas Rishi, who certainly shared many ideas with the Buddhists, to the Buddhists themselves, who had the opportunity of reflecting on and codifying many ascetic imperatives owing to their sustained history, most ascetic traditions articulate their practices as a progression and journey in a teleological scheme. At a phenomenological and foundational level, the journey is a move from the space of the town or village to that of the enabling forest or wilderness. At a social level, the move is from home as encapsulated in the universe of gaha to a condition of wandering existence. These moves are, however, not enough. The ultimate telos of the ascetic—and that too is conceived of within a movement—is a heightened moment happening at a psychophysiological boundary that is described as a progression from one mental stage to another, a stage more intense and transformative than the previous. The spatial matrix of Lomas Rishi can be seen as an elemental and spatial analogue of that movement. In the history of ascetic architecture, such a spatial matrix is evident in Buddhist stupas before the production of cave architecture.41 Besides being a venerable site and memorial to the Buddha, the stupa is also an instrument (literally, a yantra) of a psychophysiological movement structured by the architectural elements of the toraṇa (gateway) and the pradakśinā-patha (the circumambulatory paths). At a site like Sāñcī, the monk would enter through the torana into a demarcated zone spatially differentiated by vedikā railings and, once inside, first traverse the stupa by circumambulating it. The monk would then climb a set of steps and perform another set of circumambulations at a both physically and ideationally higher level. There were no more planes or steps for the monk to negotiate from there physically. From that level on, after having performed the simpler physiological movement, the monk applied progression in a more conceptual and inward way. If stupas like Bhārhut and Sāñcī, built in the third century BCE, provide the earliest articulation of narrative movement in ascetic architecture, a more elaborate and theatrical expression is seen at the tenth-century site of Borobudur in Java (Indonesia). In the polysemic interpretation of the stupa, it is considered a maṇḍala, a buddha body, even a cosmic hut, and in the case of Borobudur, a palace in heaven.42 However, for monks and ascetics, it is a spatial matrix that must be traversed. In that sense, the stupa is an embodiment of passage and pilgrimage, of crossing gateways and thresholds, and ultimately an access to something that can be described in the understanding of the ascetic as the essential, or, as the Udāna famously describes it, the “unborn, unoriginated, unmade and unconditioned.”43
152 CHAPTER 6 A Hut with Many Meanings Simple and plain as it may appear, the ascetic hut is not so simple after all, and neither was it put together with a plain motive. The ascetic hut, the sine qua non of asceticism, condenses the rich imaginary and complex practices of the ascetic tradition. The frequent apostrophization of the term “hut” resorted to in these essays is a recognition of its polysemic character, of how an ideogram of the hut harbors the conceptual complexity of ascetic imagination. In the ideation, imagination, and representation of the ascetic hut, we are drawn to the heart of the ascetic project, to its fundamental deliberations and practices. A discussion of the ascetic hut is not particularly about the cultural history of shelter or the doctrines of religiosity, even if both issues are implicated; it is more precisely a discourse on the dwelling, on its practicalities, contingencies, and paradoxes. As a metonym of the ascetic discourse on the dwelling, the ascetic hut becomes the site, subject, and medium of that discourse. It does appear contradictory that an ideological group that has made an avowed declaration of rejecting home would center its practices on the issue of the dwelling. Does this say more about the inadequacy of ascetic principles or the obstinate presence of the dwelling in human existence? It is at the threshold of the dwelling that ascetic ideology has to make adjustments to its hallowed methods. Coursing through the terrain of asceticism is its recalcitrant relationship with residences and abodes. These are not simply the houses that ascetics once lived in as laypeople and then renounced in the inauguration of their project but various sorts of dwelling places and structures that emerge in the trajectory of the project itself. These consequential dwellings also mark episodic moments in the ascetic process. The
A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS153 question of the dwelling is encountered the very moment the asceticrenouncer steps into a countersocial space with the first, formal renunciation of home. In Indic history, the forest constitutes that alternative space where the theme of the dwelling is addressed in both its practical and existential senses, but one that acquires didactic and metaphoric significance. In the discussion of the ascetic hut, the Buddha’s dwelling occupies a predominant position and extensive domain. In both the literary and visual repertoire of Buddhism, the Buddha is often invoked through signs and objects (and soon with signs and objects) that include architectural artifacts. The iconography of this invocation is no prosaic matter since the representation of the Buddha is a powerful and irksome theme in the doctrinal debates of Buddhism. How the great teacher who has passed away is to be represented, or to be recalled, as some texts posit, forms a key aspect of the hagiography of the Buddha. Debates continue in modern times around when and how the representational traditions developed but, curiously, give little consideration to the intrinsic presence of architecture in that enterprise. A copperplate from Bhārhut from the second century BCE shows a range of early Buddhist shrines, called caityas, all related to the veneration of some aspect of the Buddha (fig. 6.1). The caityas depicted are the bodhi tree, stupa, a hutlike structure, along with a nāndipāda sign. Other than the nāndipāda, which is a sign marking the Buddha’s birth,1 all are architectural or quasi- architectural objects. This repertoire finds sup6.1 Copperplate showing Buddhist caityas, Mauryan period (Rai Govind Chandra, Indian Symbolism [New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1996]).
154THE HERMIT’S HUT port in literature. The Buddhist Yoga Śāstras mention five types of caityapūjā (shrine devotion) in honor of the Buddha by means of the following objects: stupa, gaha, kūṭa, puranacaitya, and abhinavacaitya.2 Whereas the significance of the stupa and tree are more readily apparent,3 both pointing to established and conventionalized practices in early Buddhism as well as earlier nonascetic and Vedic environments, the identity and purpose of the gaha and kūṭa are ambivalent. Gaha denotes a home, and kūṭa a rooftop or pinnacle-like arrangement or a relation to a kuṭāgāra, a pavilion at the top of a building. The Bhārhut image clearly shows a hutlike structure, in fact a double-roofed building, but what is not obvious is whether it suggests a gaha or a kūṭa, or both (since the image is of a house structure with a roof pinnacle). When a hutlike structure appears among a group of caityas, it does generate ambiguity, especially when a domestic provenance is indicated by the adoption of the term gaha. What we can assume, though, is that a caitya framed as a gaha or kūṭa makes an obvious reference to a dwelling in ascetic architecture, opening up the whole panoply of interpretations and significations addressed in this study. For its plain architecture, the ascetic hut is profusely multihued in its meanings and receptions. Despite its appearance as an ordinary structure or event, the ascetic hut is an otherwise; it consistently presents a polysemy, a source of proliferated representations and interpretations. When we notice the architectonic device framing a Buddha figure from Gandhāra, it is more than a simple visual technique for compositional purposes. The cubic harmikā atop a stupa is also not just a memory of a relic casket, as is often described; its literal translation of a “little dwelling” contains a wide range of meanings. Similarly, the repetitious treatment of pavilions and aedicules in certain Buddhist-Hindu architecture and sculpture, as in the rathas of Mahabalipuram, cannot be treated only as decorative features. “The work of art,” Ananda Coomaraswamy noted, “is a reminder . . . the summons of its beauty is to a thesis, as to something to be understood, rather than merely enjoyed.”4 The intention of this study has been exactly that, to not merely describe the visual matter at hand or make way for its aesthetic enjoyment but understand its formations and performances. THE POLYSEMOUS HUT Recognizing that the hut unfurls a dense topic despite its elemental appearance, we can be certain, whenever it is represented or narrated, it is part of a larger plot in a didactic narrative or landscape of imagination. And the plot thickens as we enter the fray, as was anticipated with the discussion of the aedicules on the seventh-century rathas at Mahabali-
A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS155 puram in the introduction. Though appearing to bear only a decorative motive, the aedicules, or little huts, actually condense over a thousand years of reflection on the dwelling, beginning with its abandonment and reconfiguration in the earliest practices of renunciation in Vedic culture and the eventual production of the hermit’s hut. Beyond its function as a pragmatic space, the hermit’s hut or the ascetic hut is a distinctive type in the broader category of imagined or ideated huts. The ideation appears in many forms, as “first,” originary, archetypal, or regenerative, in which the notion of the “first house” privileges an ur-object as a progenitor of beginnings. A common characteristic of that architectural genotype is the primitive constitution of the building form. The notion of the primitive, as we have seen, is an elusive topic harboring different meanings in different contexts, but all share a common quality of implying something more than the appearance. The presence of the primitive hut prevails more as an idea—the something more—than its material and immediate formation as a nondescript structure. A full picture of the ascetic hut can be gathered from the fundamental precepts of the ascetic project, the laborious struggle for deletion and distillation aimed at arriving at the magnificent destination of a nonconditioned state. In prosaic terms, the ascetic project indicates a systematic elimination of societal and material accretions that begins with material stuff and sequentially, and with greater labor and subtler thinking, moves to the body site of the ascetic. The conceptual goal of a final destination, whether in terms of the dwelling, living practices, or corporeal condition, is conveyed through the semantics of the primitive. In India, the emaciated hermit dressed in bark or some crude garb sitting in front of a rudimentary structure is a conventional but telling portrait of a theater of the primitive. Going primitive or displaying it is, however, not the goal of the ascetic. Achieving the primitive mode is a fundamental protocol in the ascetic project, but the most important aim remains heading toward and arriving at a finality. To designate this final destination, ascetic ideology in India adopted the term “last,” whether in a corporeal sense or its architectural analogue in the hut. The notion of the “last hut” brings the meanings and purposes of Indic/Buddhist asceticism into a sharper focus but, most important, in clear distinction to other forms of asceticism. Despite its oblique or subtle presence, all ascetic intentions are emblematized in the quasi-architectural idea of a last hut. The last hut provides the most compelling imagery of that glorious but enigmatic finality. Without specific textual or ritual references naming it as such, the idea of a last hut understandably appears as speculative and a product of retroactive imagination. A profiling of that hut is possible by way of
