ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE37 defeat of the yakṣa is carried out by a bodhisattva serving as a stand-in for the king. The bodhisattva, wearing the king’s sandals and carrying the sword and umbrella that serve as the king’s insignias, outwits and converts the dangerous yakṣa threatening the king. The bodhisattva then leads the tamed yakṣa to the city gate, where the king establishes a cult for the forest figure. The Brahmanic epic tales constantly associate the forest in a dialectic with the city. Both the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa are really forest tales, where the epics unfold within the intertwined spaces of the city and the forest. In both epics, city and palace are desired, objects to be finally acquired, while the forest is the setting of an obligatory exile, journey, and various transformative travails that lead to the climactic repossession.49 The reciprocity of the forest and city is more institutionally manifested in the Buddhist monastic system (the saṇgha). The interdependence is illustrated in the life of the Buddha himself. The Buddha did abandon and reject the house hold life, and did attain enlightenment in the forest, but at the same time, he established his new social vision by making his first sermon in a garden outside the city of Varanasi. In the monastic system that developed after the passing away of the Buddha, the renouncer and the nonrenouncer were not particularly antithetical positions.50 The pairing of grāma and vana thus suggests both contrast and continuity. The forest was already a significant space in the Vedic imagination, seen as a special extension of the social landscape and not standing in total opposition to it, despite the rhetoric. The relationship is one of reciprocity and not outright dualism. The significance of vana in the Indian imagination emerges from the societal condition of grāma, thus vana does not enjoy a fully autonomous conceptualization as a primordial site. Vana is not discovered as is but construed and produced in a dialectical relationship with grāma. The ascetics go on to inhabit that space within that dialectical framework. The space of the forest, as rescripted by the ascetics, becomes a stage for another sort of encounter: the production of the “other” and the creation of a mode of access to “a world elsewhere.”51 No matter in what way the forest is seen, as domain of the gods, world of the autochthons, or reinhabited space of the ascetics, the forest is always at the edge of civilization; 52 it is in that sense a heterotopia.53 If the forest is a heterotopic space, such a space in the sense described by Michel Foucault, or a site of the “other” in the interpretation of the sacred by Rudolf Otto, a space understandable by its enigmatic relationship with the village or city, then the hermit-ascetic himself could be conceived of as the epitome of otherness. While these notions of otherness are derived from different epistemic contexts, they do suggest that
38THE HERMIT’S HUT the idea of the hermit has ingrained within it a history of existing in heterotopic spaces. The etymology of the term “hermit” suggests such a condition: a hermit is an eremite (from the Greek eremia, “desolate” or “desert”), while the renouncer as vānaprasthi is, following the literal reference of the Sanskrit, a “forest dweller.” Heterotopic spaces are not, of course, limited to the forest. Wandering Buddhist and Jaina monks were urged to take up dwelling in such precarious sites as stables, abandoned houses, and cemeteries. And even when monks and hermits dwell in conventional places such as a village or town, their dwellings represent a microheterotopia. One could go as far to say that the hermit-ascetic is himself a portable heterotopia. Why inhabit such questionable places in the first place? It is because such tensional sites, always unstable from the perspective of mainstream society, open up new potentials and possibilities; it is by virtue of their instability that the forest and other heterotopic spaces can become transformative, precisely the desirable consequence of encountering the other. Giles Gunn, in his interpretation of otherness in a literary context, has argued that “the essential purpose of man’s encounter with ‘otherness’ is to compel him however he responds—whether with love, despair, outrage, awe—into some new understanding of and relationship to himself. The desired goal, whether successfully achieved or tragically frustrated, is deliverance and new life, and the method is always some form of decreation, a sloughing off of the old ways in response to the encounter with something astonishingly new.”54 Although Gunn was writing from a twentieth-century literary perspective on a broader concept of what constitutes the other, the idea of “decreation” in order to achieve something “astonishingly new” is strikingly close to the discourse of asceticism in fifth century BCE India. ASCETIC HABITATS AND DWELLINGS After entering the forest as an inhabitable landscape proper for ascetic pursuits, the ascetic-renouncer faced some immediate and pragmatic challenges regarding his lodging. The conception and production of the dwelling are essential to the practicing life of the ascetic. If the forest represented the spatiality of renunciation, the dwelling of the ascetic is a condensation of the forest discourse. Structures and spaces with ascetic connotations become evident in Indian iconography and literature from the third century BCE onward. This evidence is often found in the terms employed for an ascetic structure. Kuṭī or kuṭīka was a general term for the dwelling of a Brahmanical or Buddhist hermit as well as for the huts belonging to peasants and villagers.55 The kuṭī was a simple, independent structure, either circular
ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE39 or rectangular, constructed of forest materials such as large leaves or woven reeds (figs. 1.6, 1.7, and 1.8). Representations of circular and oblong kuṭīs appear in the Bhārhut and Sāñcī reliefs as the Buddha’s retreat at Jetavana (figs. 3.4 and 3.5), and later in multiple ways, from mock architectural and decorative elements to constructed objects. The rock-cut Brahmanical shrines of Mahabalipuram, from the sixth century CE, are a crucial link in a chain of that iconic repertoire. Buddhist representational art, from the third century BCE onward, shows a variety of huts, from ordinary dwellings to various kuṭīs of the Buddha, as well as huts belonging to Brahmanical hermits (figs. 1.9–1.13). There are also depictions of structures with nonresidential purposes, such as shelters for fire or those related to the serpent cult. Frequently depictions show vividly the prevailing natural and human conditions of the environments in which the huts are set. Buddhist literary and epigraphic texts describe how ascetic dwellings were de fined, identified, and prescribed. Though, as mentioned, ascetic dwellings were noted in pre-Buddhist times, it is Bud dhism that reflects ex tensively on their significance in ascetic thought and its im peratives. The concept of dwelling was faced almost immediately by the Buddha himself as a fundamental question put forward by his ascetic 1.6 A Brahmanical hermit in front of his paṇṇa-sāla (Faccenna, Sculptures from the Sacred Area of But kara I, plate 269). 1.7 Brahmanical ascetics sitting inside their huts, Gandhāra (Ingholt, Gandhāran Art in Pakistan, plate 431).
1.8 The Brah mani cal ascetic Kāśyapa in his hut with the fire altar in front, Gan dhāra, ca. second century (Museum of Art and Archae ology, Uni versity of MissouriColumbia).
ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE41 followers. What should be sanctioned as a dwelling? What should be the nature of such dwellings? What kind of spaces would be proper for an ascetic performance? The questions are critical because they involve reformulating the normative house, which has already been renounced. The literary texts reveal two prescriptions for dwellings that are somewhat contradictory. Befitting the renunciatory spirit of the Buddha, he prescribes naturalistic forest settings such as beneath a tree or in a cave as proper spaces for a monk. On the other hand, the Buddha, in a well-regarded statement in Buddhist literature, sanctions five kinds of spaces proper for the ascetic dwelling. The five came to be codified as pañ ca leṇanis56 and include the viharā, aḍḍhayoga, pāsāda, hammiya, and guhā. The tree emerges as the most critical space in the first instance. The tree and the cave belong to two spatial archetypes much favored as ideal dwellings for ascetical purposes (fig. 3.1). The tree also returns the reflection to the spatial locus of asceticism: the forest. Many important texts make mention of the tree as a site for dwelling. The Vinaya says it rather emphatically: “In the matter of housing, the śramana’s life is based on dwelling at the foot of a tree. Thus you must endeavor to live all your life. Cells, houses, mansions, and huts are extras.” There is clearly a primacy 1.10 A scene from a jātaka tale showing ascetics around a fire, Goli, Andhra Pradesh, second to third cen turies (C. Sivara ma murti, Birds and Animals in Indian Sculpture [New Delhi: National Museum, 1974], fig. 50a). 1.9 A hermit in front of his hut in a forest setting, Gandhāra (Indian Museum, Kolkata; photo by author).
42THE HERMIT’S HUT accorded to the tree by downplaying other types of dwelling. On other occasions, as enunciated in the Majjhima Nikāya, the Buddha is found referring to living under trees and in caves.57 The benefits of such a spatial condition for an ascetic purpose are repeated in influential texts, particularly in the Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification), written by a prolific commentator from the fifth century CE, Buddhaghosa. In a chapter of the Visuddhimagga titled “Dhutaṇga-niddesa” (Instructions Regarding Dhutaṇga), Buddhaghosa lists thirteen ascetic practices for achieving the goal of asceticism. Dhutaṇga is an individual practice distinct from the general cenobitic life of the bhikkhu collective, something that was allowed in the early period of Buddhism. Dhutaṇga also embodies a stricter ascetic mode carried out in remote places such as the forest. Of the thirteen practices on the list, the “tree-root dweller’s practice” coincides with the original Vinaya suggestion of “depending on the root of a tree as an abode.” The dhutaṇga ascetic is urged to begin his practice by declaring, “I refuse a roof.” Living at the root of a tree is recommended by the Buddha because it is “valueless, easy to get, and blameless.”58 Buddhaghosa elaborates on these features and lists the following benefits of living at the root of a tree: one becomes conscious of the fact of impermanence by seeing the con tinual alteration of young leaves; the desire and affinity for building work are absent in that context; one dwells in the company of deities; and, 1.12 Scene of a hermitage in a grove, Virūpākṣa Temple, Pattadakal, eighth century (C. Sivaramamurti, Birds and Animals in Indian Sculpture [New Delhi: National Museum, 1974], fig. 4). 1.11 Scene of a forest hermitage belonging to Brahmanical ascetics, Sāñcī, first century BCE (Stella Kramrisch, The Art of India [London: Phaidon, 1965], 22).
ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE43 one lives there in conformity with the principles of minimal wishes.59 I am drawn to the declaration of refusing a roof also for phenomenological reasons. By locating himself under a tree, the ascetic nonetheless retains the benefit of being sheltered, but by disavowing a roof, he is relinquishing all requirements and technologies of a constructed dwelling. He is also nullifying the valorization of the roof, which is the basic premise of building and toward which all construction know-how, social values, and the very functionality of a building are directed. Even though the guhā (cave) is one of the five dwelling types sanctioned by the Buddha, and the Buddha himself spent some time meditating in caves, it has an ambiguous presence in the Buddhist imagination compared with the attention given to the tree. The pañcaleṇanis is one of the few occasions in which a cave dwelling is explicitly identified. The cave theme is more frequent in Brahmanical and Hindu architecture, with their Vedic metaphorical antecedents.60 A distinction can be made between the natural caves that were often abodes for Vedic or Brahmanic hermits and the human-made rock-cut spaces that formed the repertoire of early architectural spaces in the Buddhist and Jaina cultures. It is probable that the early rain retreats, the vassa-āvāsas, made use of by wandering Buddhist monks during the rainy season were caves. The cave is not only a convenient shelter from the rain but it is also, with its dark, cavernous condition, also an environment well suited to isolation and introspection (fig. 3.3). Nonetheless, the cave remains ambiguous in terms of its utility as a model for habitation. The texts are also ambivalent even on the definition 1.13 The Buddha meeting Brahmanical hermits, Amarāvatī, late second to third centuries (The Huntington Archive, The Ohio State University, Columbus).
