Chapter 2 Differences

In this chapter, I seek to outline a new approach to the question of how to engage responsibly in a comparative study of monasticism as a historical and cultural phenomenon found in multiple and varied forms. Another way to put this is that I want to give adequate account of the different ‘monasticisms’ (plural) that we encounter in our world. How are we able to assign this same label convincingly to a variegated field of monastic practices and communities that sometimes seem to stand in tension with each other? What models do we have at our disposal as we try to balance our need for definitions and the day-to-day differences that seem to resist any easy definition?

As a way to think through these questions, I will be drawing on the work of the late anthropologist Catherine Bell, whose research in the field of ritual studies has given us resources to think about how various kinds of monastic practices are themselves marked as acts of cultural ‘differentiation’. In addressing the problem of how to define ritual, Bell focuses on the social process of what she calls ‘ritualization’. In her book Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, she defines it as follows:

[Ritualization is] a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian [i.e. everyday] activities … [a way of acting that involves] specific strategies for setting some activities off from others, for creating and privileging a qualitative distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’.

In short, for Bell, ‘ritualization’ involves a kind of strategic play. In and through certain structured bodily actions, ritual leaders and participants mark off their own practice as distinct from other modes of social activity.

In the process, participants shape the way that authority and power gets distributed within communities. In a typical Roman Catholic Mass, for example, the priests’ intercessory authority and the congregation’s subordination to God is ‘ritualized’ through bodily postures and through the layout of the space itself: the priest often stands in an elevated spot, raising his eyes to heaven, while the congregants kneel with heads bowed. As Bell puts it, ‘[K]neeling does not merely communicate subordination to the kneeler. For all intents and purposes, kneeling produces a subordinated kneeler in and through the act itself.’

How does this relate to the subject of monasticism? Let me begin on the level of generic description and then move to a more specific level. First, insofar as the daily lives of monastic communities are typically structured through ritual practices, we should expect them to participate in the differentiating dynamics characteristic of Bell’s concept of ‘ritualization’. In other words, as a species (or subset) of ritualizing practice, monasticism naturally engages in strategic acts of differentiation. Second, and even more importantly, however, we need to ask what is distinctive about monasticism as a venue for ‘ritualization’. How do monastic communities engage in acts of differentiation in specific ways? This question, I think, will help put some meat on the bones of our definitional quest to figure out what different ‘monasticisms’ have in common.

Here, I want to think about monasticism(s) in terms of two unifying pairs of themes: (1) withdrawal and renunciation (as forms of spatial and bodily differentiation); and (2) regimentation and routinization (as forms of social differentiation).

As we shall see, in each of these areas, monastics have traditionally marked their own activities over against other more readily available social options. These forms of ritualization provide a means for re-enculturation to a markedly different(iated) lifestyle and worldview.

Withdrawal and renunciation

The life of a monk or a nun typically begins with a decision to withdraw from everyday society, to live a life spatially set apart. Closely linked with spatial separation are acts of renunciation such as poverty, fasting, and celibacy, which further serve to set monastics apart from the economic, dietary, and sexual mores of conventional households and civic society.

The earliest documented ascetics are attested in the Upaniṣads, a collection of authoritative Vedic Sanskrit texts that trace their origins to the 7th or 6th century bce, but that underwent a process of later redaction into the Common Era. These early ascetics were what we might call proto-monastics—solitary, itinerant figures in northern India who decided to leave their natal homes and dwell in forests, subsisting by wandering and begging for food. The most common Sanskrit term for such figures was sannyāsin, ‘one who gives up, abandons, renounces’, but they were also called by the name bhikṣu, ‘one who begs, asks for alms’.