156THE HERMIT’S HUT a review of the archaeology, iconography, and ideology of Indic asceticism and a hermeneutical inquiry of its architecture. The idea of a last hut, whenever it appears, explicitly or implicitly, brings the threshold to the foreground: a termination of one condition and the beginning or promise of another that is superior. If dreams or goals of termination characterize ascetic thinking, there are different degrees and stages involved in it. The basic sense of the last hut begins from the idea of gaha, the homely life that represents being-in-the-world, with all the conditions of worldly and social attachment that engender human motives of desire and attachment. This is the fundamental precept of the ascetic project, which receives its most sustained and indepth ideological articulation in Buddhism. The last hut in the most basic and inaugural sense is the familial and social dwelling that must be renounced before the ascetic enterprise can begin; this process is conceptualized by Buddhists as entering the realm of homelessness, pabbaja or anāgārika. From the pragmatic dismantling of the parameters of home as a fundamental point of departure, the ascetic strategy is gradually built up toward a more conceptually articulated renunciation of the last hut, one that engages complex theoretical framings. Even after renouncing the social gaha, the novitiate ascetic is not completely free from the need for lodging. Thus ensues an existential struggle—between a complete abandonment and the fundamental need for a dwelling, even if that means being in such primitive conditions as a natural cave, under a tree, or on a tuft of grass. We have seen how the Buddhist monastic codes listed four essentials, or nissayas, for a proper performance of the ascetic project. These four essentials, which included dwelling, clothing, food, and medicine, laid the foundation of the monastic codes and also revealed a tension and complicity between renunciation and reconfiguration. The struggle for a conclusive termination continues until the moment of the ascetic climax, when (and since then) the last hut takes on a completely ideational quality by becoming analogous to the ascetic body. In this ultimate equivalence, the body is the gaha, the final vestige of socialization. Musings by various monks reflect this aspect: “This was your old hut; you desire another, new, hut. Discard the hope of a hut; a new hut will be painful again.”5 The arahan, one example of a perfected ascetic, is described as “bearing his last body” (antimaśarīraṃ):6 the ascetic, by attaining perfectedness, has finally broken the chain of being born and reborn in phenomenal bodies and now lives in the last corporeal state. In most ascetic narratives, the body is a hut, a body-hut, whose existing fabric must be deconstructed before the beginning of an enlightened life. Vivaṭo-cchado, or the shattering of the ridge plate or roof of the body-
A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS157 hut, is the most climactic and cataclysmic image of termination that the Buddha applies in describing his experience of enlightenment. The critical moment coincides with the final goal of asceticism, of attaining freedom from social fetters, achieving a second birth, purer and better, or acquiring a nonconditioned state. Although the Buddha himself will need actual dwellings even after his enlightenment, he is perhaps saying that the need for a hut, even in psychological and existential terms, is over after the cataclysmic moment. Desire is gone, replaced by an informed detachment. GOING PRIMITIVE, EXPRESSING PRIMITIVISM From the perspective of the town, the hermit’s hut appears unmistakably primitive, and that is its literal and immediate identity. We know that going primitive was not without its contradictory articulations in the practices of asceticism. The debate in the Cullavagga verses on monks’ housing is about structures that are seen as crude by the lay community in preference for those that are not only well built but socially acceptable. The community could not comprehend why enlightened people such as ascetics chose to live in crude structures when they could have better accommodations. But such simple structures are everywhere in the ascetic landscape, contemporaneous to that period and in previous times. The developed iconicity of the hermit’s hut is based on this very production of the primitive genre so consistently evident in Buddhist art and narratives. The Buddha is depicted visiting Brahmanic ascetics who themselves are shown in front of a coarse structure. The Buddha’s own residence in the Jetavana, the gandhakuṭī, was no different from conventional houses in villages and settlements of that time. It was certainly rudimentary compared with the palace he abandoned in Kapilavāstu. In various doctrinal tracts, the Buddha exhorts his followers to take up shelter under trees, in caves, and in other natural conditions. The extreme ascetics, such as the paccekabuddhas, did exactly that by making an ideology of heading toward and living in primitive conditions with their categorical declaration, “I refuse a roof.” Clearly, such an ambitious declaration can come only from someone who has a roof. And it is from this production of “this deliberate piece of extravagantly coarse”7 structure that the ascetic or hermit’s hut was distinguished from the general conglomeration of primitive structures. It is obvious that the hermit’s hut, at least that discussed here, is both aligned with and distinct from the common characterization of a primitive hut. The primitiveness of the hermit’s hut is, however, both interim and instrumental as the fuller property of the hut is gathered from its wider performance in the ascetic narrative.
158THE HERMIT’S HUT There is then a distinction between an ascetic hut and a primitive dwelling, between a structure occupied particularly by an ascetic and one, because of its literal architectonic and material properties, designated as primitive. The ascetic hut is a primitive structure or condition constructed and aligned morphologically with rudimentary buildings of a particular region. Such a structure does not propose any tectonic distinction from those prosaic buildings nor does it present any advancement in the general thinking regarding dwelling. The significance of that structure lies in its participation in an ascetic discourse, the center of which is occupied by the ascetic himself. A divine aura and mythic hue often cling to the ascetic, especially when considered with admiration by the nonascetic lay community. Such appreciation has often elevated the ascetic to a godlike figure possessing extraordinary powers. The ascetic’s supernatural attribute is often an interpretation of the ascetic as a denizen of the forest, a space populated either by gods or beasts. Yet the glory of the ascetic is in his human comportment, in his capacity to take human nature to its extreme by human means. The hermit’s hut, Michael Meister has proposed, is a special kind of shelter; by sheltering a hermit-ascetic, a figure representing a recognized spiritual potentiality, the hut is humanized in a way unlike the cosmological sacred monuments of early India.8 Laypeople consider the ascetic as possessing extraordinary powers, a capacity derived not from a divine gift, mythic imagination, or supernatural force; the extraordinariness of the ascetic is an actuality, a human possibility, and a personality as the Buddha has actualized it. The emphasis is unmistakably on the humanity of the ascetic and the extreme distance he can go with it; this is his superhuman self, that is, to be human and to use human potential to arrive at the farthest reach of his species in order to discover what it means to be a human in a nonconditioned way. The human way to reach that shore, moreover, is via thought and intellect. As a core of his teaching toward achieving the extrahuman goal, the Buddha on numerous occasions rejected those positions prescribing that everything happens through the will of god and every event is determined by past karma or occurs by chance. The Buddha discarded these alternatives precisely because they denied free will and human effort. The Buddha developed a new and dynamic meditation system for focusing the mind; the wisdom produced through this process, as Akira Hirakawa noted, “was not a mystical form of intuition but allowed a person to see things as they are in a rational and free manner.”9 Slowly and cumulatively the extraordinariness of the ascetic unfolds as the ordinary and the putative are taken to their natural limits, often paradoxically, through an attempt to reach a kind of unnatural degree
A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS159 or state. Mircea Eliade described how yogins, in order to achieve the extrahuman condition of a perfected ascetic, aspired through their rigorous practice to bring stillness to the normative and natural conditions of breathing and movement. The codification of such a practice emerges in mastering the dynamic internal energy through an otherwise static, seated posture of āsana: this has often been described as transcending the human condition. All of this work was carried out by means of human agency and cognition. Raimundo Panikkar described such an essential prerogative of the ascetic-monastic intention as suprahumanum, something equivalent to the summit of human evolution. The idea of the human reaching beyond his humanity through human effort may be approached via the American poet Robinson Jeffers’ concept of “inhumanism.” Although this represents a modern philosophical attitude of extreme humanism and Jeffers proposed the idea in the context of humanity’s alienating relationship with both nature and itself (to reconstruct a relationship in reaction to “the peculiar disunity and disloyalty of modern man”10) and consequently with the aim of a condition that accepts the greatness and beauty in things, the notion of inhumanism emerges from and merges in the same pool of human existential thought on the transformation of the human as in Indic asceticism. Inhumanism produces, Jeffers wrote, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. . . . This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our needs to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.11 Jeffers’ notion of “transhuman magnificence” aptly approximates in a modern sensibility the idealistic and humanistic goal of the ascetic project, even if some aspects of inhumanism are distinctly different. Reaching the heart of humanity by way of an extreme humanism is the central tenet of the ascetic ethos, and this is what makes the hermit’s hut a civilizational project. Despite the usual primitive nature of its construction, the hermit’s hut is not a primitive hut; it is a product of an intellected and intentional enterprise. In other words, the hermit’s hut may be primitivist, but it is not part of a primitive worldview. The hermit’s hut, in fact, is the last vestige of civilization in the sequential en-
160THE HERMIT’S HUT terprise of asceticism that considers achieving the ascetic goal as nothing less than a sophisticated and cultured human pursuit; the hut is an instrument of that process. “Architecture,” as the architectural historian Banister Fletcher rehearsed the conventionalized trajectory of a history, “must have had a simple origin in the primitive effort of mankind to provide protection against inclement weather, wild beasts and human enemies.”12 The hermit’s hut complicates the conventions and assumptions of that description. The place of the hermit’s hut is not in a prerecorded time and preconceptual context in which the primordial hut might have been fashioned using whatever construction ingenuity was at hand to respond to practical matters and environmental contingencies. The hut is also not an ur-form, encountering the earliest problems of dwelling and responding with the first bit of technology and material resources available. If a single metanarrative is to be detected in the ascetic hut, it is in the notion of “beginning,” in the uncompromising and relentless praxis of proceeding, as most doctrinal literature describes it, toward an irrevocable finality that terminates the tentacles of the samsaric world, and inaugurates a nonconditioned mode of being. It is the preponderance of this idea, of a new beginning, that makes the ascetic hut a thoughtful and intellectual project. “MOUNTAIN PLACE IN THE CITY” Two consistently interlinked conditions are borne by the idea of the “last hut”: a contrived primitivization and an articulated passage. Constructed primitivism is laid out in a spatiotemporal schema in which the passage is choreographed to form the teleological narrative of the last hut. The Lomas Rishi Cave is a persuasive “construct” in which the conditions of the last hut are presented in an architectural setting. There are two distinctive depictions of the hut at Lomas Rishi: the outer hut that functions as a portal and the inner hut that serves as a shrine or a reified object. Between the two is a space of transformative potential, a transitional space that represents the world of ascesis and homelessness. This interim space also represents a condensed passage, a condition of necessary sequence as an inherent attribute of asceticism. Lomas Rishi as a whole is an allegory of the ascetic journey, the striving to reach the other end, at the threshold of which is the final hut. This ascetic itinerary, inscribed spatially at Lomas Rishi, from the portal of entry to the final hut, is elucidated in other representational modes. At Lomas Rishi itself, the journey—the distance between entry and the last limit—is phenomenological and spatial. One needs to traverse the actual physical distance between the outer and inner huts, even if it is conducted in the ritual framework of shrine devotion. The material-spatial