44THE HERMIT’S HUT of guhā. Although it is generally described as a natural space, Buddhaghosa also describes it as a “hutment made of bricks and scooped out of rock or made of wood or laterite (pamṣu).”61 Buddhaghosa, writing about a thousand years after the Buddha, also notes that of the five sanctioned dwellings, only the viharā (constructed dwelling for monks) and guhā survived as types, while the others simply became obsolete. It was the early cave dwelling as a rain shelter that possibly provided the inducement to undertake the excavation projects at later times when patronage was available to create the elaborate cave monasteries. Sukumar Dutt has proposed that the pavilion-like viharā became the model for the monastic buildings in northern India, whereas the guhā served that purpose in the south (although the term viharā, along with leṇa, came to be used in a fluid way for cave monasteries).62 Interpretation also becomes complicated when certain spaces in later cave monasteries, such as the magnificent caitya hall in Karli, are reconfigured as a lithic copy of an architecture of timber, bamboo, and earth. The lithic versions are evidence of an elaborate freestanding architecture. It is, in a sense, ironic that the cave begins to lose (or conceal) its fundamental primordial spatiality by depicting a freestanding prototype in timber. The viharā is the most frequently mentioned dwelling type in Buddhist literature, including epigraphs. Although viharā is not mentioned in the Rig Veda, it is related to the more ancient viharāti.63 While in its ancient form as revealed in the Rig Veda and Brāhmaṇas, the viharāti suggests the ideas of “staying” or “residing,” it also meant “to keep apart, separate.”64 It also came to mean “distribution, transposition,” “arrangement of the three sacred fires and the space between them,” “strolling, wandering,” and “a place for recreation, pleasure ground.” The meaning of the term saw many changes in the Buddhist context. It first came to mean a single structure used as a dwelling, or even a “temple,”65 but it gradually came to signify a monastic campus. In the early phase of Buddhism, when viharā meant a single residence for a monk, the proper term for a monastery was saṇghārāma,66 something created by the repetition or clustering of viharās.67 The texts do not make clear what an aḍḍhayoga is; it was most likely a structure with a special or elaborate shape. The Vinaya texts describe it as a house shaped like a Garuda, the mythological bird-mount of Vishnu. Buddhaghosa describes it as a gold-colored Vanga, or Bengal, house of a later period, although this could be a mistranslation. A Mauryan copperplate depicting various shrines (caityas, or, Pali, cetiyas) shows what appears to be such an aḍḍhayoga structure (fig. 6.1).68 H. Sarkar has suggested that in size the aḍḍhayoga may have been bigger than a small viharā but smaller than a pāsāda, referring to a large viharā.69
ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE45 Pāsāda (Skt. prāsāda) names a mansion, typically of seven stories, generally a pretentious building belonging to a king or wealthy merchant. It is not clear what pāsāda might have meant in an ascetic context, other than being an elaborate building in a monastery, perhaps as the “domical shrine” illustrated in a relief from Ghaṇṭaśālā70 or the “three-storied gandhakuṭī” from Mathurā.71 Pāsāda may have signified substantial buildings donated to monks by wealthy patrons. The fourth century CE text Mahāvaṃsa describes the lohapāsāda (in Sri Lanka) as a palatial building of nine stories that was also an uposatha (hall for a ritualistic gathering of monks); the structure supposedly contained one hundred kuṭāgāra (literally, “sky room”; a room in the uppermost part of a structure) and one thousand chambers.72 Ananda Coomaraswamy described in detail the characteristics of nonmonastic pāsādas as mentioned in Buddhist texts.73 From these descriptions it appears that pāsāda as a building type may have been added later to the list of dwelling types; it is therefore possible that the codification of the five dwelling types is a later event. The hammiya (Skt. harmiya) is generally considered to be a dwelling more generous than a kuṭī, although its precise meaning is also uncertain.74 The term harmiya occurs as a reference to a dwelling in the Rig Veda (I, 121, 1, 1) and in the Atharva Veda (XVIII, 4, 55).75 Kautilya’s Arthasāstra describes the hammiya as featuring a pillared pavilion with an elevated mezzanine floor and sometimes with a flat or domed roof.76 In Buddhaghosa’s description, the hammiya seems to have a kuṭāgāra on the topmost level.77 The Amarakośa distinguishes the hammiya from a pāsāda by defining the former as an abode for wealthy persons and the latter as a residence for kings. The Buddhist Cullavagga also makes a distinction: a pāsāda is a long building of several stories, whereas a hammiya is one with a kuṭāgāra; sometimes the kuṭāgāra itself is called a hammiya.78 Buddhaghosa mentions in the Sumaṇgala-vilāsinī that the hammiya is a pāsāda capped by a single chamber.79 He describes one that was supposedly erected in a clearing in the Mahāvana forest for the Buddha in which the hammiya consisted of a storied building with a hall below surrounded only by pillars. The pillars supported a gable roof on which sat a chamber called a gandhakuṭī used by the Buddha as a retiring room. In this case, the whole pāsāda took its name from the rooftop chamber and was called a kuṭāgāra-śāla. Hammiya is also related to the harmikā, the significant little structure located on top of a stupa. THINGS NECESSARY FOR AN ASCETIC In considering the different dwelling types and their various descriptions, it is important to note that they all, despite the variousness, point to a deep ambiguity regarding the dwelling. Considering that renuncia-
46THE HERMIT’S HUT tion is fundamental to asceticism, nearly all ascetic groups were forced to address the following questions: What are the things that need to be renounced? How much is to be renounced? There is a double bind in the exhortation that reveals an inherent ambivalence in ascetic practice. There is, on the one hand, an imperative for a denial and, on the other, an acknowledgment of certain crucial necessities. The question of the degree of renunciation is at the core of all ascetic discourse. Certain ascetic groups maintained extreme forms of renunciation, such as going fully naked, living in cemeteries, and so on, or ascetic practices, such as standing on one leg, being partially buried, and so forth. Buddhist discourse, however, presents a mediated position on most issues. Ascetic practice, in the Buddhist viewpoint, is not for the purpose of extreme denial but for attaining the transformed self. The belief was that a crucial balance must be maintained in the functioning of the body for the sustaining of life in order to enable a proper continua tion of ascetic performance with the ultimate goal of selftransformation always in mind. The Buddhist texts list four elements considered as essential for the life of a Buddhist monk.80 These necessities were referred to by the term nissaya, or, literally, “that on which something depends.”81 The Sanskrit equivalent, niśraya, is related to the word āsraya, or “shelter.”82 The question of the four essentials was fundamental to Buddhist monastic ethics. Following the Buddha’s instructions, the four necessities were incorporated as a central feature of the initiation ceremony for monks. Jaina ascetics also practiced according to a similar list of necessities.83 The Vinaya texts describe the four necessities as piṇḍiyālopabhojana (obtaining food by begging), paṃsukūlacīvara (securing clothing by collecting rags), pūimuttabhesajja (urine as medicine), and rukkha mūlasenāsana (dwelling under a tree). The necessities are thus food, clothing, medicine, and dwelling. The early life of the ascetic Buddha illustrates the importance of the necessities as a conceptual core of being an ascetic. The Buddha, before his climactic moment of enlightenment, practiced various forms of asceticism, of which some were of the extreme variety. He led a life of self-mortificatory practices for twelve years (in some versions, six) before his enlightenment. In that early time, he discarded the use of clothing, underwent long periods of starvation, accepting food only in the palm of his hands, and living in the wilderness without a designated shelter. Following his enlightenment, the Buddha maintained a low opinion of such extreme asceticism. He is supposed to have said to his first group of disciples, the Pañcavaggiya monks, “A life given to selfmortification is painful, ignoble, and inefficacious.”84 Despite the repeated requests by some of his more zealous followers to make such
ASCETICISM AND ARCHITECTURE47 extreme practices a requirement for all, the Buddha pronounced them as things of “mere taste and liking,” identifying instead other elements as necessary for a fruitful pursuit befitting a Buddhist ascetic.85 The four essentials raise questions about fundamental human needs and the minimal requisites for existence for a proper and vigorous ascetic practice.86 One principle in determining such requisites is that a healthy body is the site of a healthy mind, something that is crucial in the ascetic project.87 Such questions also inevitably lead to those of what is extraneous to existence. The nissaya represents a precarious dance between what is needed by the individual in an ascetic project committed to its explicit criterion of renunciation and what is not needed. This practice, eventually, gestures toward the limits of renunciation, if not its paradox. The fundamental bodily requirements of an ascetic as pared down according to the four Buddhist essentials appear in most ascetic discourses in different forms. Whereas the Buddhist stipulations appeared mediatory, either because of the Buddha’s modulation of ascetic practices or the political gain that could be had from a less-strict path, Jaina ascetic rules were severe. Regarding Jaina rules, Nand Prasad has observed that “the ideal of non-possession culminates in its severest form as nudity, the purity of food gave rise to hair-splitting rules, and the quest for a suitable abode for the monks was made a huge task.”88 The matter of the dwelling, ambivalent as it was regarding prescriptions and proscriptions around it, was far more critical than rules for food and clothing. One could say that among all the requisites, the dwelling brings the ascetic aporia to the foreground. I mentioned previously the two broad, and sometimes antithetical, positions found in Buddhist texts, both of which are attributed to the Buddha. The Buddha is on record urging the monks to take up dwelling in such secluded and unconventional places as “the forest, the root of a tree, a mountain, a ravine, a hillside cave, a charnel ground, a jungle thicket, an open space, a heap of straw.”89 Two conditions are prescribed for the ascetic: a secluded or a natural space for a dwelling and a dwelling space without construction. The importance of a secluded place was experienced by the Buddha himself during his ascetic practices before enlightenment. He articulates the importance later when saying that “it can be expected that when a bhikkhu lives alone withdrawn from society, he will obtain at will, without trouble or difficulty, the bliss of renunciation, the bliss of seclusion, the bliss of peace, the bliss of enlightenment.”90 The benefits of solitary meditation are listed by Nāgasena in the Milindapañha.91 They are echoed by Buddhaghosa in the Visuddhimagga when he names the benefits of the solitary dhutaṇga practices. Buddhaghosa affirms the Buddha’s point of view in connection with ascetic dwelling in the forest and de-
48THE HERMIT’S HUT fines the quality of the spatial environment needed to gain unprecedented concentration.92 In such a space, the ascetic will have freedom from distraction and anxiety, aspects of everyday life in the village. There may also have been at play concern over socializing. The Buddha at times expressed concern that some of the monks were taking too much part and pleasure in the company of others. On the other hand, the whole notion of living by oneself (as a dhutaṇga practitioner) in the forest to gain ascetic prowess is brought under scrutiny. This comes from the Buddha when he warns that although a secluded place and a nonbuilt shelter are preferable, the actual awakening comes from a proper mental condition in a conducive environment. A secluded site is not enough if mind concentration is not achieved because the basic requisites of life are not available.93 Sāriputta, a close disciple of the Buddha’s, warns of the pitfalls of living alone and proposes the efficacy of communal, civic living.94 Various sutras question the value of living alone in a forest if the ascetic has no manners, is haughty and rough tongued, and has defective faculties and habits (such as eating). One notices here the emergence of the socialization of ascetic practice and the beginning of a (civic) monastic system. A similar ambivalence is found regarding the architecture of the dwelling. The earlier prescription of a natural and primitive space for sheltering an ascetic is gradually altered in support of a more proper and elaborate dwelling. A striking text illustrating the shift comes in the form of the sixth chapter of the Cullavagga, called the “Senāsana khandaka.” The text represents a significant document on monks’ dwellings as distinguished from the Buddha’s hut. The description is pragmatic and concerns itself with construction, technical, and functional aspects. I return to the text in some detail when discussing the theme of home in chapter 2, but for now its mention is intended to underscore the marked ambivalence regarding the ascetic and his dwelling place. The text also reveals the perpetual tension between the requirement to build and the imperative not to. This is emblematic of the larger dichotomy in ascetic discourse between minimalization and elaboration and between an idealized spirituality and quotidian reality.