Accordingly, the Upaniṣads emphasize how such ascetics ‘gave up the desire for sons, the desire for wealth, and the desire for worlds, and undertook the mendicant life’. Elsewhere, the text lauds ‘those in the wilderness, calm and wise, who live a life of penance and faith, as they beg their food’. As Patrick Olivelle notes in his commentary on this text, ‘The householder is replaced by the celibate ascetic as the new religious ideal.’ The withdrawal of such individuals from society—as well as their rejection of sex, family ties, and conventions of food and work—marked their distinct identity as forest dwellers and hermits. At the same time, far removed from the centres of Indian society, small-scale ‘institutional’ forms began to develop in these forest districts, with ascetic groups of followers and students congregating around charismatic teachers. Here, withdrawal, renunciation (sannyāsa), and discipleship were intimately linked.

In the 6th and 5th centuries bce, the rise of Buddhist and Jain monastic movements emerged out of this same social milieu. Indeed, in the literature produced by both of these communities, the Pāli word for monk (bhikkhu) derives from the same root as the Sanskrit word for the type of wandering ascetic (bhikṣu) found in the Upaniṣads.

The Buddha’s own life story is illustrative of this established pattern of Indian asceticism. After leaving home and family to wander in search of ascetic mentors, he eventually attained enlightenment and then attracted a cadre of disciples, who are thought to have formed the earliest Buddhist monastic community. That community was initially characterized by itinerancy, with only temporary settlements established at forest refuges during the rainy seasons. Over time, however, through gifts of buildings and property made by lay donors, Buddhist monastic communities evolved to embrace more sedentary patterns of residential and ritual life, even as solitary forest dwellers remained respected and revered figures.

Vardhamana Mahāvāra, a slightly older contemporary of the Buddha, is celebrated as a key early institutional founder of Jainism and as the last in a line of twenty-four illustrious divine teachers called tirthankaras—‘ford-makers’, i.e. those who create the tirtha (community) and are able to ford successfully across the waters of endless births and deaths on behalf of themselves and others. As in the case of the Buddha, the chronology of Mahāvāra’s life has been debated, but the current scholarly consensus holds that he died c.425 bce, only fifteen years or so before the Buddha’s death. Like the Buddha, Mahāvāra left his family to wander the Ganges basin in northern India, seeking out the counsel of other independent ascetics, and concentrating his energies on fasting and meditating until he achieved enlightenment. Before his death he gathered to himself eleven brahman followers, who became heads of the Jain monastic order. Our earliest sources of knowledge for these scant biographical details are the Acaranga and Sutrakritanga, two books dated to the 3rd or 2nd century bce and later incorporated in the Svetambara Jain scriptural canon.

One section of the Acaranga (1.9) emphasizes not only Mahāvāra’s withdrawal from society, but also the harshness of his renunciatory practices, including his rejection of clothing, bathing, shelter, food, sleep, and human contact—austerities by which he sought to break the chains of body and mind, to separate the nascent monastic life from the world’s cycles of birth and death, and thus to achieve enlightenment. Later Jain monks and nuns have sought to emulate Mahāvāra’s status as a renouncer or ‘striver’ (s´ramaṇa)—a term and a corresponding set of bodily regimens that served to differentiate him from the brahmans, previously the only authorized social status for priestly or ascetic performance.

In this sense, both Jain and Buddhist monasticism constituted a critique of the Indian caste system and orthodox cults of sacrifice, replacing them with an emphasis on detachment from society and practices of renunciation, including a commitment to non-violence, lack of possessions, fasting, and celibacy. In this way, monastic communities—in and through their ritualized strategies of social differentiation—have sometimes played a crucial role in religious critiques of class structures (although at other times they have fallen prey to such critiques).

As competing monastic movements in north-eastern India, Jain and Buddhist communities also made marked efforts to distinguish their own ritual practice from each other’s. While the Buddhist ‘Middle Way’ sought to chart an ascetic course between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification, Jain renunciation took a more rigorous form, with Jain monks instructed to reside ‘in a burial place or cremation ground, in a deserted house, below a tree, in solitude, … where no women live’. Jain nuns were likewise charged to live a homeless life of self-denial and to avoid places inhabited by men.