A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS161 site of Lomas Rishi is a cave where a hut with a distinctive representational property takes the prime role in a narrative, and by doing so turns the inert cave into an allegorical space. Embedded in the allegory is the route map of an ascetic journey, of initiation and crossing the threshold and arriving at some kind of termination or apex. Inaugurating an entry into the world of asceticism, the outer hut simultaneously marks a departure from the normative, mundane world— the well-crafted hut at the portal is just such a representation of the world left behind—and an entry into a period of arduous labor in order to reach the other limit, the climactic point associated with the inner hut, the “last hut.” By being the location and occasion of the glorious “release,” the last hut is also the point of a symbolic egress as the outer hut portal is an ingress into the world of asceticism. In rituals surrounding the Buddhist stupa, the trope of the journey is physiological but with a higher degree of mental participation. One enters the zone of ascesis through the gateways, or toranas, where circumambulation becomes an intensely ritualized and geometricized version of the journey, with the final “abode” lying conceptually at the peak of the stupa in the form of the harmikā. With smaller-scaled votive stupas, the journey is completely condensed within the symbolic field of an artifact and carried out through mental concentration. An identical activity surrounds the mental and meditational use of the two-dimensional maṇḍala or yantra. Expounding the idea of the ascetic hut as an emblem of forest discourse, the ascetic themes of passage and primitivism are more intensely evident in the aesthetical and ritual configuration of the Japanese chashitsu (the room or structure in which a tea ceremony is performed). The chashitsu may be geographically and chronologically distant from Indic materials, but as indicated in the introduction, there is an intimate shadow of the Indic ascetic hut. While the ascetic hut did not evolve into as conceptually precise and aesthetically articulated a schema as the chashitsu, the latter is a culmination of concepts and practices that have their principal provenance in Buddhist India. For this reason, the chashitsu can be profitably used to illustrate the twin themes of ascetic spatiality. Chanoyu, the tea ritual, developed in Japan over a few centuries, from the shared tea drinking in the Zen monastic environment and ceremonious drinking among aristocrats in the eighth century, and through the successive elaboration by various tea masters. By the time the tea master Rikyū had codified the various elements of the practice in the sixteenth century, it had acquired a very precise meaning of choreographed passage and constructed primitivism. The codified chashitsu is erected through aesthetic parameters derived by conflating the physi-
162THE HERMIT’S HUT ognomy of the peasant’s hut (sōan) and the hut of the forest recluse practicing within the ideology of wabi simplicity. The product of that convergence becomes a paradigm, a very carefully fabricated primitivist structure with a nondescript appearance containing a minimalist space. The structure, with its thatch roof and natural materials, came to possess what has been called a refined poverty. Conceived not as an autonomous architectural object but as part of a constructed landscape, the chashitsu is situated in a literal garden that simulates a forest or mountain setting within which the choreographed movement is enacted (fig. I.16). In that imaginary landscape, the chashitsu is visualized as a mountain or forest retreat belonging to a recluse. Before Rikyū and his time, there were practices in which a mountain hut was constructed within the city to perform as a special space for reflection. The notion of bringing the “mountain place into the city” was a vogue expression among the literati of medieval Kyoto. This practice involved the building of chashitsu within the city in the manner of forest and mountain retreats, and the practitioner came to be called a hermit in the city.13 The chashitsu, as a reproduction of the mountain or forest hut, embodies a more cultivated and conscious simulation of the space of a recluse in a forest. Kakuzo Okakura noted how the chashitsu, by implying a hut in the forest, becomes increasingly charged metaphorically and symbolically.14 This chashitsu was considered superior to an actual mountain retreat, since that was neither proficient nor aesthetic in comparison with the contrived construct of a primitive hut in the hustle and bustle of the city.15 This particular practice of construction implies that primitivism needs to be understood, and enjoyed, in relation to its adjacencies, whether with its unequivocal opposite, the culturally superior structure, or its territorial antithesis, the city. An ideological construction of the primitive involves playing the card of binariness, as illustrated in tea master Shūkō’s description of a fine steed tied next to a tired chashitsu.16 By the time of Rikyū, the chashitsu has become more than an aesthetic reconstruction of a primitive hut; it is now informed by Zen Buddhist ideology. The image of the hut in the forest now alludes to a renunciatory life, a passage into self-illumination. The garden path, or roji, that leads from the waiting platform, the machiai, where guests leave behind their principal social emblems (such as their swords) on their way to the chashitsu, corresponds to the first stage of meditation. The roji was intended to break the connection with the outside world and to produce a fresh sensation conducive to the full enjoyment of the chashitsu itself.17 The passage to the hut included a number of articulated thresholds, from the machiai to the tiny door, or nijiriguchi, each one corresponding to
A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS163 stages in self-illumination. The nijiriguchi is the small opening through which the visitor crouches and finally crawls into the chashitsu; the whole act of bending down, bending the body, pushing and pulling oneself out through a narrow opening took on significant meanings.18 Before the nijiriguchi became the crawl entrance for the chashitsu proper, it had been the entrance to the whole space that included the garden and chashitsu, thus marking a threshold of a special realm.19 The historian Kumakura Isao has attributed the theater entrance as an origin of the nijiriguchi as embodying a rite of passage from the realm of the ordinary to the extraordinary, a process not unlike the gaining of a new life force or rebirth.20 “His body cleansed,” as Kumakura has described the act of passage, “the guest passes from one world to another and, with a sense of keen awareness increasing at each step of the way, finally arrives at the teahouse, whose interior has become less the realm of the connoisseur than a sacred space.”21 In anticipating what it is like to be finally in the space of the chashitsu, Kumakura has stated: “Because of its small size and restricted character, the tea room placed great restraints upon the actions of people in it. Conduct became ritualized and, by means of refined conversations and movements, people came to experience an increase in awareness and an uplifting of the spirit.”22 Meanwhile, some fifteen hundred years ago, in the cool and cavernous site of Lomas Rishi, where the hustle and bustle of the everyday world and the phenomenal conditions of light and wind have been largely eliminated and the only thing an ascetic might have been aware of was his body and its movements and the breathing and beating of his heart, there was, one can imagine, a similar heightening of awareness and a promise of becoming a new human, if not a superhuman. THE HUT-BODY The narrative of the ascetic hut is very much a story of managing the body. The double theme of the last hut—the structure of passage and primitivism—is played out in two narrative strands, one that is clearly architectural, where the schema is constructed and presented in material and spatial terms and finds its eminence in the physiology of a building (hut). In the corporeal mode, the same notion is schematized in the ritual and physical body of the ascetic. The body is a key protagonist in all hut narratives, which is to say again that there is no hermit’s hut without the hermit. In converse, and tautological terms, the ascetic hut finds its fundamental significance from the ascetic. It is the asceticized body upon and with which the great ascetic experiment takes place that consistently thematizes the hut. In analogical development and reciproc-
164THE HERMIT’S HUT ity between the hut and the body, the properties of one begin to be reflected in the other as the ascetic figure matures from its revolutionary beginning in the fifth century BCE (although ascetic culture is older than this time, it is often described as revolutionary since it presents a successful social alternative and a clearly articulated ideology). There is a thematic consistency in a hermit with primitive garb living in a rudimentary hut after having dissociated from an elaborate, socialized life. But how do passage and primitivism play out in a carnalized condition? In the architectural narrative, the lay of the ascetic land is traversed and enacted by ritualized or sanctioned movement, circumambulation or a journey by the involved ascetic. The ascetic hut is located in that geographic matrix as a destination, locus, or portal. By being designated as the next dwelling after the inaugural renunciation of home, the hut, or viharā, becomes the anchor of the ascetic’s lived world despite the perplexity shown in (Buddhist) injunctions regarding growing attachment toward the structure. Depending on where the ascetic is in his stage of pursuit, the hut or dwelling space may be an interim arrangement for proceeding toward the next round of the ascetic struggle; the hut or space could very well be a gateway for advancing to the next phase. A more elusive incorporation of movement involves the ascetic body itself, with a literal carnalization of the schema of passage and primitivism. Already present in Vedic discourse and practices as a reciprocity of body and building, the Vedic theme of interiorizing the structure and meaning of the fire ritual confers a rich deposit of meanings on the ascetic figure and provides conditions for the maturation of that figure. The corporeal interiorization of sacrifice is by far the most important way of structuring the gravitas of the glorified ascetic; the image of the Buddha, for example, becomes iconic because of his status as a perfected ascetic, a mahāpuruṣa, or superman, and the subsequent codification of the attributes of such an ascetic. With a building, or a representational structure, considered as an alter ego of the perfected ascetic, the iconicity engages the reciprocity between architecture and the dweller. The twin characterization of body and building establishes a relationship to a third and distinctively metaphysical coordinate, a cosmological one. Following a triadic setup involving body, building, and cosmos evident in late and post-Vedic thinking, a homology of the mystical body of the ascetic is established with the cosmic plane; this is enabled by the symbolic substance of the Vedic sacrificial structure in which the rite is fundamentally a cosmogonic act, creating and maintaining the social as well as the cosmic order. This is the prelude to the notion of a “cosmic hut”; the term “cosmic” describes a further proliferation in the meaning of the ascetic structure in which it receives new symbolic value drawn from the triadic relationship.23
A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS165 The “cosmicized” hut, wherever it appears, becomes an embodiment of ascetic corporeality, sacrificial dynamic, and the supernal structure; it is a particular designation of the ascetic hut in which ritual and symbolic systems from a cosmological structure or cosmogonic process are engaged in its fabrication. On such occasions, the ascetic hut performs less with phenomenological or existential persuasions regarding the dwelling and more with an exoteric symbolic content linked with an extrahuman landscape, the cosmos. It is exoteric because it is no longer inscribed within a closed system but reaches out beyond the scale and scope of the body with a cosmic claim. The occasions are also representative of a time when the hut and its dweller, especially because of the dweller, have acquired a glorified status in the larger community. While there is no single hut typology that corresponds to a cosmicized edifice, there are specific constructional elements whose significance surpasses the immediate utilitarian or functional usage for a far more hallowed performance. The kaṇṇika, or roof plate, the śikharā, or roof pinnacle, the harmikā, the small structure located on top of a stupa, and the doorway/portal have been consistently deployed to prop up the cosmic hut. Two architectural-spatial operations have been especially critical in the production of such a hut: the pillar of ascent and the hole in the roof. It has been mentioned how the pillar and the roof hole, an integrated theme in Vedic ideology, is transferred from the Vedic metaphysical universe to the symbolic repertoire of asceticism and binds the ascetic and the idealized hut in a singular conception. The reified pillar supports the sky and constitutes the instrument for vertical ascent and, most important, provides a climactic condition along the route of ascent. The climactic point is the summum bonum of the whole operation, a point in the axis where the kinetics of ascent is transformed and registers as a “rupture of plane.” The intersection is then seen as a special portal that is accessible by a ladder, rope, post, or such contraptions of climbing in order to be “suspended from above.”24 This practice is reflected in the shamanic ritual of climbing a tree or post, or the ecstatic climbing to heaven, which Eliade described as the “universally disseminated symbolism of magical flight.”25 In the psychophysiological constitution of the ascetic, the march up the axis is visualized and experienced as meditational states, as “rising planes of consciousness” during yogic labor. Many Buddhist texts term these sequential states as abodes, or viharās, retaining a reference to physical viharās. The final viharā coincides with attaining the highest state of enlightenment, which is also coincidental with the appearance of a protuberance in the cranial foramen region of the ascetic’s head. In plastic representations of the Buddha, the valorized protrusion, the uṣṇīṣa, comes to be depicted as the most vivid expression of an ascetic success story. Stella Kramrisch, describing the uṣṇīṣa as a “point limit,”