49 CHAPTER 2 Home in the Ascetic Imagination Home is both the foundation and, literally, the point of departure for the ascetic project. “Going forth,” as expressed in the popular Pali term pabbaja (Skt. parivrājaka), names the central tenet of Buddhist ascetic practice, defining and prescribing movement from the ideology of home to the doctrine of homelessness. Technically referring to the renunciation of home and as such prompting the cenobitic saṇgha into a life of wandering, pabbaja also maintains a lingering presence of domesticity in ascetic ideology. Most ascetic traditions are premised on the idea of renunciation as a form of entry into the realm of a cultivated homelessness. Renunciation does not result in complete disentanglement from home, however; home maintains a recalcitrant presence in the ascetic itinerary. But what home is this? With its sense of stability and safety, the notion of “home” and certainly the experience of it exist at the core of all societal existence, but at the same time it is a maddeningly elusive idea, shifting its meaning over time and across regions.1 Home is not simply a material artifact (as in the literal sense of a hut or house) but a conceptualized and imagined entity structured by and structuring, on the one hand, an individual’s social, economic, and communal conditions and, on the other, the mythological, psychological, and oneiric dimensions. Considering the centrality of home in ascetic discourse, it is worthwhile to track the departure from domestic life in Buddhist narratives. Two episodes in the Buddha’s life relate in rather dramatic ways the fraught relationship with home—one famously known as the “great departure,” the other narrated as the Buddha’s return to his hometown after gaining enlightenment. The great departure marks the most important episode in the Buddha’s rearrangement of his relationship to home (figs. 2.1 and 2.2).
50THE HERMIT’S HUT The episode is a climax in the legendary retelling of Siddhārtha’s encounters with the vicissitudes of life—old age, disease, and death—as well as subsequent existential crises. At another level, the great departure inaugurates the ascetic tension with home, replete with all its varied consequences, identified most with the momentous image of departing the city (figs. 2.3 and 2.4). “I shall not enter the city named Kapila without looking first at the far shore of birth and death!”2 With those last words uttered at the gates of Kapilavāstu, Siddhārtha leaves home and town in the momentous quest that reconfigures home forever. Very little of that episode is verifiable, and different texts give different accounts. The popular narrative describes Siddhārtha leaving his father’s palace in the dead of night riding his horse Kaṇthaka and accompanied by his servant Chaṇdaka. Even after his father, King Śuddhodana, has placed guards to thwart the anticipated flight of Siddhārtha and organized a great merriment the previous evening to entertain the young prince, Siddhārtha manages to escape what he had come to consider the fettered life of home. The nature of the palace, or the kind of architecture Siddhārtha was accustomed to as a prince, can be discerned to some degree from the images of urban mansions or palace life depicted in sculptures from Gandhāra (figs. 2.2 and 2.5) or paintings showing the lives of preBuddhas in jātaka stories in Ajaṇṭā (figs. 2.6 and 2.7). The palace, as beautiful and resplendent as it is, filled with all the imaginable sensual pleasures represented by the reclining bodies of intoxicated young women after a night of merriment, is to Siddhārtha despicable—a cemetery filled with swollen, dead bodies. He decries it as “indeed a calamity,” on fire.3 Among various versions of the departure story, one text describes Siddhārtha’s leaving home the very day his son, Rāhula, is born, suggesting a parallel between the imperative of renunciation and the reproduction of the social norm of fatherhood. According to one story, when Siddhārtha is given the news of his son’s birth, he exclaims despondently, “A son is born, a bond is born.”4 The word in Sanskrit for “bond” or “hindrance” is rāhula. 2.1 Siddhārtha in the palace, Gandhāra (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia).
2.2 Siddhārtha preparing to leave home, Gandhāra (William Cohn, Buddha in der Kunst des Ostens [Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1925], 9).
52THE HERMIT’S HUT In another, and more symbolic retelling, Siddhārtha leaves town well before the birth of his son, and the moment of enlightenment uncannily corresponds to the birthing pain of his wife and subsequently the birth of Rāhula. In this intriguing symmetry between the two events, both entailing physiological labor and an explosive outcome, differentiated by gender, one extols the contingencies of home while the other nullifies it. To return to the first story, however, when Siddhārtha’s servant Chaṇdaka returns to the palace and breaks the news of his master’s departure, Siddhārtha’s wife, Yasodharā, understandably disconsolate, cries out in lamentation: “He does not see that husband and wife are both consecrated in sacrifices. . . . Surely it must be that this fond lover of religion . . . has deserted me . . . in the hope of obtaining heavenly nymphs in Indra’s world.”5 Even 2.3 Siddhārtha emerges outside the city gate, Amarāvatī, 200 (© The Trustees of the British Museum, London). 2.4 Scene of the Great Departure, Jamal-garhi (Lolita Nehru, Origins of Gandhāran Style [Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989], fig. 5).
HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION53 more critical of his pursuit, she states, “And if he just wishes to practice dharma while he’s leaving me, his partner, now without master, of him who wishes to enjoy the penances without his dharma partner, how is this dharma?”6 Home is alluded to here not merely as a sensual setting but part of a ritual and consensual construction carried out by husband and wife through Vedic sacrificial customs. The perpetuation of generations is but a consequence, albeit a necessary one, of these customs. Indeed, Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita mentions a number of times the practices of Brahmanic sacrifice and offerings current at the time of Siddhārtha’s birth and years as a young man. Clearly, the Buddha grew up in a Brahmanical religious milieu within which home bore a very precise and rigorous meaning. The other momentous encounter with home, less prominent than the narrative of the great departure, occurs when Siddhārtha returns to Kapilavāstu as a great teacher, the Buddha, and visits the home he abandoned six years earlier. The visit is initiated by his father, King Suddodhana, who has invited the Buddha to visit the town. The Buddha accepts the invitation with the stipulation that he will not stay inside the town but in a viharā to be built for him outside the city gates.7 To receive his now illustrious son, Suddodhana builds the Nyagrodhārāma, or the Banyan Grove, by following the plans of the Buddha’s favorite retreat, Jetavana in Srāvastī. The Buddha does enter his hometown but for begging rounds; on one occasion, he visits the palace for alms.8 One can imagine this moment as a highly poignant and dramatic one. Yasodharā has been anticipating this encounter, and still harboring the desire to have her absconding husband return home, attempts in various ways to lure the illustrious father home, including sending the six-yearold Rāhula to him, but fails (fig. 2.8). The attempt apparently had opposite results, since the little boy himself is taken into the monastic fold. In some narratives, Yasodharā implores the Buddha to come to her chamber, which he does, in the company of two disciples.9 The significance of this second story lies in the conversion of one family member after another to the monastic group; members include the Buddha’s aunt; his son, Rāhula; and eventually his wife, Yasodharā. According to the story, immediate family members follow the great leader wherever he goes and camp with him in the various retreats, al2.5 Representation of urban buildings, Bodh Gayā (Ananda Coomaraswamy, La sculpture de Bodhgayā [Paris: Les éditions d’art et d’histoire, 1935], plate 14).
2.6 Life in a palace; scene from a jātaka story, Ajaṇṭā (Fergusson and Burgess, Cave Temples of India, 312). 2.7 Life in a palace; scene from a jātaka story, Ajaṇṭā (India: Paintings from Ajaṇṭā Caves [Norwalk, CT: The New York Graphic Society by arrangement with UNESCO, 1954], plate 17).
HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION55 though they live separately. Yasodharā stays at the Vaiśālī monastery for a while but later goes to Jetavana to learn from the Buddha, and she makes a place there since Rāhula is there too. She studies under the Buddha and, with his permission, visits Rāhula.10 The rearrangement of the family suggests either a dissolution of the normative home in Kapilavāstu or a new configuration within an ascetic milieu. The ascetic dwelling, then, comes to bind home, its abnegation, and the reconciliation of the two phenomena into a single but complex narrative.11 HOME AND HOUSE Despite the variations in the meaning of “home” to different people and in different times, the approach to the ascetic dwelling might be more visible through the gateways of “home.” In order to understand what home may have meant in a late Vedic context at a time when the Buddha was advocating the movement from home to homelessness, one can take two routes: one is to decipher the prevalent normative terminologies of home, and the other is to explore the implication of home in Buddhist ascetic rhetoric. The two routes are actually interrelated, since all appellations of renunciation—anāgārika, saṃnyās, pabbaja—are commentaries on an original home condition. The idea of home in the ascetic context invokes two paired notions: home and house, and home and homelessness. Most critical is to distinguish the idea of home as a social, familial, and mental entity from the sense of home as a material construction (a house). This fluctuation between home and house, that is between artifice and artifact, is an ancient one and finds expression in many cultural contexts.12 Gṛhya (Pali gaha) is the most pervasive Sanskrit term for home/house in the Vedic period; other terms approximating the meaning of both home and house are dama,13 kuṭī,sala, āgāra, vāstu, viharā, harmiya, and dhāman. The ambiguity between home and house is such that the two are linked in a relationship even if kuṭī, for example, signifies a more physical structure while gṛhya and vāstu suggest a sense of domestic life. 2.8 Rāhula seeking paternal recognition from the Buddha, Cave 17, Ajaṇṭā (Debala Mitra, Buddhist Monuments [Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1971]).