Jain and Buddhist monks came to wear different colour robes and adopted different policies with regard to carrying alms bowls. Jain monks either went naked or wore undyed robes and carried bowls made of gourd or wood. Buddhist monks donned red robes but were only allowed to use wooden bowls. Thus, in their ritualized acts of withdrawal and renunciation, Jain and Buddhist monastic communities not only differentiated themselves from non-ascetic lifestyle models (e.g. household and family, participation in civic governance), but also from other, alternative ascetic options in the social and religious marketplace of the Ganges River basin.

In the Mediterranean world, early Christian monasticism was also characterized by ritualized acts of withdrawal and renunciation. As mentioned earlier, the oldest documented form of Christian monasticism seems to have been that of individuals or of small, loosely-knit groups living in village or urban neighbourhood environments. This evidence, which only came to light in the 20th century through papyrological discoveries, contradicts the long-held, traditional image of the first Christian solitaries as isolated figures living a life of retreat in the desert, an image shaped by iconic tales like that of St Anthony, who is remembered for his successive stages of flight into the Egyptian hinterlands beyond the Nile Valley.

On this subject, two points are important to highlight. First, the decision by certain late Roman Egyptians and Syrians to set themselves apart within town settlements was itself a form of physical withdrawal and social renunciation, a departure from the centres of power and associated mores of civic society. Second, a close reading of St Anthony’s famous Life actually gives us glimpses of how the earliest Christian monastics negotiated a subtle (and sometimes precarious) balance between isolation and self-deprivation on the one hand, and social contact on the other.

Probably written by the 4th-century bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, the Life of Anthony was meant to propagandize this new monastic movement as a valid expression of Christian spirituality. The plot of Anthony’s Life takes him away from his family and his village, further and further into the outback of the Egyptian desert. But this movement happened in stages, and as such the story dramatizes a range of spatial locations for aspiring renunciants.

At the beginning of the story, Anthony is inspired to make a break from society when he hears two passages from the Gospel of Matthew (19:21 and 6:34) read in church. In response, he leaves his sister with some local ascetic women and ‘devote[s] himself from then on to the discipline rather than the household’. Choosing as his mentor an old man in a neighbouring village ‘who had practised from his youth the solitary life’, Anthony begins by taking up residence ‘in places proximate to his village’ (Life 3). Already, we see several key assumptions at work for the 4th-century author: that he was familiar with groups of female ‘virgins’ living in village-based communities; that both Anthony and his unnamed older mentor initially pursued the monastic life within or near town settlements; and that their decision to live a solitary life nonetheless frequently involved loose social contracts between mentors and disciples. These details give us a varied sense of what a life of ‘withdrawal’ looked like for the earliest Christian monastics.

Later in Anthony’s biography, he ventures out from his village and takes up residence in increasingly remote locations. First, he spends twenty years in an enclosed tomb ‘situated some distance from the village’ where friends would occasionally stop by ‘to supply him periodically with bread’ (Life 8). Next, he moves to a ‘deserted fortress’ on the outskirts of the irrigated land, at the foot of the ‘mountain’ (or cliffside) bordering the Nile Valley (Life 12). Finally, he relocates to a ‘high hill’ on the ‘inner mountain’, the desert plateau that extends for miles above the cliffside (Life 49 and 51). Today, his ‘inner mountain’ cell is commemorated as a cave located about thirty kilometres from the Red Sea. At each of these locations, he is eventually joined by larger and larger groups of followers, who take up residence in his vicinity and seek to emulate his example. Notably, in each successive stage, Anthony’s withdrawal is framed as an act of differentiation: each spatial location of his monastic practice is differentiated not only from his town of origin but also from his previous ascetic abodes. In the story, his desire for solitude is continually held in tension with his own social role as mentor to other would-be monks.