166THE HERMIT’S HUT identified it as a critical threshold or a “zenithal pole of realization,” “where this world ends and that world begins, the point limit of the manifest and the unmanifest, the Bindu.” The point limit described by the uṣṇīṣa in the context of an ascetic physiognomy finds an analogical expression in the topology of the stupa as the harmikā, and in cosmological geography as the hut at the top of the “world-mountain.”26 The intention here is not to rehearse the idea of the cosmic house but propose an understanding of the iconized ascetic hut and the formation of the increasingly intricate analogy between the physiognomy of the perfected ascetic and the physiological structure of the iconized hut. With the last hut as a sign of a critical threshold, a thematic unanimity binds the kaṇṇika, harmikā, śikharā, and āmalaka (the climactic elements on a temple top) in architecture to the uṣṇīṣa in the figure of the perfected ascetic. The kaṇṇika is identified as the roof plate that binds the roof rafters of a building together at its peak. As a mysterious cubicle residing at the geographic tip of the Buddhist stupa, the harmikā marks a threshold condition. Identified with the myrobalan, the āmalaka is a fruit-shaped element located at the apex of a Hindu, and in many cases, Buddhist temple tower.27 A comment in the introduction pointed to a hiatus in the historical development of Brahmanic-Buddhist temples beginning roughly in the third and fourth centuries. The temple form seems to have developed without antecedence, especially considering that the open-air sacrificial space was the ritual norm in the immediately earlier environmental and historical contexts of Vedism. It would appear that the temple building emerged in a historically unmoored manner un less the seemingly sudden and mysterious appearance is explained by the concept of the cosmic hut-body. If the ascetic dynamic is conceived of as the “interiorization of sacrifice,” that is, an incorporation of the Vedic fire ritual, then the analogic hut—in which the hut is a mirror of the ascetic—externalizes the psychophysiological dynamic of the perfected ascetic. It is the valorized ascetic hut that may have formed the first instance of built shrines, as Alfred Foucher and Coomaraswamy observed in the production of the double-tiered roofed huts. This is perhaps the most plausible explanation of the movement from the Vedic fire ritual to the hermit’s hut and onward to temples in the historical evolution of temple architecture in India. Mediating between the fire altar and temple is one aspect of the multifaceted property of the hermit’s hut. From the performance of the putative hut as a pragmatic structure responding to the requirements of dwelling to its reception as an iconic hut condensing the ascetic ideology, the ascetic structure proceeds to encompass both the intellected practice and cosmological symbolism of the proliferated profile of the ascetic.
A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS167 The ascetic hut, deterritorialized from the lived situation of the forest space, circulates as an idea representing both the practice and discourse in asceticism and retaining a tension with normative social space; the project of bringing the “mountain place into the city” represents that artifice. The symbolically expanded idea of the hut, informed by cosmological content, takes the hut and relocates it at the tip of the imaginary topography of a world mountain. Beginning with the plain hut as the epitome of renunciation, of the abandonment of the dwelling for a reconfigured condition, we arrive at the same object but now thickly laden with significance ranging from the existential to the cosmological. What was a dissent to the dwelling now presents the dwelling as a fundament of renunciation.
168 CHAPTER 7 The End of Architecture Who is in the small hut? A bhikkhu is in the small hut, with desire gone, with well concentrated mind. Thus know, Friend, your small hut was not made in vain.1 Announcing the end of architecture, as well as the body as we know it, the idea of the “last hut” serves as an arrival at the edge of civilization. This is the culmination of an evolutionary project in which home, from a socialized, ritualized space, has been reconceptualized as a last hut, the ascetic body made homologous to a structure, and finally, the body-hut positioned for a cataclysmic transformation. Comparable to attaining a nonconditioned mode of existence, or what is “unoriginated” and “unmade,” the destruction of the body-hut becomes a singleminded pursuit of the ascetic, but for which the whole Buddhist edifice of codes, practices, and doctrines has been erected. The image of the final hut becomes a powerful metaphor and didactic tool in articulating the subtleties of the nonconditioned, and a lasting ideogram for approximating the ineffable destination of nirvāṇa. Despite being the emblem of asceticism, the last hut is not an affable project; it also exposes the contradictions and incongruities of the ascetic imagination. The end—the arrival at the nonconditioned state presenting itself as a theater of destruction—is not without some ambiguities. First, the final destruction announces a terminal point that resists or defies easy description, maintaining a semantically elusive term such as nirvāṇa and remaining an internal experience of the ascetic psyche. Furthermore, what appears to be the object of destruction is required as an ontological necessity in the whole process. Despite being nondescript and unremarkable, the hut was not made in vain; it was erected in order to achieve an overcoming. The first implies a representational challenge, and the second poses a conceptual perplexity. In this exegesis of asceticism, the hut—a cryptogram for the dwelling— was considered as the ontological fundament of asceticism. Even when
THE END OF ARCHITECTURE169 the ascetic body is brought to the foreground of the final frontier, the narrative is related through the semantics of the hut. Extracting ourselves from the rigmarole of doctrinal texts, we discover a focused meditation on a perpetual human dilemma: the nature of dwelling. Tossing and turning between contraction and expansion, between rejection and elaboration, and between rootedness and site lessness, the problem of the dwelling is not brought to a full resolution but left in a suspended truce in which the matter at hand is neither completely nurtured nor fully nullified. The project, it appears, must simply go on. From a dissent to the dwelling one arrives at a dissertation on it. Taking up the matter of the dwelling, the hermit’s hut recalibrates it along the axis of renunciation, pushing it to its limits, to the edge of civilization. The hut, appearing in an ascetic context, is an embodiment of the world, the condition of material, spatial, and social entanglements. Even when the body is conceived of as a hut, it is seen as a vestige of sociality, perhaps the last one. From the beginning to the end, the world is needed as a given; it is where renunciation begins, for asceticism and renunciation presuppose a world, a socialized and cultivated realm, which then is to be transcended. The representative repertoire of the hermit’s hut—from simple dwelling structures to dwellings in the form of harmikā to the structure with a “distended lintel”—illustrates a basic ascetic paradox of profiling a certain condition and, at the same time, attempting a transcendence. Hovering over the ascetic project, both literally and thematically, the shadow of the dwelling continues to invoke an intractable contingency. Two contrary ideas are condensed simultaneously in the metonymic character of the hut: being-in-the-world and being outside it. The schema is paradoxical because the significance is based on acknowledging the ontological necessity of something that then needs to be abandoned. In other words, the ascetic realizes that movement out of the world can be made through the world. This is evident in how ascetic praxis is always structured with its converse or conflicting self. In this matter, what is true for building practices is true for the ascetic body. The great ascetic experiment, when taken up on the body site, works through the simultaneity of occupation and destruction of the body-building. It is not truly a destruction, however the rhetoric may be, but a radical reconstitution or transformation, where “something” remains, although the old measures of identity are no longer significant. The rearrangement, as we have seen, generates what is considered a second birth. What is significant is the required presence of the hut-body in the cataclysm: the given body is needed, as the verses by Kuṭīviharin attest, upon which the great experiment can take place. Both the built form and ascetic body are restructured by a mechanism
170THE HERMIT’S HUT of reduction in which the former receives a primitivist makeover and the latter a precise disciplining that adopts various forms of self-denial and self-abnegation. Self-denial is not a nullification of the body; some of the avowed practices are to be considered beyond a literal reading of an opposition suggested by self-denial and more as a heightening of the consciousness of the body, making it disciplined and principled, taut like a bow, so that, according to Geoffrey Galt Harpham, it is made “intelligible by indicating the presence of a principle of stability and immobility within the constantly changing physical being.”2 It is under those ambivalent circumstances that the necessity of expressivity and requirement for an audience come in to the ascetic project: what develops is a language of asceticism. For that purpose, the ascetic language is directed not only toward its own informed or indoctrinated flock but also to the lay population, making ascetic practices a heightened semantic operation.3 The expressivity gives ambivalence a concept through narrative and rhetorical practices within which architecture participates as a fundamental theme. Asceticism is also a project of inherent paradox. It creates, in other words, an expressivity in which the paradox is brought to the foreground, and the landscape of oppositions is laid out without a resolution but keeps them framed and organized. This paradoxical practice, or double nature of the project, is perhaps an essential feature of all asceticism. The durability of asceticism lies, Harpham has written in the context of Christian asceticism, in its capacity to structure oppositions without collapsing them, to raise issues without settling them.4 Harpham conceives culture as asceticism’s other, its structural opposite, yet argues that asceticism in its perceived location in the spectrum of the opposite neither condemns culture nor sanctions it; it, in fact, does both.5 Asceticism’s capacity to engender and structure opposition manifests in some obvious ways, as in the juxtaposition of simplicity and flamboyance in the chashitsu as well as the matter of double obligation regarding housing as revealed in the Cullavagga text. It is present, or rather presented, in the contrariness between monachos and the collective, in the spatial distinctness between the city and the forest, and in the paradigmatic contrast between asceticism and eroticism. This double desire is framed by the two quotes at the beginning of the book. The relation between the opposites is far more intertwined and interpellated than we realize. Reaching beyond an adversarial standoff between the two, Harpham regards asceticism as the “cultural element in culture,” where culture articulates itself through ascetic tropes and ideograms. Harpham insists that “where there is culture there is asceticism: cultures structure asceticism, each in its own way, but do not impose it.” Raimundo Panikkar, on the other hand, described the relationship from