56THE HERMIT’S HUT “Home” in modern usage can be substituted by “dwelling,” “shelter,” “residence,” “abode,” “house,” and domus, this last term retaining the original tension inherent in the fabrication of home. Émile Benveniste pointed to a bifurcation in the archaic sense of home in Indo-European conventions, one displaying a fissure between a constructional sense of house and an anthropological or social idea of home. Benveniste noted this difference in the Greek term domos and Latin domus, both of which evolved from etymological roots related homonymically. The homonymic cluster presents three conditions: the development of the idea of home/house as a social unit (from the root form *dem-); the sense of house as a construction (stemming from the root *dem(ə)); and the meaning of “to tame, to subdue” (from the root *domā-). The principal distinction is present in the Greek term domos as “building, house” and the Latin sense of domus as a social entity, from which arises domāre (to tame) and domicilium (seat of domus). The sense of taming or subduing unassociated with the idea of a house is certainly viable with the Latin domus. “In the Greek sense, as in Homer,” Benveniste wrote, “domos is accompanied by descriptive epithets; the house is ‘great, high, well constructed, wide,’ etc., that is to say, it has the characteristics of a construction. . . . [In Latin] domus always signifies ‘house’ in the sense of ‘family,’ which is quite foreign to domos.”14 Domus, clearly characterizing a familial, social, and moral condition, does not entertain a sense of construction and therefore cannot be seen as an architectural term unless one expands the notion of architectural space as integral to social form.15 A set of oppositional properties further evolves out of the sense of domus as a demarcated space of familial, ritual, and social action: foras/ foris, that which is outside home; peregre, foreign parts; and militiae, war as contrasted to everyday activities, that is, the works of peace, domi.16 Home is then inherently tied to a series of antithetical properties not immediately obvious in the descriptive properties of a house. Jean-Pierre Vernant read the bifurcated character of home in the paradigmatic pairing of the ancient Greek mythical figures Hermes and Hestia. Hestia represents a sense of the enclosed, secured space of the dwelling centered on the hearth, and Hermes, the open space of the country.17 Home is also part of a neighborhood.18 Since the family is not an independent entity but a component of a socially organized tribe and clan, a web of relationships spinning out of domus suggests a larger universe of social emplacement for home. In the context of ancient India, dama, vāstu, and gṛhya remain associated with home. The Sanskrit terms dam and dama, cognate with the Latin domus, imply being in a house or being homely.19 There is also the sense of taming or subduing, as found in damana and damaka, and hence the development of domestication.20 Three distinct notions—of
HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION57 constructing, taming, and making a social unit—adhere around the designations damana and damaka. Although dama as home/house did not retain currency in the Indian usage, the idea of taming, subduing, or basically domesticating did persist in such terms as damayati, damana, and dāmpati (master of the house). The sense of home as a social unit was reflected more cogently in the term gṛhya, with most of its significations unrelated to the cluster discussed above. “Dwelling” as a term parallel to the idea of home has received much interpretive attention in modern times. The term “to dwell” develops from an original sense of “to stun, to make giddy, to mislead” (in Skt. dhwr, “to mislead, to bend aside,” as in dhūrta; Anglo-Saxon dwellan, “to retard, to seduce,” or its causal dwelan, “to be torpid, dull”). It then shifts to the consequent meaning of “to delay, to retard” (in Old High German, twellan, “to retard, hinder, delay”) and hence “to linger” (Middle English dwellen, “to linger”). The key idea around lingering is to abide or dwell in a place.21 An essential condition for domus as well as for gṛhya is abiding and lingering in a place, thus affirming a strong notional relationship between “home” and “dwelling.” The term vāstu has persisted as an architectural and spatial concept, constituting the basis for a constructional and ritual discourse in the body of work known as the Vāstuśāstra, a set of texts consolidated in the tenth century. Vāstu denotes a “thing” (object) and includes, among other things, a building. According to the statesman and political philosopher Kautilya, writing in the third century BCE in his influential political text Arthaśāstra, there are four aspects of vāstu: building, seat, bridge, and conveyance.22 Although there lacks an explanation in the text of what ties these four disparate objects together to make a vāstu, one can speculate that each creates and constitutes a place conveyed by another spatial term, sthāna. Accordingly, a correspondence can be found between two terms that still describe architecture: vāstuṣilpa and sthāpatyaṣilpa. How is an establishment, a stability in architectural terms, rendered by vāstu? An etymological query might untangle part of the puzzle. The origin of vāstu is vas, literally, “to be,” with an earlier root meaning “to burn.” In other words, to burn is to be. Consequently, a psychoexistential analysis both in its phenomenal and ritual senses places fire at the center of Vedic life. In brief, fire constitutes a fundamental reference to existence in the archaic lifeworld. The Vedic definition of homelike stability connoting the production and maintenance of sacrificial fire—similar to the presence of Hestia for the Greek household and Vesta for the Roman home—represents the circulation of an archaic pan–Indo-European idea of begetting something (vāstu) from the hearth of home. The god or goddess who presided over that domestic fire is a representational figure who guarantees per-
58THE HERMIT’S HUT petuation and continuation of the family. Gṛhya and vāstu may be completely unrelated terms, but they convey the same ideology of family as a stable social unit, the spatial center or, literally, the focus of which is the sacred hearth. It will not be surprising to find that the nomenclature surrounding the idea and practice of dwelling in the ascetic rescripting of home will steer away from gṛhya and vāstu and develop different terminologies. Ascetic ideology will eventually militate against the whole notion of gṛhya, with the result of adopting the terms kuṭī and viharā as alternatives suggesting a more physical construct without meanings inherent to dama, vāstu, or gṛhya. A HERMENEUTICS OF GṚHYA Gṛhya is the most widely used term for home in Vedic literature.23 Subsuming a sense of the physical materiality of a house as well as indicating a sense of encirclement from its original root of “fencing off,” gṛhya nonetheless refers more pronouncedly to a family or household, a kin structure, or a socioeconomic unit, similar to the Latin domus. In the semantic world of gṛhya understood as a socioeconomic household unit, it is not surprising that gṛhyapati (or gahapati)—“lord of the house”— serves as a powerful theme providing a complex but fluctuating presence in Vedic history.24 Home begins after the sacred hearth fire has been established. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa states that “one is settled [avāsyati] when one has built a gārhapatya, and all those who build the fire altar are established.”25 The gārhapatya, eventually becoming a synonym for the Vedic home, is the immutable fire burning at the gravitational center of the home. In the Vedic home, there are a number of sacrificial fires that are established, all of which form the core of Śrauta literature, texts dealing with sacrificial codes and rituals. The principal fire, established inside the home space, is called the śāla- or gṛhyagni, literally, the “fire of the home,” used for gṛhya yājña, the domestic sacrifice. Gṛhyagni is a sacred fire, distinct from both the pacanagni, the ordinary cooking fire of the house, and the laukika, any other worldly fire. The activities around the gṛhyagni constitute the substance of the Gṛhya Sūtra literature (fig. 2.9). The two sutras Gṛhya and Śrauta, compiled between 800 BCE and 300 BCE, constitute a catalog of the enormous repertoire of Vedic (sacrificial) rituals and codes. The Śrauta Sūtra sacrifices are sometimes called the public or solemn sacrifices, carrying an explicit collective or communal character involving offerings to divinities and ancestors, whereas the Gṛhya Sūtra rituals, as the name indicates, relate specifically to marking events and ceremonies specifically within the domestic realm. Although
HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION59 meant for different purposes and operating in distinct contexts, the Śrauta and Gṛhya sacrifices maintain a complementariness, forming together what Brian K. Smith has called, after a Vedic text, a “unity of ritual” (kalpaikatva). Their interdependence is characterized in many ways. While the Gṛhya rituals focus on home and family, initiation rites and marriage ceremonies were also considered prerequisites for performing Śrauta sacrifices. It should be noted, too, that the materials of the Gṛhya Sūtra are considered more indigenous than the “Aryanic” Śrauta Sūtra materials, pointing to the archaic history of “home” management.26 The Saṃhitās and Gṛhya and Śrauta sutras help us piece together the morphological and material features of the house in Vedic times, and it appears that the Vedic house does not offer anything spectacular. The tectonic logic and language of such a house can be discerned from a pavilion structure in a painting from Ajaṇṭā (fig. 2.10). As Louis Renou noted about the structure, “We are in the presence of a type of house that is extremely rudimentary, composed of an armature of posts, connected at the summit by transverse beams onto which a thatched covering is attached. The walls are woven mats.”27 Home is, however, more than a tectonic artifact, and not because the material home (house) appears as a rudimentary structure in Vedic descriptions. Home (gṛhya) in the Vedic world is socially ordered, socioeconomically structured, and ritually constructed. The notion of gṛhya inscribes an entire milieu of activities and rituals through which the sacrificial fire altar occupies the life focus of the home. 2.9 Scene of a Hindu marriage around a sacred fire in a building with a dome and chhatris, from a manuscript of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, Rajasthan, ca. sixteenth century (© The Trustees of the British Museum, London).
60THE HERMIT’S HUT An understanding of the ritual structure of home can be gathered from various hymns and sutras in the Vedic textual corpus. Although the Gṛhya and Śrauta sutras are slightly later ritual codifications of what had been sung in ancient hymns, they contain long-established ideas. These sutras are concerned primarily with the well-being and continuity of the household, or family, and provide a window onto ritual performances through architecture. The Śrauta Sūtra fires are constituted by the gārhapatyagni, the ahavaniya, and the daksinagni. “The smārta gṛhyagni and the srauta garhapatyagni were established,” as Suvira Jaiswal has noted, “in the same manner and were maintained only by a householder whose wife was still living; and these could not be established or maintained by an unmarried person or widower. But, whereas the smārta gṛhyagni was established to meet the religious needs of an individual householder in the second stage of life, that is grahasta, the srauta gārhapatyagni, being the fire of grhapati, had a very different concern. It was meant to secure the well-being, fertility and wealth of an extended kin-group.”28 The most well-known hymn found in the more archaic Atharvaveda Saṃhita is the “Salasuktām,” dedicated to the building of a house. It provides important information on the construction features and rituals of house building as well as symbolic themes of “security” and “abundance and prosperity.”29 With the declaration and intention, “At this very place, I construct my permanent house,” the householder endeavors to build a structure that by measure and construction (mānasya patnī) is conceived of as “a good shelter, comfortable and shining.”30 The house is supported on pillars topped by a big, thatched roof. Most important, the house stands “safe and secure overflowing with clarified butter” and filled with horses, cows, and grain, bringing riches and brave sons. The hymn also describes the sacred nature of construction by representing gods associated with fixing the sthunā, the central pillar of the house as a symbol of the glorified ver tical axis. The Gṛhya sutras continue the project of home and present a total package for home improvement and maintenance. The Gṛhya and Śrauta sutras, even if composed by different individuals, lay out a coordinated scheme for the domestic life of a Vedic man starting from his brahmacāri 2.10 Structure of a pavilion building, from a painting from Ajaṇṭā (drawing by Raphael Tran).
HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION61 life (tutelage) and moving on to marriage, the birth of a child, initiating the child’s religious tutelage—eventually inscribing a full circle of life.31 Devasvāmin, in commenting on the Āśvalāyana Gṛhya Sūtra (1.1.1), noted, “The Gṛhya rituals are those done with regard to the home. The word ‘home’ [gṛha] is used here in three senses: [rituals] concerning the wife, those concerning the domicile, and [rituals] concerning the station in life (āśrama) [i.e., householdership].”32 The primary invocation of the life of a householder comes with marriage; it is not surprising, then, that the cult of the domestic fire begins with that special moment, establishing marriage in a special place in gṛhya rituals.33 If the wedding is the official mark of starting a household, it is initiated both symbolically and ritually by establishing the sacred domestic fire. “The setting up of the fire,” as Oldenburg commented, “forms the necessary preliminary of all sacred acts; the regular time for it is the wedding, so that the fire used for the wedding acts accompanies the young couple to their home, and there forms the center of their household worship.”34 Home and house are clearly equated with securing a wife by the young Vedic man, participating in the marriage ceremony, and inaugurating the home fire. As the Gobila Gṛhya Sūtra states, “If they like, his wife may offer the morning and evening oblations over the domestic fire. For his wife is (as it were) his house, and that fire is the domestic fire.”35 Besides the fire, other offerings are required to be given to and on behalf of the house. In addition to matrimonial rituals, the named sutras describe other fire rituals and rites, from the daily and monthly to various special occasions, all key moments in the life of a Vedic man. These include such domestic affairs as rites related to agriculture, raising cattle, burial, and worship of the dead, rituals involving animal sacrifices, fulfillment of particular desires, and, most important, acts surrounding building, such as choosing a ground or the building act itself. The house-building rituals are telling. One ceremony (the Anvashṭakya) describes an elaborate set of acts and mantras with the declaration “He looks at his house with (the words): ‘Give us a house, O Fathers!’”36 While there are some pragmatic recommendations for choosing the site for a house (such as topography, geological condition, vegetation, etc.), there is clearly a requisite social exigency: “On such (ground) one who is desirous of fame or strength, should build his house with its door to the east. . . .”37 There is also a concern for material accumulation: “Stand here firmly, O house, rich in horses and cows, rich in delight; rich in sap, overflowing with milk be set up, for the sake of great happiness.”38 Mantras are dedicated even to architectural elements in the project for material satisfaction: “He fixes the beam of the roof on the posts with (the formula), ‘Rightly ascend the post, O beam, erect, shining, drive off the enemies.
62THE HERMIT’S HUT Give us treasures and valiant sons.’”39 The physical space of the house is also valorized, such as when one reenters the house after a journey or absence, with the following mantra: “House, do not fear, do not tremble; bringing strength we come back. Bringing strength, gaining wealth, wise I come back to the house, rejoicing in my mind.”40 Or, “To thee I turn for the sake of safety, of peace. The blissful one! The helpful one! Welfare! Welfare!”41 Apparent is the notion of the house as a gateway to the family’s material and general well-being. One text in the Atharvaveda Saṃhitā declares, “O fire divine, this is your regular abode, born out of which you shine forth. Knowing that, may you ascend to it. Therefore may you increase our riches.”42 The presence of agni (fire) is all-encompassing in these endless and elaborate rituals dictating every aspect of life and living; it represents both literal fire and the deified being who carries messages to other gods. Recalling and repeating an older ethos, the Gṛhya Sūtra declares such homilies around the deity Agni: “Agni is the lord of beings; may he protect me.”43 One mantra marks the role of Agni as messenger: “Thou, Agni, art quick. Being quick, appointed (by us) in our mind (as messenger), thou who art quick, carriest the offerings (to the gods).”44 Further evidence that fire is the focus for the married householder is indicated by the concern for relighting the fire if it is interrupted in any way. When such an occasion arises, the Hiraṅyakeśi Gṛhya Sūtra prescribes that “in an enclosed space, having raised (the surface), sprinkled it (with water), strewn it with sand, and covered it with Udumbara and Plaksha branches, he silently brings together the things belonging to (the sacrificer) according as he is able to get them, produces fire by attrition out of a sacrificially pure piece of wood, or gets a common fire, places it in a big vessel, sets it in a blaze, and puts (fuel) on it with the words, ‘Bhūh! Bhūvah! Sūvah! Om! Fixity!’”45 These textual excerpts affirm that the hearth was the center of the house and symbol of the family and its well-being in almost all Indo-European societies.46 Explaining the valorization of fire in Indo-European traditions, Fustel de Coulanges noted that the earliest practice revolved around the worship of the dead, the ancestors.47 The cult of sacrifice in these traditions only carried this wor ship further. Cremation is another tradition conducted through fire and sun cults; cremating a dead person is seen as “a transporting or even a transforming power, not only transporting the dead into the realm, but even transforming him into the nature of the sun.”48 Thus the primary sense of fire in Indo-European traditions is dual: it is sacred, and it also sanctifies. The hearth fire, accordingly, is not the fire of material culture that “warms and burns, that transforms bodies, melts metals, and becomes the powerful instrument of human history.”49 It is a special fire perceived as pure and magical.
HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION63 Around this supernatural and spectacular property of fire, the term gṛhya was constructed. Fire-altar-hearth describes a complex arc that includes the domestic and familial, the societal and communal, and the sacral realm, all leading to a very powerful equation in Vedic life of the gṛhya with the concept of the cosmos.50 In this way, the gṛhya can be seen as a kind of altar, and the building of an altar, as Mircea Eliade recounted, “is an imitation of creation, whereby chaos is turned to cosmos, chaos receives form, it becomes real.”51 The Vedic home, inaugurated by an altar and concentrated upon it is thereby real. The Vedic home is thus cosmos and, as Raimundo Panikkar pointed out, the main symbol of being-in-the-world.52 HOMELESSNESS AND THE CRITIQUE OF GṚHYA What it means for a Vedic man to be in the world is the maintenance and continuation of the ritual fire in order to uphold the moral, cosmic, and social orders, all of which is emblematized in the gṛhya. The Vedic house, however it is visualized and materially fabricated, is a condensation of the various requirements and attributes of gṛhya. It is precisely those enormous obligations that bound the Vedic man to the home project that the ascetics of the sixth century BCE revolted against. The century represents a full-fledged climax, of which the Buddha’s position is a heightened one, but a critique of gṛhya had been festering for a long time, some of which is already anticipated in the antiritualistic introspection of the late Vedic texts the Upaniṣads. We can assume that Siddhārtha must have not only witnessed some of the fire rituals but also participated in them when he was a member of his family and community in Kapilavāstu. When Siddhārtha left home in his great departure, he was not merely giving up on the sensual and pleasurable life at the palace; he, like many of his ascetic predecessors and contemporaries, was turning against the vast paraphernalia of gṛhya rituals that not only determined the life of a man but also subjugated him to an endless and mechanical chain of obligations. The outline of the Vedic gṛhya can serve to contextualize the ascetic discourse of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE and its basic critique of gṛhya and its rituals. One of the major reasons for the ascetic movement of that period is an increasing antipathy, if not hostility, toward the codes and rituals associated with maintaining that moral order and rigid prerequisites for a “higher” life as prescribed by priestly authority through the gṛhya-centered rituals. The gṛhya custom was at center stage in the religious universe since the institution of independent temples was not then the practice. The critique, already inaugurated in the Upaniṣads, reflects on the means of human salvation and questions whether that is
64THE HERMIT’S HUT not possible through more individual, meditative processes than the home-centered, priest-managed rituals. The Buddhistic expansion of that critique elaborated the idea that all suffering is implicated in (or generated by) the condition of gṛhya and its obligatory maintenance. The principal Buddhist tenet is articulated simply in the following way: familial and societal obligations lead to taṇhā (desire) and possibly nonfulfillment and thus dukkha (suffering). The whole ritual procedure around home, particularly surrounding birth, marriage, old age, and death, is a vineyard of suffering. Home is also double-edged: whereas home may represent well-being and stability, it also implies rootedness and bondage. The ascetic movement, by questioning these, calls for its destabilization. Although not all Indic renunciations go to the extreme of nullifying home, most practices articulate new positions that involve radical alteration of gṛhya-centered rituals, especially those concerning the domestic ritual fire. While certain ascetics in fact relocate themselves from the village to the forest with their wives, sacred fire, and other domestic paraphernalia, the snuffing out of the ritual fire, that is, the total rejection of the sacrificial praxis, remains the ultimate goal of the ascetic project. The Brahmanic āśrama system differentiates between two kinds of practices based on a home reference: vanāvāsa suggests simply a relocation from the village space to the forest, carrying the implements of gṛhya (i.e., the sacrificial fire), whereas saṃnyās denotes a full rejection of all homely associations and obligations. The Buddhist ideology of pabbaja parallels the latter, inasmuch as the Buddha adopted a path of total renunciation. The modified nature of home when certain ascetics bring the domestic fire into the forest after their renunciation of the physical home is not enough. On his first day in a Brahmanical āśrama, Siddhārtha witnessed sacrificial fires blazing and rituals conducted around them, which to him seemed like extending the misfortunes of home in a forest space.53 Siddhārtha departed that āśrama since it would not bring for him the final cessation. The āśrama, no matter how hallowed it seemed, was still bound by the fetters of home and was established for attaining heaven at best, which was not what Siddhārtha desired. By fully rejecting domestic mores, the ascetics clearly mark their position outside the circle of mainstream Vedic society. While within their conceptual universe the ascetics are predisposed toward the highest human attainment (of immortality), from the perspective of the mainstream, the ascetics have joined the company of the demonic āsuras; they have become the “other” since they no longer possess sacrifice and are ungodly.54 Whether it is a full-fledged denial or not, the relationship of the ascetic-renouncer with mainstream society appears to be a contrary one; in some cases, it may seem quite adversarial and in others as mediatory. It is clear from the life of the Buddha, from the two narratives de-
HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION65 scribed in this chapter, that Siddhārtha had already become restless with the domestic setting much before the decision to leave home. No amount of cajoling or coercing from his father or his emissary, or even his wife, could contain him in that sphere. In response to his friend Udayin’s entreaty of love as the highest good and social commitment, Siddhārtha admits that sense objects are the nature of the world, but since they are transient in nature, his “mind does not delight in them.”55 Siddhārtha’s growing aversion to the status of home begins with his realization of the transitory nature of the various affects and enticements of home. In reply to his father’s reminder that the first obligation of a (Vedic) householder is to dharma duties prescribed in scriptures, not wandering off into the forest without first fulfilling the household duties, Siddhārtha adamantly declares that it is far less improper to “stop someone wishing to leave a house that is burning with fire.”56 To Śuddhodana’s emissaries who follow the wayward prince to the forest to remind him of his dharma (household) duties before entering the forest, Siddhārtha replies resolutely that he has reached the forest with a firm conviction that the net of relations and home have been cut: “I am free, and don’t wish there to enter again.”57 A priest in the group reminds Siddhārtha that a Vedic man is born with three debts—to forefathers, sages, and gods—and that he is freed from the debts by his offspring, study, and sacrifices; progression through this system leads to the liberation of a Vedic man. They also remind Siddhārtha that it is not impossible to return home after one has left since there is ample precedence of kings and forefathers—they also cite the example of Rāma—who have gone off to the forest and returned home. Siddhārtha is firm, he will not turn to home as an ignorant man with “the truth not seen, and senses still in sense objects.”58 It is clear that Siddhārtha has conducted a close analysis of home in all its dimensions—the relational, religious, ritual, and sensual—none of which assures him of an enduring efficacy. The series of questions around the seduction of home would culminate in the great departure and the beginning of homelessness. In ascetic discourse, homelessness is the second important notion paired with home. As an obvious antithesis to the meanings of home, homelessness opens up a wide body of thoughts and practices in asceticism. In Buddhist terminologies, the antithesis is codified in the well-regarded concept pabbaja (Skt. prabajya), which literally means going from “home to homelessness” (agarāsamā anagāriyaṃ pabbaja), making homelessness synonymous with the ascetic-monastic life.59 The ascetic is also described as an anāgārika, “one without home.”60 There is a literal, conceptual, and ideological usage of the sense of homelessness as implied in pabbaja, from its similarity to many Brahmanical and other ascetic practices to its restructuring in Buddhism to mean “joining the saṇgha,” the cenobitic monastic order.