In the Life, we are also told that Anthony endured a series of temptations by the devil, which serve to mark the stark terms of his renunciations. First, he was plagued by ‘memories of his possessions, the guardianship of his sister, the bonds of kinship, love of money and of glory, the manifold pleasure of food, [and] the relaxations of life’ (Life 4). Second, the devil appeared to Anthony at night ‘in the form of a woman’ and ‘in the visage of a black boy’ (Life 5–6), each representing the threat of ‘fornication’ for ancient monks trying to dissociate themselves from sexual desire. Third, Anthony experienced severe bodily pains associated with his stringent self-denial: these took the form of whippings and beatings administered by the demons, and as attacks in the night by wild beasts—‘lions, bears, leopards, bulls, and serpents, asps, scorpions and wolves’ (Life 8–9). Fourth and finally, he was accosted by visions of ‘actual gold thrown in his path’, a tangible sign of his struggle to separate himself from the dominant marketplace values of the late Roman world and to opt for an alternative economy of the spirit.

One observes a similar pattern in the Life of the early 5th-century Syrian monk, Simeon Stylites. In Simeon’s case, he began by joining a community of monks before striking off on his own to engage in increasingly dramatic acts of withdrawal and renunciation. Over the course of his ascetic career, he bricked himself up in a hut for three years, he chained himself to a rock on top of a hill for five, he lived at the bottom of a well or cistern, and then began living on top of tall pillars (hence his name, Stylites, which comes the Greek word, stylos, meaning ‘pillar’). The last thirty-six years of his life he spent on a 2.5-metre-square platform perched atop a 21-metre-tall pillar in northern Syria, the base of which still survives. All along, he pursued extreme practices of renunciation that would turn modern stomachs: he stood for so long the skin of his feet and belly burst open; his joints became dislocated from prostration; open sores became infected with maggots; his body reeked with a foul stench due to these ulcers and his refusal to bathe. For early Christian monks, such harsh forms of renunciation were not the norm, but in the story, his physical ailments and sufferings are meant to be visible signs of his separation from standard social expectations.

At the core of Simeon’s and Anthony’s Lives—and in the biographies of other Christian monks who followed in their wake—lies an irony that speaks to the fruits of such strategies of social differentiation. Even as Anthony tried to withdraw to ever more remote locations, he remained embedded in social networks that sustained his practice, first as a disciple to an older monastic mentor, and later as mentor himself to groups of devotees and followers. In the case of Simeon, even as he physically removed himself to the top of a 21-metre-tall pillar and engaged in forms of self-abnegation that made him repellent to both sight and smell, he attracted hundreds of international pilgrims who desired to see and (if possible) touch him, and his pillar became the physical centre of a large monastery housing scores of monks. While Simeon’s extreme asceticism is most certainly a historical outlier, in the centuries since, monastic men and women have wrestled with a similar set of tensions—between withdrawal and forms of community; between the goal of renunciation and the implicit value given to bodily disciplines along the pathway to virtue.

Regimentation and routinization

Around the same time that solitaries like Anthony and Simeon were being celebrated as idealized models of the ascetic life, there is also evidence for the rise of monastic communities in which the values of withdrawal and renunciation were tempered and rechannelled. The early 20th-century sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) would have described Anthony and Simeon as figures who embodied a kind of ‘charismatic authority’, founded on individual prowess and (inter)personal magnetism. But Weber also recognized the way that such charisma was ‘routinized’—made stable, regular, and routine—through the rise of institutional structures. For such hermit heroes, ‘routinizing’ patterns could take forms as simple as the daily delivery of bread to one’s cell, or mentor–disciple arrangements for transmitting monastic teachings. Or it could take more elaborate and translocal forms such as the organization of monastic federations, schools, and orders—networks of monasteries bound together by weekly worship or common rule.

In the 4th century and following, different kinds of organized and semi-organized Christian monastic communities developed in which charismatic and institutional forms of authority coexisted and were contested. One kind of (semi-organized) monastic settlement was the lavra type, which grew out of the aforementioned mentor–disciple arrangements. Lavras were loosely structured groups of hermits, each often accompanied by one or two younger monks, living in a cluster of mud-brick cells or caves, usually near a centrally located church where the community would gather on a weekly or occasional basis. The earliest documented lavra-type settlements were founded in the 4th and 5th centuries at Nitria and Scetis in northern Egypt and on the Judean desert plateau in Palestine.