THE END OF ARCHITECTURE171 a grander standpoint by arguing that monkhood is a human archetype, “a constitutive dimension in human life,”6 making the relationship not oppositional but integrative or constitutive. Harpham eventually considers asceticism as the basis of culture, where his theme of “ascetic imperative” is positioned as a primary, transcultural structuring force. In describing this intertwined relationship between culture and asceticism, Harpham notes how an inherent aspect of the cultural experience, whether emerging out of an ethical or existential exigency, is an uneasiness, “an ambivalent yearning for the precultural, postcultural, anticultural, or extracultural.”7 It is not enough, for Buddhist asceticism, to merely posit an opposite with the constructed binary. It is also not, to go another degree further into the relationship, simply a dialogical structure where one infiltrates the other, informing and shaping each other. While a dialogical interaction is certainly taking place between culture, or the lay community in this case, and asceticism, where the former is informed and disciplined in some ritual way, the Indic ascetic goal is more ambitious in its advocating an objective of transformation. Whereas asceticism certainly provides and encourages a new discourse for culture, it reserves for itself a very particular and dedicated axis leading toward the enigmatic goal of self- transformation. The two—asceticism and culture—are not in parity as far as that designated goal is concerned. The opposition is legibly structured and configured, but asceticism sets up its own distinctive topos. A “compromised binarism” may be argued as far as the tactical purpose of asceticism is concerned, as when, other than extreme ascetics, most Indic-Buddhist ascetics, and certainly the Buddha himself, resorted to returning to the societal milieu that was once renounced. After his enlightenment, the Buddha spent the remaining years of his life teaching and preaching in the cities of northern and eastern India. But it is important to remember that his return did not mark a reconciliation or blurring of the boundary between the contraries but maintaining ascetic culture with the unfaltering purpose of propagating the virtues of transformation. The configuration of opposition is seen also as stemming from culture’s intrinsic and existential need to articulate an other form, even if it is conceived, as Harpham has noted, from an “ambivalent yearning for the precultural, postcultural, anticultural, or extracultural.” While conforming to the general schema, Buddhist asceticism, and for that matter all Indic ascetic ideologies, maintains a distinctiveness in its being an articulation of culture’s potential extremism, of taking to its limits and producing a “hyperculture”; it is in that context that the ascetic who has attained perfection is described as a mahāpuruṣa, a superman. It is pertinent here for bringing the discussion to a conclusion to refer
172THE HERMIT’S HUT again to the so-called first house in order to understand the ulterior character of the last hut. The production and imagining of the first house is a manifestation of culture’s equivocal yearning for countercultural or precultural conditions. An invocation of the extra- or precultural aligns more precisely with a discourse on hypothesized origins, including the imagining of the primitive, against which the notion of the last hut needs to be positioned. This is an inevitable juxtaposition that is not remarked upon in Joseph Rykwert’s tour de force scholarship on the first house. The two notions—the first and last huts—represent a condensation of a broader human enterprise around the idea of the house/dwelling. Despite the common presentation of a primitive ethos and form, there is a distinction between the first house and the last hut, between the role of the former as a fabulous model of emulation, construction, and manifestation and the latter’s teleological and dissipating nature. As an affirmative and authenticating trope, the imagined first hut develops primarily from a sense of loss, a condition of disassociation that has occurred in some mythical or prehistorical time from an originating context. The quest for the first building represents more than an architectural enterprise; it is part of a vaster project for restituting the values of a paradigm that will make everything right or validate a current time, pursued vigorously in the writings of various European scholars from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries to Rykwert’s critical archaeology of the “first,” the phenomenon of the valorized beginning. The first hut, to paraphrase Rykwert, is a reminder of the original and therefore essential meaning of all human architecture; the search for the primitive first in architecture emerges from a need for legitimation. The first house is recalled as a kind of “eternal return” because it is a primary answer to necessity before the fuss of elaboration: “Whether in ritual, myth, or architectural production, the primitive hut has appeared as a paradigm of building: as a standard by which other buildings must in some way be judged, since it is from such flimsy beginnings that they spring. These huts are always situated in an idealized past.”8 The paradigmatic purpose of the first house as an exemplar of perfection is its most important cue, whose contours are then perpetually sought in a architectonic and spatial configuration. By the virtues of its setting being extolled, the first house also becomes an environmental enterprise. As a primitive ensemble, the first hut provides a surrogate “nature” in that it recalls humanity’s direct answer to need (i.e., the need that is satisfied by instinct to produce the first artifact).9 What is often amplified with the architectonics of the first hut is the primordial scenario of an environmental context within which the hut is shaped from the resources available. The resplendent space of an imaginary forest is invoked, as in the profiling of the first hut by the
THE END OF ARCHITECTURE173 seventeenth-century writer Abbé Laugier in his influential tract on the topic, in order to derive a tectonic typology. “A neighboring wood offers,” Laugier speculated, “the cool of its shadows, he [man] runs to hide in its thicket; and he is content again. . . . The man, inadequately sheltered by leaves, does not know how to defend himself against the discomfort of a humidity which seems to attack him on all sides. A cave comes into view, he slips into it. . . . He leaves the cave determined to compensate by his industry for the omissions and neglect of nature. Man wants a dwelling which will house, not bury him. Some branches broken off in the forest are material to his purpose. He chooses four of the strongest, and raises them perpendicularly to the ground, to form a square.”10 The narrative continues to describe how primitive man goes to make a little hut for himself from the bounties of the forest. The hut that Laugier fashioned from that imagined landscape and on which all “the splendors of architecture ever conceived” was a pavilionated typology conceived as a natural consequence of the material and structural properties of wood.11 Different environmental resources spawned the imagining of other forms in the reconstruction of the first. Quatremère de Quincy, another writer concerned with the origins of architecture, conceived of three firsts—hut, tent, and cave—each representing a distinct material and meteorological environment. The debate on the typological profile and nature of the first house remains unresolved and will remain so, as does the debate, as expected for a fabulous production, on whether the making of the first hut is a product of humanity’s instinctual or unselfconscious response or directed attention of a protorational mind. The ascetic strategy, on the other hand, is not instinctual; it is thoughtful, directed, and goal oriented, the intention being to overcome the consequences of the given first artifact or its descendants even as one lives with it. It is the first artifact that binds, being one that started it all as humanity’s original and pragmatic way of being ensconced in the world. Holding the first as spawning a gradual sequence of complex needs, with their concomitant satisfactions and dissatisfactions, the ascetic position analyzes this as gradually generating (or degenerating into) a whole panoply of increasingly labyrinthine imaginings and conduct. Condensed in the first is humanity’s social beginning and its enslavement in a kind of Rousseauean quandary. It is this social nexus that the ascetic wants to challenge and turn asunder, and it is the perception of enslavement that fuels the appositely opposite goal of freedom and emancipation. The hut becomes the critical laboratory for the ascetic’s social dissent. From the mythopoeic Adam’s house to the fabulous primordial hut speculated by Laugier and others like him preoccupied with the subject, there is an air of loss and dissociation. It is this asymptotic quality of
174THE HERMIT’S HUT being irrevocably lost and being re-searched that makes the first house or its search so tantalizing. The idea of a rupture from a beatific and pure condition to a deteriorated present is a common conceptualization in many cultures. In Judeo-Christian narratives, the mythic event of the Fall marks the moment of a categorical departure and inaugurates the irreconcilable distance between an Edenic home and a telluric house. John Hollander has described the Fall as the beginning of a need for a house in the context of the Judeo-Christian imagination.12 As an approximation of the “original home” in an Edenic past, the production of the physical and localized house (architecture) suggests a mimesis. The time or condition prior to the Fall denotes that perfection and anything after that as being in nature, “where ‘being-at-home’ could ever be localized in something like a house.”13 It is only the fallen, natural, human consciousness that requires a house, Hollander presumes: “Adam and Eve had no house because they were so purely at home.” The project of the first hut is the desire to establish an “original” sense of home from this perspective of a lost one. The image of an Edenic home furnishes the most fertile idea of a perfect dwelling, a compelling model for the quest of “at-homeness,” defining an ideal condition of matrimonial domicile and unit of social space. No wonder the pursuit of that ideal model remains a tantalizing prospect, with architectural construction continually attempting a mimesis or approximation. Indian asceticism, more specifically Buddhist, posits a teleological scenario; there is hardly any concern with regaining a lost or past “paradise.” There are few instances when the moment of awakening or the highest state of spirituality is described in paradisal terms, but certainly not as something that is lost and to be regained. In any case, Buddhist ideology does not consider “heaven” as a final, permanent, or perfected destination. The normative samsaric life is in fact various manifestations of imperfection encountered again and again in the web of reincarnation; “heaven” is a higher state but nonetheless another station on that endless web. The finality of Buddhist asceticism is a first-time and onetime event; it is neither a regaining (i.e., attaining the condition of a lost paradise or ideality) nor an approximation of an ideality. Reserving an antimimetic character, the last is something that can be attained fully. In iconography, there may be limited mimesis, as when a caitya window imitates the profile of the gandhakuṭī, but it is not a reproduction of a lost condition or an attempt to reconstruct a purer time. The goal of asceticism is to attain a state that is decidedly experiential and fully actualizable. In the ascetic trope of the last hut, the sense of an authentic home is clearly not the focus; in fact, home as understood as a matrimonial and familial concept is repudiated. Home is actually interpreted as the har-
THE END OF ARCHITECTURE175 binger of all suffering. What is reflected upon—or what the ascetic is trying to arrive at—is a house that is both a literal building and an analogue of the ascetic’s body. What is the nature of this house? The house is portrayed as a minimal structure, shorn of all or most of its trappings, as in a similar manner the ascetic body is conceived, with all conditioned properties peeled away; what is perhaps best is when there is no need of a house, as is expressed in the corporeal drama of the shattering of the house in the Buddha’s momentous description. The last hut, employing an architectural image, denotes a condition that defines and describes the invisible but actualized psychophysiological dynamic of the arduous ascetic. There is then both a distinction and complementarity between the fabulous first house and the last hut. The first hut refers to an original but lost condition that may be approximated, while the last hut points paradoxically to a utopia that is actualizable. Although the former refers to such a condition as having been experienced in a quasi-historical, mythical, or cosmogonic past that can be reenacted (and thus the need for mimesis), the latter presents the condition as not yet experienced. It is in this context that the first hut is a discourse on origins while the last hut is about beginnings: the first hut offers a renewal by referring to an original beginning that started it all, whereas the last hut presents the termination of one condition after which a new one can begin, from where there is no looking back.