66THE HERMIT’S HUT The literal form of ascetic homelessness is wandering or peregrination, a peripatetic life of moving from place to place, something that is conveyed in the Sanskrit term parivrājaka (literally, a tourist-wanderer). In actuality, the ascetic life involves a combination of wandering and halting (delaying or dwelling), which is a meditative and contemplative occupation as well as a wandering and alms-receiving activity. The spatiality of asceticism translates as a chain of stasis and movement, captured best by the seventeenth-century Zen poet Matsuo Bashō as not so much traveling as just stopping here and there. The spatiality of home, on the other hand, is one of the concentricities radiating from the fire focus. For the ascetic, the movement between two points is as important as those static points, or it becomes so from the initial euphoria of the change from perpetual movement to a reconfiguration of stasis. Even in a condition of stasis, no site is really occupied, colonized, or inhabited in the sense of gṛhya. Buddhist monasticism arose from the initial “agreement” for a saṇgha following the Buddha’s sermon in the Deer Park and the establishment of the vassa-āvāsas (rain retreats) because of the pragmatic reason of postponing wandering and alms receiving during the rainy seasons. It is this static moment that led to the development of “proper” ascetic dwellings—the monasteries. Why go homeless? What is its benefit? The state of homelessness is conceived not only as an antithetical position to home but also as one with its own ontology. The conceptual and ideological significance of Buddhist homelessness is delineated in the “Samaññaphala Sutta” of the Dīgha Nikāya. The well-known sutra goes beyond a mere critique of gṛhya and lays out the goals and fruits of homelessness: “Supreme goal of the Brahma-faring for the sake of which young men of family rightly go forth from home to homelessness.”61 It is here the Buddha cites a fundamental difference in attainment of the householder and that of the ascetic. The householder life, concludes the Buddha, “is close and dusty, the homeless life is free as air. It is not easy, living the household life, to live the fully-perfected holy life, purified and polished like a conch shell.”62 The ascetic aspirant undergoes a series of disciplined exercises that lead him to a higher moral plane (“thus he is perfected in morality,” according to the Dīgha Nikāya) to becoming a “guardian of the sensedoors” and accomplished in mindfulness and clear awareness. The ascetic is contented, for he is like a bird that flies “hither and thither, burdened by nothing but its wings.”63 But the biggest promise of homelessness culminates in the ability of the perfected ascetic, after the initial rounds of practices, to see his former births, which is another way of describing the acquiring of a higher consciousness. The homeless life of the ascetic is a disciplined and laborious one that takes him sequentially from one potentiality to another, something obviously denied to the
HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION67 householder. The different meditative states and strivings of the Buddhist ascetic take him from the initial “delight and joy from detachment” to mental purity and clarification. The ascetic slowly draws out a new body (a mind-made body), even attains what are described as supernatural powers,64 and gains the ultimate knowledge of previous existences,65 which amounts to the final moment of cessation of rebirth. “Birth is finished, the holy life has been led, done is what had to be done, there is nothing further here,” so the perfected ascetic declares.66 If the “Salasuktām” is considered a paradigm of Vedic life, it can be compared and contrasted with the (Buddhist) ascetic counterproposal in the “Samaññaphala Sutta.” Where the former makes an entreaty for perpetuating the samsaric life, the latter, by describing pabbaja as being not just an empty denial of gṛhysṭa, elaborates on the ultimate merit of the homeless existence: gaining a new body and, at the same time, one that will be the last body ever. RELOCATION: THE ĀVĀSA AND ĀRĀMA The “Samaññaphala Sutta” indicates what an adequate dwelling space is during the homeless life when the ascetic has acquired restrained senses and desires. The ascetic is now contented, the sutra lists, in a solitary lodging, at the root of a forest tree, in a mountain cave or gorge, a charnel ground, a jungle thicket, or in the open air on a heap of straw.67 The Vinayapiṭaka states this in a more declaratory way: “In the matter of housing, the śramaṇa’s life is based on dwelling at the foot of a tree. Thus you must endeavor to live all your life. Cells, houses, mansions, and huts are extras.”68 The designated spaces seem adequate for the main activity of the ascetic sitting erect and cross-legged in meditation after the usual rounds of walking and alms receiving. Reduced to alms-gathering walks and rest for meditation, the ascetic’s life is already an acknowledgment of the existential facticity of a static space. Ensuing events in Buddhist narratives reveal an ever-expanding significance of the basic nature of habitation. It is not verifiable how much time the Buddha spent sitting on a tuft of grass, but the facts indicate a move toward a more congenial space right after his first sermon at the beginning of his wandering life, surrounded by his expanding community of followers. But there were other enlightened figures within the nascent system who maintained a strong individualism by opting to stay as recluses in a solitary space and carry on meditational practices with an unmediated determination.69 Such an ascetic in the Buddhist system, the paccekabuddha, summoned his ascetic powers living in isolation from any sort of community. This conforms to the dhutaṇga form of asceticism allowed in early Buddhism, something distinct from the
68THE HERMIT’S HUT obligations of the collective order of monasticism. It is clear from the dhutaṇga practice that the paccekabuddha’s term of engagement is a spatial one. Buddhaghosa, writing in the fifth century CE, lists thirteen dhutaṇga practices conducive to the pursuit of virtue (Buddhaghosa’s book is called, after all, Visuddhimagga, or The Path of Purification).70 One such practice is living under a tree, that is, without a roof, a practice the ascetic begins by declaring: “I refuse a roof.” Such a declaration reflects the ideas of the Vinaya texts and the Buddha’s recommendation of living at the root of a tree since it is “valueless, easy to get, and blameless.”71 Living under a tree is beneficial, according to Buddhaghosa, because one becomes aware of impermanence by seeing the continual alteration of young leaves, dwelling in the company of deities, living with few wishes and desires, and not encountering the avarice associated with abodes and buildings. Buddhaghosa also lists three classes of dwelling under a tree, from the strictest in which the ascetic does not clean up the area of fallen leaves (he is, however, permitted to move the leaves with his feet), to the milder, according to which the ascetic can have the space tidied up by passers-by. The mildest category allows the practitioner to have the area cleaned up by monastery novices and also have them “level it, strew sand and make a fence round with a gate fixed in it.” The practice does allow the ascetic to move to a place other than a tree on a special day, however, the dhutaṇga vow is broken if the ascetic resides under a roof or knowingly meets the dawn under a roof.72 The dhutaṇga practices indicate a move from an unmediated condition to some sort of spatial definition. The ideal of living without a roof at the base of a tree goes to the origin of the renunciatory ideal, to the question of where and in what kind of environmental and social conditions a Buddhistic aspirant may pursue his goal, whether by him self in isolation or in the company of fellow seekers. The dhutaṇga practices reveal a form of stasis outside the official categories of monastic dwellings. As has been noted, the early years of the Buddha saw a small group of śramaṇas with him forming a crude community, the first saṇgha after the Deer Park sermon. It is interesting to see how a wandering sect gradually transformed itself into a settled group. The transition from an itinerant to a settled life took place gradually but was certainly established as early as the fourth century BCE.73 Many individuals continued the practice of wandering, but probably by the first century after the Buddha, most monks were not living a fully peripatetic life but a residential one. Such a spatial dwelling was the true beginning of monasticism, or what Sukumar Dutt has described as a life of stasis,74 leading,
HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION69 first, to the independence of the saṇgha organization from the wandering sect, and, second, to the establishment of a collectivity. In the Vinayapiṭaka texts, the core of Buddhism, the saṇgha does not appear as a group of wanderers but as “a settled cenobitical society.”75 The texts do, however, contain some of the tension between these two archetypal orientations. It was during one of the wandering phases in the Buddha’s time that he is said to have urged that a parivrājaka (wanderer) must suspend wandering and remain in retreat during the season of rains. There are dramatic versions of this shift in the texts: the Mahāvagga devotes a whole section to the rains and the taking up of retreats at that time. One recurring reason is the chastising by laypeople. They not only point out how the ascetics are going about everywhere and living in substandard conditions but also offer proper dwellings for the monks. When the matter is brought up to the Buddha, he allows new dwellings for his monks.76 The rainy season in northern India occupies roughly three months, beginning around the middle of June. The rule for most ascetics was to take up vassa (rain) residence on the day after the full moon of Asālha (mid-June) or a month later and continue it for the following three months.77 The Buddhists called this retreat vassa-āvāsa (rain residence), and the Jaina ascetics called it pajjusana. The Buddhist wanderers were distinct from their Jaina and Brahmanical counterparts in that they developed specific regulations regarding living together during the rain residence. Two kinds of retreat of a more permanent sort gradually came into existence out of the experience of rain residence: the āvāsa in the countryside or in some form of wilderness that was staked out, built, and maintained by the monks themselves (similar to the āśrama of the Brahmanical ascetics)78 (fig. 1.6), and the ārāma, in or near a town or city created as a private enclosure and looked after by a donor (fig. 3.4). The gathering of a group of monks at the rain retreats led to the formation of more proper monastic and collective settings. The practical contingency of living together temporarily led to a more settled congregation and eventually the organization of a established community. One could say that the rain retreats had a huge impact on rescripting the world of the Buddhist monk as they defined a settled as opposed to wandering life as well as the need for organized dwellings. It cannot be answered with certainty whether the first āvāsa shelters were natural caves or crude structures in the countryside, or derelict sites, since evidence of the latter does not exist. The carved caves in Ajaṇṭā give credence to cave dwellings that may have started off with natural caves and ended up as elaborate rock-cut spaces (fig. 2.11). Both āvāsas and ārāmas were used nominally for the three-month
70THE HERMIT’S HUT monsoon period, but they tended to become establishments of a semipermanent character. The custom of coming to the same āvāsa resulted in the formation of a congregation, or a protocommunity, and practicing certain common activities. The collective rituals of reciting the pātimokkha (monastic guidelines), the pavarana (atonement for any offense or infraction), and participating in the kathina (robe-giving ceremony) were an outcome of collective living. This is also what distinguished the Buddhist monks from other Indic wanderers. As a superior kind of habitat to the āvāsa, the ārāma was, as Sukumar Dutt has noted, durable, permanent, and well attended to by donor and dweller.79 Most of the Buddha’s dwellings were in one ārāma or another. Ārāma denotes an established pleasure ground, usually a property in a city or adjacent area belonging to a well-to-do citizen and laid out as an orchard or flower garden that has then been converted into a monastic retreat. After a garden was renamed a saṇghārāma, it shook off the implications of a pleasure garden to suggest a precinct occupied by a group of monks.80 While the term ārāma has an ancient usage, it came to be known following its Buddhist appropriation as a “wooded enclosure of peace” where monks stay under trees.81 This, according to Gustav Roth, may be the earliest reference to Buddhist monastic dwellings understood as a retreat of peaceful seclusion, although these dwellings were still far from the designed layout of buildings in a monastery.82 The notion of ārāma as a place of peaceful joy for contemplative purposes was used by other groups at that time, including the Brahmanic group. This designation also occurred prior to its adoption by the Buddha (although in the Brahmanic epic literature, such as the Mahābhārata, words like āranya, udāyana, and vana are more frequent than ārāma).83 The Buddha used the term ārāma in a similar context. It is important to note the distinction between udāyana (pleasure garden) and ārāma and the ritualized process of converting a pleasure garden typically owned by royalty or someone of the wealthy class into a contemplative place. The process became a prerequisite for establishing a site for the dwellings 2.11 Vihāras as cave monastic dwel lings, Cave 12, Ajaṇṭā, second to third centuries (Fergusson and Burgess, Cave Temples of India, plate 27).
HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION71 of ascetics and monks. The famous location of Jetavana is an example of the conversion of an udāyana to an ārāma. Aśvaghoṣa described the process of conversion of udāyana (“a garden of worldly pleasures”) to an ārāma (“a place of mental peace and seclusion”) as a permanent transfer of land that was carried out by the simple ritual of pouring water over the hands of a Buddhist elder by the owner of the property. The gift of Venuvana by King Bimbisāra (558–491 BCE) has been identified as the earliest recorded occasion of ritually creating an ārāma.84 Both āvāsas and ārāmas had defined sīma (boundaries) within which were located huts as the monks’ dwellings. The original term for such a hut was viharā; only later did the term come to denote the whole monastic compound. A viharā could be occupied by a single monk or small group of monks; in the latter case, the allotted portion for each monk was called a parivena.85 Sīma is an important notion since it involved locating and delimiting a site for creating an āvāsa or ārāma.86 When King Bimbisāra asked the Buddha where he would like to stay, the latter replied: “Neither too far from the village, nor too near, suitable for coming and going, not crowded by day, having little noise at night, quiet, without peoples’ wind, for to lie undisturbed by men, suitable for meditation in solitude.”87 It was upon hearing the Buddha’s directions that Bimbisāra decided that the bamboo grove of his royal garden would be suitable for such a place. In response to Bimbisāra’s gift, the Buddha stated to his monks, “I give authority, monks, to a wooded enclosure of peace (anujānāmi bhikkhave ārāmam ti).”88 Though early āvāsas were not articulated with a sīma since they were not yet independent units of monastic activity, the practice of sīma eventually came to mark the physical boundaries of the ekāvāsa (coresidence) of a saṇgha within which collective activities were performed.89 The marking of such boundaries also lent a distinctiveness and identity to each residential group, opening a path to the development of proper monasteries. THE PARADOX OF DWELLING Home, as far as the phenomenon of fire is concerned, is a situated condition. Even if defined by abstract or conceptual factors, whether in an economic or a ritual sense, home requires a territorial location and geographical rootedness, where the constructed house is its most visible locus. Ascetic renunciation, of almost all varieties, aspires toward sitelessness, a deliberate denial of place and territory. What is set up as an opposition to home is either a literal or conceptual homelessness. Ascetic homelessness implies a peripatetic existence where the planned de-mooring becomes synonymous with the giving up of a habitual life around a centered
72THE HERMIT’S HUT space along with its psychoemotional investment. Asceticism in its fundamental sense represents an opposition between stasis and mobility, invoking Vernant’s image of Hermes and Hestia on the Parthenon. This bipolar flux is not so much an ascetic monopoly as a fundamental existential dilemma around the two human archetypes of the settler and the nomad. The ascetics, however, play out this dilemma in its most poignant and spectacular, not to mention paradoxical, way. It appears that the hermit’s dwelling or the ascetic’s hut is neither a home nor a place. In the matter of articulating the nature of dwelling and redefining the constituency of home, an irreconcilable panorama appears on the ascetic horizon. A paradox is revealed: home, as much as it is the target of ascetic critique and the singular point of departure of the ascetic movement, is hard to relinquish. It appears and reappears in readjusted, reformed, and recalibrated configurations; the fate of asceticism seems to be steered by the very definition of home. This conflicted entanglement is brought up in more than one way in Buddhist narratives and practices. At his climactic ascetic moment, Siddhārtha—the about-to-be Buddha—positions himself in a seated yogic posture under the shelter of a fig tree. At one point in the meditation, in the mythopoeic description, a big storm arises, keeping the skies overcast and the weather rainy and cold for seven days. The environmental turbulence is certainly a test for the meditating Siddhārtha. The serpent-king Mucalinda emerges to encircle Siddhārtha’s body with its coils and spreads its great hood over his head: “Let no cold annoy the Lord, let no heat annoy the Lord, let not the touch of flies, mosquitoes, wind and heat or creeping things annoy the Lord”90 (figs. 2.12 and 2.13). The question of dwelling is already inscribed in that fabulous narrative of the Buddha’s enlightenment, forecasting how the idea of dwelling would come to have a crucial role in ascetic practices. Even if the sheltering serpent is a fable, and parts of the narrative of the great enlightenment were added much later for popular consumption, its mention nonetheless reveals the necessity of shelter in ascetic practice and affirms the nissayas (requisites for a monk) for a proper functioning of an ascetic. The hood of the fabulous serpent-king Mucalinda sheltering the Buddha at the critical time of his enlightenment is no mere mythological 2.12 The Buddha sheltered by the nagā king, Cambodia, seventh century (The Huntington Archive, The Ohio State University, Columbus).
HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION73 story; it is a surreptitious reference to dwelling. A relatively unremarkable fragment from a capital from Gandhāra shows an acanthus leaf gently drooping over a meditating Buddha; it’s actually a delightful and telling image of that contingent relationship (fig. 2.14). The notion of dwelling or shelter raises numerous ambivalences. The nissayas are evidence of the duality of renunciation, which is most acutely experienced with dwellings. While the matter of denial and elaboration of dwelling is clearly ambivalent, it is not contradictory. What takes place is a subtle rearrangement between a secluded, solitary, and minimal life and communal and organized living; the rearrangement also positions monastic ideology in a favorable way with the laity.91 The Buddha’s wife, Yasodharā, and son, Rāhula, nun and monk as they may be after their conversion, take up residence when they can at the ārāma where the Buddha is present. They create a kind of surrogate home, thus reproducing the older Brahmanic model of a vanavāsi family but without the fire. The Cullavagga text on the gradual elaboration of a dwelling refines, or, to be fair to a Buddhist ideology, especially if this was sanctioned by the Buddha himself, rearranges the ascetic space in the image or requirements of home. Epigraphic records showing monks who began without a possession but were granted the personal acquisition of a space following donations by laypeople give a legal definition of such personal space.92 The notion of ownership is immediately tied to the marking of an area; sīma indicated that at the larger scale of the community. Both practices complicate the ideal notion of an ascetic-renouncer as a siteless being. At the institutional level, the recognition of the arahan, the accomplished asceticteacher, as chief as the monastic saṇgha was being organized came to resemble the patriarchal, domestic nature of the gāhapati, the lord of the household. The Buddha’s return to his native place, both for a short visit and then to pass away, indicates that asceticism in its radical concept as total denial is more complex than it appears, for it makes sense only in a dialogical interplay with the locus of departure or with the place where it all started, home. And that is why the Buddha, who prescribed a middle path, as well as other extreme ascetics, needed the erstwhile rejected space—the village and the town—where the ascetic practices could not only be sustained but also be expressed. Rejection is one thing; rejection not noticed is another. One aspect of the ascetic praxis is its demonstrative compulsion. 2.13 The Buddha sheltered by the nagā king, Cambodia, twelfth century (Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis).
74THE HERMIT’S HUT The Cullavagga text helps in reconstructing the Buddha’s gradual turn toward the paraphernalia of home from a previous declaration of living under a tree or on a tuft of grass as the most efficacious way of monkhood. The sixth chapter is quite revelatory for a turn toward an architecture of elaboration. It describes monks’ dwellings as distinguished from the Buddha’s hut and describes construction, technical, and functional issues. The text, in its pragmatic descriptions, also reveals the basic ascetic ambivalence between building and not building and between the elaborate and the minimal. There are other nar ratives that illustrate the quandary faced by early ascetics when they were chastised by laypeople for living in primitive conditions (e.g., at the root of a tree, in a cave, a cemetery, or wandering around) and offered proper dwellings. Thus came the āvāsas and ārāmas into being in the first place. It was during one of those dilemmas of choice when a merchant in Rājagaha offered to build houses for the monks that the Buddha agreed to five dwellings: “I allow, monks, five (kinds of) abodes: a dwelling-place, a curved house (aḍḍhayoga), a long house (pāsāda), a mansion (hammiya), a cave (guhā).”93 After the merchant in Rājagaha has built sixty dwellings in one day alone, the Buddha thanks him in the following way: They [dwellings] ward off cold and heat and beasts of prey from there And creeping things and gnats and rains in the wet season. When the dreaded hot wind rises, that is warded off. To meditate and obtain insight in a refuge and at ease :– A dwelling-place is praised by the Awakened One as chief gift to an Order. Therefore a wise man, looking to his own weal, Should have charming dwelling-places built so that those Who have heard much can stay therein. To these food and drink, raiment and lodgings He should give to the upright, with mind purified. (Then) these teach him dhamma dispelling every ill; He, knowing that dhamma, here attains nibbana, cankerless.94 2.14 The Buddha protected by an acanthus leaf, Gandhāra (© The Trustees of the British Museum, London).
HOME IN THE ASCETIC IMAGINATION75 While this is another confirmation of the Buddha’s acknowledgment of the need for dwelling for ascetic purposes, it is after this moment that the narration in the chapter becomes more notable. The Buddha might have given a general description of an ascetic architecture befitting a monk, but the monks realize that it is not enough and petition the Buddha for a more upgraded and proper habitation. It begins with the śramaṇas pointing out to the Buddha one inadequacy after another of the building (in the standard narrative they were pointed out again in a form of chastisement by the laypeople), beginning with a lack of doors to doorposts and lintels. The list continues and includes a post for a bolt, “a hole for pulling through the cord,” a pin to secure the bolt, a keyhole and three kinds of keys, windows and three kinds of railings, adding a verandah, furniture (a bed of grass matting upgraded to a solid bench, a long couch, chairs with slats, etc.), and such things as draperies, shutters, and even little bolsters across the windows so that squirrels could not get in. It did not end there. There were considerably detailed issues about maintaining a quality wall, how to have whitewash adhere to the wall, how to stop the floor from becoming damp, what materials to use for the roof (tiles, stones, plaster, grass, or leaves), and various techniques that could be described as relating to building finishes. The Buddha also had to respond to questions about the management of the buildings, of maintaining and keeping them clean. The chapter is a veritable compendium of building features and construction details, what can be described in modern construction terms as architectural specifications. Ambivalence regarding dwellings is discussed in other texts. In one section of the Milindapañha called “The Dilemmas (V),”95 which highlights the perplexities of the Buddha’s teachings, Milinda (Menander) points out to Nāgasena that the Buddha seems to be promoting two contradictory positions on the dwelling, one in favor of a house and the other renouncing it. Regarding the favoring of a house, Milinda cites the Buddha’s statement that an ascetic “should have charming dwellingplaces built and lodge those who have heard much therein.”96 In connection with renouncing a house, Milinda refers to the Buddha’s words that “fear springs from fellowship (intimacy), dust is born of a house.” The goal of a sage is to be “houseless and independent (unintimate).”97 Nāgasena explains that the urge to renounce the house is directed particularly to the monks, who can reflect on the forest deer that “roaming about in a forest or a wood, lies down to sleep wherever it likes, having no abode, and no home. . . .”98 The house was favored because the gift of dwelling places by laypeople is considered to garner merit. Houses are also desirable for bhikkhunis (nuns), who can learn from senior monks in a convenient environment. There was, however, a worry that living in such accommodations might generate a desire for home.99
76THE HERMIT’S HUT On a pragmatic level, the fundamental issue is to build or not to build. A practical shelter is needed for ascetic efficiency, as the use of dwellings by the Buddha after his enlightenment attests, or even as the fabulous story of the serpent-king Mucalinda illustrates. The quandary over building or not building reflects the tension between settledness and wandering. The creation of the rain retreats as proper dwellings for the monks during the monsoon testifies to a partial resolution of that tension. The dilemma is echoed in the Buddha’s ambivalent statements, exhorting against building and dwelling on the one hand and approving huts and lodgings on the other. The Cullavagga text demonstrates another level of ambivalence—between a minimal structure and an elaborate dwelling. At an ideational level, the project of renunciation is seen to be substantiated or completed with the abandonment of home conceived as an emblem of being-in-the-world. But the hermit-ascetic continues to adopt some kind of dwelling beyond the renunciation of the normative home. One might assume that the need for dwelling would disappear after the event of the Buddha’s glorious enlightenment. The question of dwelling persists even after the momentous event, however. The normative dwelling represents saṃsāra, that is, being and rooted in the world, whereas the ascetic’s dwelling seems to propose two things at the same time: it refers to a generic hut and at that same time an overcoming of it. As much as it is portrayed as a villainous protagonist in the ascetic theater, the state of home determines the fate of ascetic ideology. Even the ascetic-renouncer’s dramatic departure from the city—the larger site of home conditions—is eventually modulated by his ultimate return or traversal of the city. The Buddha spent more years in the cities of Rāja gaha and Sāvatthī (Srāvastī) than anywhere else. The towns provided the ascetics with an audience, patronage, and possible new recruits. The ascetic’s return to the city is seen first in the building of retreats at the edge of town, or not too far away from the city; many of the monasteries grew along travel routes as an outcome of socioeconomic exchange with the patronizing class and of the need for recruiting new monastic candidates.100 Renunciation and asceticism thus seem to be caught in a web of disengagement and mediation. What is then seen as a paradox of ascetic dwelling is perhaps best described as an osmosis rather than an antagonism between two parallel systems or, as Romila Thapar has noted, a “dialectical interconnection between the ascetic and householder.”101
77 CHAPTER 3 The Buddha’s House Home, the point of departure of the ascetic project, has both a central and ambivalent role in ascetic ideology. While the avowed declaration of the ascetic is to renounce home and all social and ritual trappings associated with it, home finds its way surreptitiously into the heart of ascetic discourse. Home thoughts, or its surrogates, articulate the regulations of early monasticism, structure the practices of renunciation, and inflect concepts of ascetic individuation and community. The question of shelter, rather than being a pragmatic matter, becomes an ontological and existential theme in ascetic discourse. Architecture, as much it seems a counterthesis to asceticism, remains the very ground for the construction of ascetic ideology. If an ascetic exegesis is to be sought in architecture, the Buddha’s house provides its most resourceful ground. Even though there is neither a single clear image of the house nor a precise, unified description in Buddhist traditions, the profile of the house exerts a tremendous influence on pragmatic, didactic, and symbolic deliberations of Buddhism. Considering the position of the Buddha as the superascetic with every aspect of his life as exemplary, it will not be surprising to find his dwelling too taking up an exalted role. If the Buddha’s house acquires a larger than life status, it is not because of the house itself but because of the stature of the dweller of the house. In this chapter I draw an outline of that mesmerizing house. The house of the Buddha emerges from the facts of the life of the historical Buddha and the regard accorded him then and after as the perfected ascetic, or as he was described, the mahāsamana (archascetic) or mahāpuruṣa (superman). If Buddhism and its various practices are ascetic in nature, dwelling is a key locus within that, and the Buddha’s
78THE HERMIT’S HUT house is its paragon. The house is, however, an enigma; it does not exist per se. No single literary, archaeological, anthropological, or epigraphic account—the tools of reconstruction—can fully build up a profile of the house. The “Buddha’s house” refers to the wide range of architectural constructs and references made in the context of the Buddha’s habitation, from purely pragmatic ones to those that play more than domiciliary roles in the Buddhist universe.1 The Buddha’s house appears in manifold ways within the traditions, depending on the various schools that emerged after the First Council was held immediately after the passing away of the Buddha as well as the various accounts and concepts of the Buddha that developed soon after.2 These conversations do not concern themselves with the literal architecture of the house; rather, they employ the architectural structure for a deliberation on asceticism—on describing, explaining, and encoding the dimensions of renunciation. For this reason, the Buddha’s house acquires a kind of paradigmatic value. I mentioned in the introduction how the image of even an imaginary house becomes the focus of a sustained religious, sociological, and philosophical imagination,3 and how the reform of society is often sought in such a paradigmatic architecture.4 It seems there is a cultural propensity to assign reified properties to a certain architectural image that will charge the lives of people by forming expectations broader than prosaic architecture. The Buddha’s house becomes a significant site and subject for reflecting on the scope and limits of renunciation and on the constructive, ritual, and existential dimensions of asceticism. After all, the Buddha— Śākyamuni—was an archascetic whose life practice and teaching dealt with the critical relinquishment of home and the various reformations thereafter. Within Buddhist traditions, the house engenders diverse appearances, from practical considerations to didactic, metaphorical, and symbolic formations. There are descriptions, in both literary forms and visual representations, of the house that the Buddha dwelled in. The house also appears in various fabulous narratives where extraordinary or miraculous dimensions are described. The house is also a mirror of the ascetic body. There is extensive commentary in Buddhist ascetic thinking on the relationship between the ascetic body and the architectural figure, one that proceeds from the pragmatic aspect of the single ascetic in his singular cell to dimensional symbolism and spatial reciprocity. In the course of the renunciatory process, the final encounter takes place within the frame of the human body, which is visualized in many narratives as a dwelling, thus ushering an intimacy between two aspects of existence: building and body. The house is homologized with the ascetic’s body so that a metaphysical understanding of the suprahuman figure can be discovered in the architecture.