Another (more highly organized) kind of monastic settlement was the cenobitic type. Cenobitic (‘community-based’) monasteries were usually heavily regimented through their defined hierarchy of leadership and a mandated adherence to a common rule. The classical example is the federation of monasteries founded in the 4th century by Pachomius in southern Egypt, and as a result this type of community is sometimes referred to as ‘Pachomian monasticism’.

What was most distinctive about Pachomius’ monastery was its governance by a system of rules. These rules set standards for entrance requirements, material possessions, manual labour, and a regimented daily schedule of work and prayer. The monasteries under Pachomius’ authority were organized according to different jurisdictions and spaces: the monastics had their own cells, but they each also belonged to different houses within the monastery, and these houses were overseen by heads of houses who reported up a chain of command to Pachomius himself. Pachomius also introduced larger systemic innovations: pairs of monasteries for men and women, and a regional federation of at least eleven monasteries that shared the same schedule and were guided by the same rule. This elaborate organizational system inculcated an ethos of ‘sameness’ within the community, but it also provided the means by which Pachomian monks and nuns strategically differentiated themselves—from the society-at-large, from other non-rule-based monastic practitioners, and occasionally (in moments of ritualized disobedience) even from their cenobitic monastic compatriots.

Following Pachomius, the cenobitic system became the characteristic form of Christian communal monastic life in the West. Its enormous impact can be measured not only by cultivation of spiritual disciplines, but also by the larger cultural contributions of monasteries, which came to serve as centres for the production and preservation of books and as places specializing in the care of the sick. Monastic scriptoria and libraries played a foundational role for the development of medieval and modern universities (the architectural plans of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge are modelled after cloisters), and monastic infirmaries played an equally instrumental role for the development of hospitals.

The impact of Pachomius’ monastic foundation can also be measured in the rapid and diverse proliferation of similar communities across the late ancient Mediterranean and medieval European landscape. Later systems of rules—and the various reforms they embodied—show how the monastic life continued to be routinized and regimented, even as different monastic movements sought to distinguish themselves from one another through their careful recalibrations of ritual practice.

In Egypt, in fact, we know of at least one other monastic federation that derived its rules system from that of Pachomius. I am referring to the White Monastery Federation, a group of three monasteries (two for men and one for women) located across the Nile to the west, just downriver from Pachomius’ headquarters. For an incredible eight decades this federation was headed by the irrepressible monk, Shenoute of Atripe (c.347–465 ce), who also has the distinction of being the most prolific author in the history of the Coptic language. His extensive writings include a collection of Canons that contain traces of his community’s corpus of rules, a set of statutes that he enforced with an iron fist. I will have more to say about both Pachomius and Shenoute in Chapter 3.

But cenobitic monasticism, with its characteristic rule-based system, was certainly not restricted to Egypt. The 4th and 5th centuries witnessed the establishment of monastic communities associated with Basil of Caesarea in Asia Minor, Augustine of Hippo in North Africa, and John Cassian in Gaul. In each case, rules collections associated with these founding figures survive and give us a tangible sense of the way that such rules were adapted to other geographic and communal contexts. The Rules of St Basil, in particular, proved influential over the governance of monasteries in the Byzantine world. Theodore of Stoudios (760–826) adapted Basil’s rule in founding his reformist Stoudite monastery in Constantinople, and his rule in turn ended up serving as the basis for ‘The Rule of the Holy Mountain’ implemented in the 10th and 11th centuries at Mount Athos (Hagion Oros) in north-eastern Greece.