177 Notes INTRODUCTION 1 Gobila Gṛhya Sūtra, IV.3.22. See The Grihya-Sûtras: Rules of Vedic Domestic Cere monies, trans. Hermann Oldenberg, pt. 2, The Sacred Books of the East, ed. F. Max Müller, vol. 30 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 109. 2 A declaration of the dhutaṇga practitioner, an ascetic active in the earliest period of Buddhism, as described by the fifth-century Buddhist commentator and scholar Buddhaghosa in his Visuddhimagga, II.56, vol. 1, 74. 3 The Pali form of the name is Siddhattha Gotama. “The Buddha” refers here to the historical figure Siddhārtha Gautama, who presumably lived from 543 to 483 BCE and was born and raised as a prince in the northern citystate of Kapilavāstu (in present-day Nepal). 4 These lines are from the Dhammapada, verse 154, trans. James Gray (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1887), 17. Part of the Pali canon, the Dhammapada is a collection of statements and sayings attributed to the Buddha. Different translations give different terms for gahakāraka, from “house builder,” “house maker,” “maker of a tabernacle,” to “architect.” Similarly, the word geha has been translated as “house,” “home,” and “tabernacle.” 5 This particular narrative is found in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, an important Mahāyāna text composed around 100 CE that expounds on the notion of “emptiness,” or śūnyatā, through conversations with the bodhisattva lay figure Vimalakīrti. A Tibetan version has been translated as The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti by Robert A. F. Thurman. 6 Vimalakīrti’s mythopoeic mansion rematerializes, in Japan, in the shack the twelfth-century courtier-turned-renunciant Kamo no Chōmei built for himself in a forest outside Kyoto, and in the tea-ceremony structure fashioned and codified by the sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyū. 7 The traditions of Buddhism, despite the heterogeneity and distinctiveness, maintain an intricate link with both pre-Buddhist and non-Buddhist practices. A discussion of Buddhist architecture and ideology invariably invokes the other traditions. 8 This phrase is frequently mentioned in the Vinayas. Sir Robert Chalmers
178NOTES TO PAGES 4–14 notes this in Further Dialogues of the Buddha, translation of the Majjhima Nikāya (London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1926–1927), xvii. 9 For a discussion of various shelters in Vedic rituals, see Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1946), 156–159. 10 Hindu temples as stone buildings start to appear in the fifth century, preceded by tree shrines and other structures that housed a cultic object for worship, but none of the latter presided over religious rituals as powerfully as fire altars. See Michael W. Meister, “Hindu Temples,” in Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), vol. 14. 11 The term ratha, meaning “chariot,” may be a misnomer here, for the structures are more properly designated as vimānas, literally, “flying machines,” but more generally the full physiology of a temple structure along with the sanctuary. Brahmanical/Hindu shrines may have the additional designation as rathas, but here vimānas refer to the South Indian temple type with the multitiered pyramidal roof. Naming the shrines after the principal characters in the Mahābhārata was most likely a later, local event. 12 The shrines appeared at the time of King Narasimhavarman of the Pallava dynasty, with each “structure” being a monolith carved out from a single rock outcropping. The structures appear unfinished and may not have been used as temples. 13 Foucher, L’art gréco-bouddhique, 120–123. 14 Ananda Coomaraswamy, “Early Indian Architecture: IV. Huts and Related Temple Types,” in Coomaraswamy, Essays in Early Indian Architecture. Michael Meister has noted, regarding Brahmanical temples, how “the cupola is a veiled reference to the domed hut of the forest ascetic and to the cap of a vertical shaft around which the temple’s palatial forms have been organized”; see Michael W. Meister, “Symbology and Architectural Practice in India, in Emily B. Lyle ed., Sacred Architecture in the Traditions of India, China, Judaism and Islam, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). 15 Two kinds of structures are identifiable: square, domed huts, called kūṭas, located at the corners, and rectangular structures with barrel roof vaults, called śālās, placed at the perimeter. 16 Sadler, Ten Foot Square Hut, 12, 17. 17 Though Coomaraswamy comments on the iconographic features of the hut and its ascetic provenance in various essays, he did not fully consider an anthropological or sociological explanation regarding the significance of the hut in its setting. The relationship of the hut to its dweller and to the nature of the practice and ideological corpus to which these nondescript huts belong were also not discussed. 18 Okakura, Book of Tea. 19 The chashitsu is a synthetic production of Shinto and Zen Buddhist ideas, evolv ing in the context of Japanese feudal and military social structures. While there is an older Japanese tradition of renunciation in the ideology of solitude and simplicity, best described as wabi, the chashitsu, as formalized by the sixteenth century, represents a more refined expression, a kind of controlled renunciation. There, in the precise space of the architecture, in conjunction with the ceremonies of tea, a householder—a socialized person—could partake for a brief period in the hallowed world of ascetic ideals. From Shintoism comes the idea of a harmonic and integrative relationship with nature, from wabi comes the idea of a reclusive existence,
NOTES TO PAGES 14–22179 and from Zen Mahāyāna Buddhism evolved the ideology of austerity and the metaphysics of emptiness for the overall practice of tea. Sadler commented that “the taste for a retired life of elegance has always been and still is characteristic of the Japanese temperament, as is evident from the popularity of the philosophy of Cha-no-yu or Teaism, which enables even busy people to become temporary hermits in the Tea-room, to be in the world though for a while not of it, like the ‘moon in the marketplace,’”; see Sadler, Ten Foot Square Hut, iii. 20 The fixing of the size of the chashitsu is important. The size and shape are determined by the modular tatami, the rice-straw mat, the codified size being 90 cm by 180 cm by 5 cm. While the size of the tatami mat provides a constant, with four and a half mats being the most common, there are larger sizes. The size of the four-and-a-half-mat configuration is a little short of a ten square feet, the number that supposedly refers to a passage in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra. See John F. Kirby Jr., From Castle to Teahouse (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1962), 32–33. 21 Okakura, Book of Tea, 31–32. 22 From the Nampōroku, recorded by Rikyū’s disciple Nambō Sōkei, cited in Kisho Kurokawa, Rediscovering Japanese Space (New York: Weatherhill, 1988), 64, 65. 23 This apparent plainness and simplicity was also an architectural expression of the wabi philosophy. Shūkō, a fifteenth-century tea master, encapsulated the juxtaposition of plainness and flamboyance in saying that there is excellence in tying a prized horse to a thatched hut. The presentation of poverty embodied in the thatched hut alone was not what came to be described as wabi beauty; the aesthetics of deletion was achieved only when “the atmosphere was charged by the commanding presence of a splendid steed.” Kurokawa, Rediscovering Japanese Space, 74. 24 The āśrama in Ahmedabad was earlier the principal residence of Gandhi. In 1933, Gandhi pledged not to return to it until India had gained independence. Gandhi’s home in Wardha, where he lived from 1934 until 1948, was one of the few places that counted as his residence. 25 Rajni Bakshi, Bapu Kuti: Journeys in Rediscovery of Gandhi (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998). The various structures on the site were built in succession, and it appears that Miraben, a close disciple of Gandhi’s born as Madeleine Slade to an English family, was responsible for the design and construction of Gandhi’s hut. It is worth noting that Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba, had a separate hut in the compound, reproducing the gendered complexity of asceticism. 26 R. V. Rao, Sevagram: Gandhiji’s Ashram and Other Institutions in Wardha (Sevagram: Sevagram Ashram Pratishthan, 1969), 9. 27 Dhammapada, verses 98–99. 28 Gregory Schopen, “Cross-Dressing with the Dead: Asceticism, Ambivalence, and Institutional Values in an Indian Monastic Code,” in Cuevas and Stone, Buddhist Dead, 97. 29 Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 299. 30 From the Samaññaphala Sutta, 98, in the Dīgha Nikāya. 31 In the Theragāthā, verse 57. This is ascribed to Kuṭīviharin, literally meaning “hut dweller,” which was most likely an adopted name. See Norman, Theragāthā.