THE BUDDHA’S HOUSE79 THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE HOUSE Jetavana is a special place in the life of the historical Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama (543–483 BCE). The place was a garden retreat outside the city of Srāvastī (still an extant city in present-day Uttar Pradesh in northern India). Around the sixth century BCE, when the Buddha was roaming the Gangetic Plain, going from one city to another with his ardent project of transforming the self, he would station himself in a secluded area inside or just outside the city. The area could be an ārāma (garden) as part of the estate of a wealthy person, an established retreat, or section of a forested site. The making of Jetavana as an ārāma is an important landmark in Buddhist history; it involves how the lay disciple Anathapindika bought the original grove from Prince Jeta as the Buddha’s retreat by laying out 1.8 million gold pieces on the grounds. The Buddha stayed at Jetavana for a total of over twenty-five years on his numerous visits to Srāvastī (Savatthi). The site of Jetavana fares very significantly in Buddhist art and hagiography, where it is depicted with dwellings especially constructed for the Buddha (figs. 3.4 and 3.5).5 One can assume that prior to the dwellings at Jetavana, the Buddha lived in various architectural and protoarchitectural spaces. When the Buddha was about twenty-nine years old and known as Siddhārtha, a prince in the northern kingdom of Kapilavāstu (in modern Nepal), he abandoned his palatial home and left in the dead of the night for his now celebrated quest and eventual accomplishment under a tree in Gaya (present-day Bodh Gayā in Bihar). The story has been told and retold of the Buddha’s teachings and exemplary life combining self-abnegation, ascetic discipline, and contemplation, and finally a self-transformative illumination about the course of life (a phenomenon that came to be characterized as enlightenment). What remains rather elusive is how the Buddha lived and carried out his daily routine, first, in his life of wandering in the wilderness after renouncing his princely home and, second, in his life of postnirvanic traveling in more urban settings. It is critical to know, in the light of renunciation, how the great teacher and practitioner of denial dealt with the mundane but necessary aspects of dwelling after the moment of enlightenment. The Buddha, in an ideological move, may have repudiated the normative house as the prime symbol of domestic and social ensnarement that came to be designated as saṃsāra but did require and acquire some sort of dwelling even in his life as a great teacher. We know only spottily about the actual residence of the Buddha (the Jetavana structures being one case), of the various huts or pavilion-like structures he might have used in the gardens of cities that he visited in his itinerant life. Images start appearing in Buddhist literature and
3.1 Siddhārtha medi tating below the jambu tree, Gandhāra, second to third cen turies (© The Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena, CA).
THE BUDDHA’S HOUSE81 iconography from around the third to second centuries BCE, a few centuries after the Buddha’s own time. Prior to the existence of these designated dwellings and before his enlightenment, the Buddha encamped in more ambiguous conditions. The earliest dwelling of Siddhārtha, in his life of wandering in the forest in the preenlightenment phase, can be regarded as having been an elemental shelter. Buddhist texts written a few centuries after his passing away describe such a condition variously, as being under a tree (fig. 3.1), using a cushion of grass for a seat (fig. 3.2), or being in a cave (which we can reconstruct from the Buddha’s postenlightenment experience in the cave at Uruvelā) (fig. 3.3).6 It is obvious by now how such primitive conditions were integral to the renunciatory lifestyles of all kinds of hermits and ascetics going back to Vedic times.7 The 3.2 Grass cutter offers grass for a mat to Siddhārtha (left); Siddhārtha prepares to spread the grass (right); Pagan, ca. eleventh to thirteenth centuries (Gordon H. Luce, Old Burma–Early Pagán [Locust Valley, NY: Augustin, 1969]). 3.3 The Buddha in a cave at Uruvelā, Gandhāra, second to third centuries (Foucher, L’art grécobouddhique, fig. 246).
82THE HERMIT’S HUT ascetic movements of Buddhism and Jainism in the fifth century BCE considered these conditions in a more formalized and organized manner that came to constitute and define the ideology of renunciation. Among various dwelling spaces, the tree figures prominently in the early Buddhist universe. Although the cave and the tree are archetypal sites of ascetic practice, they have marked phenomenological and symbolic differences. It was actually the tree at Gaya that became the critical site and “structure” associated both in actuality and metaphorically (and soon metaphysically) with the climactic moment of awakening. It is not surprising that the tree became the prevalent sanctioned “dwelling” in Buddhist monastic literature and soon a multivalent motif in the representation and elaboration of the Buddha’s abode. The tree, as may be recalled, is central to the extreme dhutaṇga practices of Buddhist asceticism. Although the reified tree is a widespread and ancient phenomenon, it became a symbol par excellence in Buddhist symbolism and its ascetic practices. The tree is simultaneously the site of enlightenment and an emblem of Buddhist metaphysics (invoking such symbolic notions as the Cosmic Tree and the Tree of Wisdom).8 The tree is both an abode and a temple: it is both a symbol of the actual site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, and therefore a definite spatial location, and a visual leitmotif of the more abstract notion of yogic enlightenment (and, hence, the Tree of Wisdom). This valorization is best exemplified architecturally by the hypaethral temples referred to as bodhigharas. 9 The bodhighara, coming a little later after the Buddha but also imbued with pre-Buddhist significance, is basically a sacred tree associated with the Buddha around which was constructed an elaborate structure for carrying out rituals.10 The tree, as the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer remarked, is very much like a hut.11 The tree and the cave are not only natural dwellings, distinct from constructed artifacts, but also archaic sources of a vast metaphysical and mythological imagination. In ascetic conceptualization, there is reciprocal significance between the tree, the cave, and the hut. Some of that significance is derived from an earlier source such as the yakṣa imagery, which substantially influenced the development of the image of the hermit under a tree and contributed toward making a paradigm from that image. As an archaic being inhabiting trees or watery realms, the yakṣa is venerated as part of a devotional cult in almost all villages, a practice that predates Buddhism but that was co-opted into the Buddhist worldview.12 In any case, the abode of the yakṣa is an important feature: it is a tree, most often located in a forest. The yakṣa and the tree are virtually interchangeable;13 specific trees as abodes of the yakṣa often develop into a locus of adulatory activities, creating a ritual ensemble of tree,
THE BUDDHA’S HOUSE83 altar, seat, and enclosure.14 The arrangement would come to be known as a caitya.15 It is this ensemble that informs the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment to such an extent that the village girl Sujata mistakes the contemplative Siddhārtha for a yakṣa.16 There is a conflation here between the property of a dwelling (bhavanam, as the yakṣa abode was known) and an honorific locus (caitya). In both Buddhist and Jaina narratives, the yakṣa caityas are used as halting places or temporary abodes for itinerant monks.17 Stories abound of the Buddha taking brief residence under a yakṣa tree and resting on its altar slab or seat.18 Living under a tree came to be valorized in a special way in Buddhist ascetic thought.19 The Vinaya texts declare that the śramaṇa’s life should be based on dwelling at the foot of a tree, where “cells, houses, mansions, and huts are extras.”20 The Buddha on many occasions encouraged living under trees and in caves, pointing out its efficacy for ascetic purposes.21 In the Buddha’s postenlightenment wanderings, always with a retinue of followers, from city to city, teaching and discoursing, he would generally reside in a forested site near a city or in a large garden such as the one at Jetavana. Sometimes the garden or grove, often belonging to a wealthy patron sympathetic to the Buddha’s teachings, would be dedicated for the sole use of the Buddha; hence, the site was transformed from a pleasure garden to an retreat for hallowed, meditational purposes.22 The large site would also constitute a residence for the group of people accompanying the Buddha, including both elders and fresh initiates. These dwellings were not yet the systematized monastic establishments that emerged soon afterward and remain the preeminent evidence of Buddhist architecture. The huts at Jetavana are the most significant constructions for the residence of the Buddha. Depicted in reliefs at both Bhārhut and Sāñcī (both from around the third century BCE), which constitute the betterknown images, the huts are shown as refined constructions of thatch and possibly wattle and mud walls (figs. 3.4 and 3.5). Two form types are represented by the huts: one square or circular and the other oblong and vaulted. There are other depictions of the Buddha’s hut, from a simple framed structure to elaborate pavilion-like buildings, but the depiction of a domed hut and a rectangular structure with a vaulted roof appear to be the more popular representations. Lesser-known depictions, such as the example from Mathura, show a cubed building with a small, domed roof (fig. 3.7), or a long building with a vaulted roof (fig. 3.8). Recent excavations of a stupa at Kanganhalli, in Karnataka, have brought to light a depiction of the compound at Jetavana, including the Buddha’s house, smaller vihāras, associated structures, a gateway, and fences (fig. 3.6).23
84THE HERMIT’S HUT Over time, the Buddha comes to be shown “housed” in various kinds of architectural conditions, the identities of which are less about dwelling than about framing the figure of the Buddha. Examples include a simple rectangular nichelike space, wooden trabeated torana-like roof (fig. 3.9), pavilion structure with a roof connoting a shrine (fig. 3.10), and a simple canopy. Regional architecture, such as that at Borobudur and Pagan, provide a distinctive, localized profile to the architecture in later periods (figs. 3.11 and 3.12). Nonetheless, the varieties of such framing require an analysis since they pose questions about a relationship between 3.4 Residences for the Buddha at Jetavana ārāma, Bhārhut, second to third centuries BCE (American Institute of Indian Studies, University of Chicago).
3.5 Residences for the Buddha at Jetavana ārāma, Sāñcī, second to third centuries BCE (American Institute of Indian Studies, University of Chicago).
86THE HERMIT’S HUT the framing device and the figure framed therein, a topic discussed in the following chapter. However, the huts represented in the Bhārhut and Sāñcī reliefs effectively codified the image of the Buddha’s house by using a consistent motif in Buddhist architectural language: the caitya arch. In the Bhārhut relief, the caitya is an elaborate doorway with wooden end beams that forms the entry for both hut types (fig. 3.13). More than a simple entranceway, the caitya form intersects the roof to suggest a definitive and 3.7 The Buddha inside a possible gandhakuṭī, Mathurā, second to third cen turies (The Huntington Archive, The Ohio State Uni versity, Columbus). 3.6 The Buddha’s house in Jetavana, Kanganhalli, first century BCE to first century CE (drawing by Raphael Tran based on an image in Meister, “Early Architecture and Its Transformation”).