In the West, the most well-known and influential of these early Christian monastic rules was the Rule of St Benedict, written in 6th-century Italy. Its stated purpose, as articulated by its author Benedict of Nursia (c.480–543/7), was ‘to open a school for God’s service, in which we hope nothing harsh or oppressive will be directed’. In such a statement, we see hints of routinization at work. By trying to avoid or moderate certain harsher ascetic practices, Benedict was seeking to distinguish his system from earlier, competing models. That is to say, he was founding his own ‘school’, where the primary ritualized curriculum was ‘the work of God’ (opus Dei)—a protocol of worship that served to punctuate both the day and the night with designated hours of prayer and ‘sacred reading’ (lectio divina).

Benedict’s ‘school’ proved to be extraordinarily successful. Originally instituted at Monte Cassino south of Rome, his rule quickly became the prevailing model and guide for cenobitic monasticism throughout early medieval Europe. In the 7th and 8th centuries, use of Benedict’s Rule spread to France, England, and Germany. In the early 9th century, his namesake, Benedict of Aniane, was appointed arch-abbot of all the monasteries in the territories ruled by the Emperor Charlemagne. This latter-day Benedict compiled the Codex Regularum, a compendium of rules incorporating and highlighting the original Rules of St Benedict but mandating somewhat stricter standards of behaviour (yet another subtle gesture of ritualized differentiation). But it was in the 11th century that the Benedictine movement reached its pinnacle at Cluny and its ‘daughter houses’ in eastern France. The reforms instituted at Cluny de-emphasized the importance of manual labour for monks. Instead, such labour was assigned to an expanded cadre of servants, and the monks dedicated themselves primarily to the precise details of liturgical performance. In this context, the Divine Office (officium divinum) at Cluny became grander and more elaborate, with the use of golden vessels and utensils, the addition of extra hymns and songs to the Virgin and the angels, and increased attention to the veneration of the saints and their relics.

Over time, the medieval European landscape became populated with a variety of different monastic ‘orders’, each with its own ritualized sense of identity and practice. The Cistercian order, founded in 1098 at Cîteaux, France, represented a direct (and rather sober) reaction to the liturgical exuberance of Cluny. Cistercian monks returned to an emphasis on manual labour and to an unadorned office of prayer based on a more literal adherence to Benedict’s Rule.

At the same time, other reform movements developed their own rule systems with distinct points of emphasis. In the late 11th century, in the foothills of the French Alps, Carthusian monks sought a return to the hermit ideal. The monastery they founded, Grande Chartreuse, was constructed as a collection of stone cells around a central cloister: its physical layout and sparer liturgy were meant to allow room for solitude, private prayer, and the reading and copying of books. In this way, the Carthusian community explicitly constructed a rule that integrated aspects of solitary and cenobitic life.

At the same time, the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries also saw the rise of other rules and orders that exhibited a more tenuous and complicated relationship to ‘monastic’ identity. One such rule was the Rule of St Augustine (an 11th-century document not in fact composed by the saint himself), which was more broadly framed than Benedict’s Rule. It emphasized poverty, simplicity, and good works modelled more on the example of the apostles than that of the desert fathers. Followers of the Rule were technically called ‘canons’ or ‘canonesses’—not monks or nuns—and fell into two general categories: ‘canons regular’ (who dedicated themselves to pastoral care); and ‘friars’ (who dedicated themselves to a mendicant life of poverty). To make matters more complicated, there were also lay Augustinians who did not take vows. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Augustinian order quickly spread throughout Europe—Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Austria, and the British Isles—offering an alternative way of life to that of the Benedictines.

Finally, the 12th century witnessed the rise of two more orders that similarly avoided use of the title ‘monk’. These were the Dominicans and the Franciscans, whose founders—Dominic (c.1172–1221) and Francis of Assisi (1181–1226)—were contemporaries of each other. Both established communities of friars and nuns who were peripatetic in lifestyle (that is, not bound to a specific home abbey). Dominic and his canon-followers adopted the Rule of St Augustine and applied themselves to the missionary vocation of preaching. Francis drafted his own rule—the Rule of St Francis—which committed his followers to a mendicant life of serving the poor. As was the case for the Augustinian order, Dominic and Francis stamped their communities with distinct kinds of quasi-monastic (or counter-monastic) identity.