180NOTES TO PAGES 22–28 32 Dhammapada, verses 352, 400. 33 Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 4. 34 In this regard, important contributions have been made by Gregory Schopen, who also warns about methodical challenges, about inconsistencies in the interpretations derived from epigraphic, archaeological, or literary sources. Schopen points especially to a difference between canonical rules that seemed to define Buddhist monasticism and actual practices by monks and laity. See his essays in Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks. 35 I anticipate a future dialogue with the minimalist and reductive ideology of modern architecture and its theoretical and methodical kinship with asceticism. CHAPTER 1: ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE 1 In discussing the origin of the aśrama, Patrick Olivelle maps some of the mean ings of the term śrama, varying from “weariness and fatigue” to “austerity” and “labor and exertion.” There is also a sense in Vedic literature of śrama as mean ing “wandering away,” or, more precisely, as wandering away from habitats. Wandering, wilderness, and exertion are related in a conjoined way. See Olivelle, Āśrama System, 10–11. For a discussion of the relationship of tāpas (ascetic heat) and śrama, where heat is seen as part of the laborious process, see S. Levi, La doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brāhmanas (Paris: Leroux, 1989). 2 I am referring to Raimundo Panikkar’s view of asceticism as an inherent human comportment; see his Blessed Simplicity. 3 The literature on asceticism in India is vast. The following works represent the critical scholarship on the subject: Basham, History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas; Bhagat, Ancient Indian Asceticism; Chakraborti, Asceticism in Ancient India; Crangle, Origin and Development of Early Indian Contemplative Practices; Dutt, Early Buddhist Monachism; Eliade, Yoga; Hardy, Eastern Monachism; Horner, Early Buddhist Theory of Man Perfected; Kaelber, Tapta Marga; Kloppenborg, Paccekabuddha; Olivelle, Āśrama System, and Origin and Early Development of Buddhist Monachism; Prasad, Studies in Buddhist and Jaina Monachism; Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks; Wijayaratna, Buddhist Monastic Life; Wiltshire, Ascetic Figures before and in Early Buddhism. 4 See McEvilley, “Archaeology of Yoga.” 5 Romila Thapar, “Householder and Renouncer.” 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Renunciation by itself, giving up the basic tenets of social life and locating to the forest or other desolate place, does not ensure reward. People could still remain attached to a worldly life, ascetics forming, for example, trade enterprises or hermits engaging in warfare, and so forth. One could also, as the Buddha warned, get attached to the idea of nonattachment itself. 9 Dumont, “World Renunciation.” 10 Robert Thurman, Inner Revolution (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 61. 11 Olivelle, Āśrama System, 62–63. 12 The notion of a “perfected being” obviously varies from tradition to tradi-
NOTES TO PAGES 28–30181 tion, but there is a common thread of that state as one of having attained the highest human potential. From the religious or devotional point of view, the perfected ascetic marks the nexus of humanity and divinity. But as a human, the ascetic represents the fullest potential of humanity, which sometimes is more powerful than that of the gods. In Heinrich Zimmer’s lyrical description, the ascetic, “through the endurance of self-inflicted sufferings . . . 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”; see Myths and Symbols in Indian Art, 114–115. Philip Rawson noted that successful ascetics like the Buddha and Jina “were regarded, and represented, as filled with the afflatus of truth, not intrinsically different from the divine”; see Philip Rawson, Indian Sculpture (London: Dutton, 1966), 67. 13 Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, 1:102. 14 Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art, 114–115. The complex relationship of the ascetic and the divine is evident in mythological narratives. Innumerable myths relate how sometimes the ascetic, and sometimes an āsura (demonic being), can acquire power greater than that of the gods. There are situations in which celestial gods are perturbed by the tāpasá of a particular ascetic and adopt various means to thwart it. Even the gods practice asceticism as a means of acquiring special prowess; the intensity of the tāpas of Śiva, the archascetic of the gods, is his wellknown attribute. 15 Horner, Early Buddhist Theory of Man Perfected. 16 Ibid., 98–99. The relationship to nirvāṇa is rather ambiguous, since some texts propose for the arahan as getting “near to nibbāna” or “in the presence of nibbāna,” suggesting that the arahan has not completed the cathartic process meant by nirvāṇa. In the Saṃyutta (2.115), two figures, Musial and Narada, represent a high degree of Buddhist knowledge and perfection, but Narada did not consider himself an arahan since he had not experientially realized “contact with nirvāṇa”; see Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, 2:103–104. 17 In the Pali Text Society’s Pali-English Dictionary, cited in Horner, Early Buddhist Theory of Man Perfected, 52. 18 Horner, Early Buddhist Theory of Man Perfected, 99. 19 Ibid., 100–103. 20 Conze, Buddhist Thought in India, 167. 21 Olivelle, Āśrama System, 10–11. The term aśrama is a relatively new one in the Sanskrit vocabulary. The word does occur in the Vedic Saṃhitās and Brāhmaṇas, or even in the early Upaniṣads. Olivelle has argued (8) that the word originated as a neologism, coined at a particular time in Indian history to express a novel idea or phenomenon. 22 Ibid., 11. 23 Ibid., 17. 24 Cited in Olivelle, Āśrama System, 11. The Rig Veda mentions (4.12.2) that a man toils (saśramanah) in bringing fuel for sacrifice. The Taittiriya Saṃhitā describes (1.7.1.3) how Manu labored (aśrāmyat) at cooking the sacrificial oblation (1.7.1.3). On another occasion, the Taittiriya Saṃhitā mentions, “The seers likewise discovered the meters and the sacrificial
182NOTES TO PAGES 30–36 bricks through śrama and tāpas” (5.3.5.4). The Aiterya Brāhmaṇa (2.13) declares, “The gods won heaven by śrama.” 25 Olivelle, Āśrama System, 11. 26 Panikkar, Blessed Simplicity. 27 Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, 1:238. 28 Dumont, “World Renunciation.” 29 This is clearly described in the various Gṛhya Sūtras. See also Olivelle, Āśrama System, 55. 30 Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, 215. 31 In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (4.4.22); cited in Olivelle, Āśrama System, 65. 32 Ibid., 45. 33 Ibid., 66–67. 34 Dīgha Nikāya, 1:63, and Majjhima Nikāya, 1:179. 35 Majjhima Nikāya, 1:483. 36 Émile Benveniste offers a lexical and etymological analysis of the terms; see Indo-European Language and Society. 37 The word “forest” originates as a juridical term from the Latin foresta. The older origin is foris, meaning “outside,” “out-of-doors.” The juridical sense comes from the Merovingian period, when it referred to a land that had been placed off-limits by a royal decree. Once a region had been declared a forest, it could not be cultivated, exploited, or encroached upon. The land remained outside the public domain. See Harrison, Forests, 69. 38 Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture, book 2, chap. 1. 39 The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated from the third edition by T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), sect. II, LXV, 239. Vico also argued that the sequence of institutions set the pattern for the histories of words. Thus a major corpus of the Latin language has its origins in sylvan or rustic settings. 40 Olivelle, Āśrama System, 67. 41 The oppositional nature of forest and society of man is confirmed in language by the duality of domi-fori. Domi implies indwelling, as being in a house or home, whereas fori is being “outside.” See Benveniste, IndoEuropean Language and Society. 42 For the distinction, see Francis Zimmermann, Jungle and the Aroma of Meats. 43 For interpretations of some of these myths, see Kramrisch, Presence of Siva. In one of the earliest cosmogonic myths in the Rig Veda (1.71), creation begins in a sort of wilderness scenario with the nameless “wild archer” as the chief protagonist that involves a transgressive but cosmogonic sexual act between a father and daughter. In another version, in the Maitrāyaṇī Saṃhitā, the hunter-archer is termed Paśupati, the Lord of Animals, after he interjects in the sexual encounter between Prajāpati, the Lord of Generation, and his daughter. In interpreting these stories, Kramrisch notes (16) that the “congress of Father and daughter is essential to the primordial scene, whether it is staged in a sacrificial setting or in the wilderness of the first dawn of the world.” In another narration from a later period, Śiva is conceived of as the archascetic who, however, roams the Deodar Forest in phallic resplendence. 44 Malamoud, “Village et forêt.” See also Olivelle, “Village versus Wilderness.”