In these examples, we encounter once again a complex terrain in the Western monastic social landscape and the blurred lines that sometimes exist between monastic and non-monastic self-definition. I have been describing how a diversity of rule-based movements and orders proliferated in the late ancient Mediterranean and medieval Europe, and I have analysed them in terms of what Catherine Bell described as ‘ritualization’—the privileging of certain sets of practices over against others and the resulting production of differentiated ascetic lifestyles. A similar model may be applied in studying the rise of various rule-based Jain and Buddhist ‘monasticisms’ in South, South-East, and East Asia.

Both Jain and Buddhist monasticism developed sets of rules for the regulation of community practices. Indeed, these rules took shape in conjunction with different kinds of monastic groupings. As mentioned earlier, from their early roots in ancient India, Jain and Buddhist monks distinguished themselves from each other through the colour of their robes and the kind of alms bowls they carried—distinctions legislated in their respective rules corpora. But they also exhibited internal differentiations, as monastic sects or movements arose within each community and as Buddhism spread outside of India and began to adapt to new cultural contexts in South-East Asia, Tibet and Mongolia, China, Korea, and Japan.

Throughout its history, up to the present, Jain monasticism has remained predominantly within an Indian geographical orbit. But even within its subcontinent of origin, Jain practice has taken different regimented forms. There are two monastic orders that dominate the Jain religious landscape in India: the Svetambara and Digambara movements. Both adhere to sets of rules that authorize—and routinize—a lifestyle of wandering, homeless begging, often practised by small groups of mendicant ascetics. Even as settled monastic institutions developed, the itinerant life remained an ideal. As part of their vows, both commit themselves not to harm any other form of life.

But there are subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences as well. Monks and nuns belonging to the Svetambara movement follow a code of conduct that allows them to wear white robes and to carry a woollen bed sheet, a woollen mat, and a broom made with woollen threads to brush away any insects on which they might unwittingly sit or tread during their travels. The Digambara sect forbids monks from wearing any clothes (although a dispensation for clothing is made in the case of nuns), and only authorizes them to carry a broom made of peacock feathers and a water gourd (see Figure 1).

1. Manuscript illumination showing Digambara monks walking in a forest carrying water pots and peacock-feather brooms. Ink on silk, probably 15th century ce.

These differences between monastics in the Digambara and Svetambara traditions originally emerged out of an early schism in the Jain community based in part on different attitudes towards nakedness as a sign of renunciation and on different views of their authoritative scriptures. Over time, the rejection of clothing within male Digambara circles became regimented practice. This ethic was reinforced through the visual depiction of the founder Mahāvāra and later Jain saints as nude figures: in one prominent example, a 10th-century ce statue of the saint Bahubali erected on a high outcropping of rock in Karnataka (south-western India) can be seen from thirty kilometres away and has been the object of a longstanding pilgrimage practice. By contrast, Svetambara monks have a more equivocal attitude towards nudity. Accordingly, they have established two paths for practitioners: the jinakalpa (where monks eschew clothing) and the sthavirakalpa (where monks don white robes). Nuns in both movements remain clothed.

One observes parallel but distinctive processes of regimentation and routinization for ancient and medieval Buddhist monastic communities. Alongside solitary and itinerant forms of ascetic practice, settled communities or monasteries developed in India, regulated by sets of rules and punctuated by ritual observances. Three such observances are the biweekly Poshadha ceremony, when the community gathers, recites the rules, and marks days of fasting; the Pravarana, a rite in which monks invite others to point out wrongs for confession; and the Kathina ceremony, which marks the end of the three-month rainy season retreat and provides an opportunity for donations of new robes and the temporary relaxation of certain precepts.

As monastic canons and rules corpora were adapted for use, different branches or ‘schools’ of Buddhism developed, the best known of which today are Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna. Each of these schools has its own emphases, but there is also considerable overlap in practice. These are not monastic schools, but they serve as the broader religious landscape in which Buddhist monastic communities have developed.