NOTES TO PAGES 36–42183 45 “Le grāma et l’araṇya se partagent la totalité du monde habitable”; see Malamoud, “Village et forêt.” 46 Falk, “Wilderness and Kingship.” Falk highlights this as a royal relationship to the throne or seat of the yakṣa in the forest grove. 47 Jeannine Auboyer argued that the idea of the royal throne in India was a stylistic and conceptual descendant of that reified seat in the wilderness. See Jeannine Auboyer, Le trône et son symbolisme dans l’Inde ancienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1949), 9–45. 48 Described in the Sutano-Jātaka. 49 In the Mahābhārata, Yudhiṣṭhira and his Pāṇḍava brothers acquire weapons in the wilderness that are crucial in the great battle, the prize of which is the gaining of the city. The Pāṇḍavas also receive the help of a rakṣasa, a demonic being of the wilderness, whose valor provides a turning point in the Pāṇḍava fortunes. The whole of the Rāmāyaṇa presents the transformative and cathartic journey of Rāma in different forest and hermitage scenarios, characterized by one key section called the “Araṇya Khanḍa.” 50 The later Sinhala Buddhist tradition shows a triadic relationship formed by the king or ruler, the “establishment” saṇgha of the village or town, and the more ascetic or contemplative saṇgha based in the forest. See Stanley Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of the Amulet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 72. Tambiah points to a partition in the saṇgha, between the saṇgha of the town and the saṇgha of the forest. This division exists with clear evidence from the tenth century onward in Sinhala Buddhism. 51 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 25–30. 52 Harrison, Forests, 201. 53 My idea of heterotopia, and the designation of the forest as such, is derived from Michel Foucault’s calibration of spaces that stand in counterposition to unreal utopias. He writes, “There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” Foucault adds that these spaces and sites “have the curious property of being in relation to other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect.” See Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” published as “Des espace autres” (based on a lecture given in 1967), in Architecture, Movement, Continuité, no. 5 (October 1984): 46–49. 54 Giles B. Gunn, The Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 191. 55 See Ananda Coomaraswamy, “Early Indian Architecture: IV. Huts and Related Temple Types” (1930), reprinted in Coomaraswamy, Essays in Early Indian Architecture. 56 Mentioned in various texts; see Cullavagga, VI.1.2. 57 Sir Robert Chalmers, Further Dialogues of the Buddha (London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1926–1927), 193. 58 Anguttara Nikāya, ii, 26.
184NOTES TO PAGES 43–46 59 Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga, 56–59, 74–75. 60 Ananda Coomaraswamy pointed to the “far-reaching exegesis” of the cave space in the Vedic-Brahmanical worldview, especially in elaborating the mystical idea of the hidden entity that manifests itself. He noted the relationship of terms like giri, guhā, and gṛhya and how they may have helped to formulate Vedic views. Giri is both “mountain” and “to swallow,” guhā is “cave,” and gṛhya, in its basic sense, refers to the physical home. Giri and guhā are often used interchangeably, whereas giri and gṛhya imply “enclosures . . . a being within something.” See Coomaraswamy, “Atmayājña,” 117–119. 61 Dutt, Buddhist Monks and Monasteries of India, 95. 62 Ibid., 96. Caves or rock-cut spaces used as monasteries, dating from the second century BCE onward, are extant at a number of sites in western India, and there are such spaces associated with the Ājīvika sect in the Barabar Hills in Bihar, and Jaina cave monasteries in Udaygiri, near Bhuvaneswara. 63 Roth, Ārāma, 24–25. 64 Rig Veda, X.162.4. 65 Originally this was a hall where the monks met and walked about, thus referring to moving about; see Roth, Ārāma, 16. 66 Foucher, L’art gréco-bouddhique, 99. Foucher also notes that saṇghārāma was the favorite term for a monastery by the seventh-century Chinese traveler to India Xuanzang. 67 Foucher, in L’art gréco-bouddhique, identifies the various columnar and open pavilions (aedicules) depicting the framing of seated Buddhas as viharās. 68 Rai Govind Chandra, Indian Symbolism: Symbols as Sources of Our Customs and Beliefs (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1996). 69 H. Sarkar, Studies in Early Buddhist Architecture. 70 Coomaraswamy, “Early Indian Architecture,” fig. 18. 71 Ibid., fig. 21. 72 In the Mahāvaṃsa, see chap. 27 for a detailed description, especially of the drawing of a celestial model (made by red arsenic upon linen cloth). See also Coomaraswamy, “Indian Architectural Terms.” 73 Ananda Coomaraswamy, “Early Indian Architecture: III. Palaces,” in Essays in Early Indian Architecture, 33–65. 74 Ibid. See also Sarkar, Studies in Early Buddhist Architecture. 75 Coomaraswamy, “Early Indian Architecture: III. Palaces.” 76 Coomaraswamy, “Early Indian Architecture: I. Cities and City-Gates,” in Essays in Early Indian Architecture, 15. 77 Sarkar, Studies in Early Buddhist Architecture. 78 Coomaraswamy, “Early Indian Architecture: III. Palaces,” 43. See also Cullavagga, VI.1.2. 79 Noted in Dutt, Buddhist Monks, 96. 80 The Vinaya texts note the nissayas as resources for sustenance. 81 See the Vinaya Texts. For recent discussion, see Prasad, Studies in Buddhist and Jaina Monachism, 108. 82 See T. W. Rhys Davids, Pali-English Dictionary (1925, repr., London: Luzac, 1959). 83 Prasad, Studies in Buddhist and Jaina Monachism, 109.
NOTES TO PAGES 46–55185 84 Mahāvagga, I.6.17. 85 Cullavagga, 7.9.14; noted in Prasad, Studies in Buddhist and Jaina Monachism, 107. 86 The limits of renunciation are looked at critically and also criticized on various occasions. One such example is the conversation of Milinda with Āyupāla in the Milin dapañha, I.20. 87 Prasad, Studies in Buddhist and Jaina Monachism, 108. Prasad, defining nissaya as “sustenance and safety of life but with limited means,” points to practical requirements of maintaining a healthy body safe from the weather. This aspect takes on a greater medical knowledge of the body in later periods of Buddhism; see Zysk, Asceticism and Healing. 88 Prasad, Studies in Buddhist and Jaina Monachism, 110. 89 The Mahā-Assapura Sutta, 39.12, in the Majjhima Nikāya, mentioned in numerous texts in the Pali canon; see Olivelle, Āśrama System, 67n107. 90 The Mahāsunnata Sutta, 122.3, in the Majjhima Nikāya. 91 Milindapañha, vol. 1, 194, vol. 2, 2–3. 92 Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga, II.54. 93 The Vanapattha Sutta, 17, in the Majjhima Nikāya. 94 The Gulisasani Sutta, 69, in the Majjhima Nikāya, is a list of warnings for the forest-dwelling ascetic. CHAPTER 2: HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION 1 John Hollander has noted in regard to modern English usage “home” remains a matter of deep human consciousness. “Home” is as dear, and as elusive, as the notion “self”; see John Hollander, “It All Depends,” in Home: A Place in the World, ed. Arien Mack, 27–45 (New York: New York University Press, 1993). 2 Aśvaghoṣa, Buddhacarita, canto V.84. 3 K. D. P. Wikremesinghe, Biography of Buddha (Colombo: Priyanka Lakshman Wickremesinghe, 2002), 38. Various verses in the Dhammapada echo this description. 4 Different timings are found for the birth of the son. Tibetan works coincide the event of emancipation with the birth of Rāhula, a moment that also coincided with an eclipse when Rahu seized the moon and hence the name of the child; from the Bkah-ngyur, part of the Tibetan translation of the Vinaya texts into what is known as the Dulva, or the Tibetan Vinaya. See William Rockhill, The Life of the Buddha and the Early History of His Order (Varanasi: Orientalia Indica, 1972), 32. 5 Matthew Kapstein et al., The Buddhism Omnibus (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 140. 6 Ibid. 7 Rockhill, Life of the Buddha, 51. 8 Ibid., 56–57. 9 Wikremesinghe, Biography of Buddha, 120. 10 Nikkyō Niwano, Shakyamuni Buddha (Tokyo: Kōsei, 1989), 98. 11 The curious reversal of city culture (normative society) and forest culture (asceticism) is already anticipated in the wailings of the palace folk upon learning of Siddhārtha’s departure, “abandoned by him, this town like a forest is, that forest possessing him is just like the town.” This becomes
186NOTES TO PAGES 55–59 meaningful in the context of what will transpire historically after that, of Siddhārtha’s aunt, cousins, son, and eventually his wife adopting the monastic order and taking up residence in the ārāmas; ibid., 130. 12 Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society. Linguistic studies by Benveniste affirmed the lexical difference of “home” and “house” in most Indo-European languages, even within a closely related family of terms. 13 The Vedic dama- is part of the Indo-European word family, with a root contributing to the sense of “house.” It gives rise to compounds like dāmpatih, “master of the house,” and damu-nah, “domestic protector of the house”; ibid., 241. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 245. 16 Ibid., 254–256. 17 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 127–175. 18 For an exploration of this idea, see Joseph Rykwert, “House and Home,” in Mack, Home, 52. 19 Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899). 20 Ibid. 21 Rev. Walter W. Skeat, A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888). 22 The Arthaśāstra, trans. and ed. L. N. Rangarajan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1992). 23 The Pali term gaha (Sanskrit gṛhya or grihá, Prakrit ghara) in its root meaning refers to girdling and encirclement as a means of defining territory and at the same time marking the edge that protects the central area. Grihá is “house,” “habitation,” “home” in Vedic texts and forms various compound words. Geha is a corrupted form of grihá, still meaning “house, dwelling, habitation” in later texts, including the Mahābhārata. The etymology suggests a possible link between gaha and ghere, “to surround,” “to bound.” See Monier-Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Grah, “grasp,” as with giri, implies enclosures, resorts, a being within something; see Coomaraswamy, “Atmayājña,” 118. 24 See Jaiswal, “Changing Concept of ‘Gṛhapati.’” Jaiswal notes that a precise sense of the Rig Veda gṛhya is difficult to ascertain. In general, it refers to a social unit. While some scholars have understood that to be a patrilineal family, consisting of members of four generations headed by a gṛhyapati, or lord of the gṛhya, others, including Jaiswal, as here, are more convinced of the evidence of a “residential unity of clansmen living under the same roof or in close proximity and constituting one single unit for ritual and economic purposes.” The gṛhyapati of the Rig Veda was then not a householder heading a patriarchal joint family but the head of a kin group that had residential unity. 25 Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 7.1.1.1–4. 26 See Brian Smith, “Unity of Ritual.” The Śrauta Sūtra rituals refer to more archaic practices from the Rig Veda, such as those associated with soma drinking, and represent more of Rig Veda poetry. The Gṛhya Sūtra rituals appear modestly in older literature. 27 Renou, “Vedic House,”141–161. In his introduction to the English translation