Theravāda Buddhism, which probably traces its roots to the late centuries bce, relies on the Pāli Canon and stresses the importance of self-reliance, direct personal experience, and the path of the arhat—one who is worthy or perfected—as the route to awakening. Attaining full Buddhahood is reserved for only a select few. While Theravāda originated in India, it became the dominant form of Buddhist practice in Sri Lanka and later in South-East Asia.

Mahāyāna Buddhism, which differentiated itself in the early centuries ce, envisions the pathway to enlightenment as a process of moving beyond the status of arhat to the bodhisattva ideal of attaining the compassion of the Buddha. Today, Mahāyāna is the most widespread and populous school of practice, having spread from India to China, Korea, Japan, Tibet and Mongolia, and parts of South-East Asia.

Vajrayāna Buddhism, also known as Tantric Buddhism, emerged in the early medieval period (c.6th–8th centuries ce), featuring a pronounced emphasis on forms of esoteric meditation involving the recitation of spells and (at an advanced stage) the visualization of deities. Also known as Tantric Buddhism or the ‘Thunderbolt Vehicle’, Vajrayāna is most closely associated with Tibet, but it also played a role in the development of Buddhist practice in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, South-East Asia, China, Korea, Japan, and Mongolia.

As Buddhist monasticism spread beyond the borders of India, it was shaped not only by these broader schools of practice but also by local and regional processes of enculturation. Theravāda Buddhism was introduced to Sri Lanka during the reign of King Dēvānāmpiyatissa (c.250–210 bce). In the capital city of Anurādhapura, three major monasteries were established from the 3rd century bce to the 3rd century ce. One of these monasteries (Mahāvihāra) promoted literal adherence to the Pāli Canon. The other two (Abhayagiri and Jētavana) were more flexible in the application of the Canon, and more open to ‘foreign influences, including Mahāyāna ideas and Tantric popular practices’, an openness confirmed by recent archaeological excavations. During the 12th-century reign of King Parākramabāhu I (1153–1186), all three monasteries came under Mahāvihāra control and other traditions were suppressed. Sri Lankan monks played an instrumental role in bringing Theravāda Buddhism to South-East Asia. Indeed, their version of the Pāli Canon and their voluminous commentaries on it served as vehicles for the conversion of village populations throughout the kingdoms of Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.

In late antiquity, Mahāyāna Buddhism was brought to China either by land or by sea in conjunction with Silk Road trading routes, and monastics played a crucial role in its missionary propagation and in the translation of scriptural texts into Chinese. With its characteristic emphasis on withdrawal, Buddhist monasticism ran counter to certain highly prized societal values in China (especially the Confucianist emphasis on a this-worldly, humanistic code of ethics), but the movement gradually gained a foothold, in part because its emphasis on meditation was interpreted as compatible with Daoist teachings. In turn, Buddhist practices came to influence the rise of Daoist monasticism in the 6th century, including rules corpora and the configuration of monastic architecture.

By the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries, multiple schools of Buddhist monastic practice had emerged in China. These included Pure Land, Three Stages, Tiantai, Sanlun, Lu, Faxiang, Huayan, Chan (Zen), and Zhenyan, with several of these schools establishing temples and monasteries in mountain territories (e.g. the Tiantai school at Mount Tiantai). In the middle of the 9th century (840–845 ce), the Tang Emperor Wuzong initiated a severe policy of suppression and persecution of Buddhist monasticism (as well as other religious communities viewed as ‘foreign’ to China), and as a result some of these Buddhist schools ceased to exist. The Pure Land and Chan schools survived, however, and became the predominant forms of Buddhist monasticism in the country. Pure Land Buddhism is characterized by its emphasis on ‘rebirth’ in a cosmological realm (Pure Land) governed by Amitābha Buddha. It is known for being open to laypersons as well as monks due to its more relaxed, informal, and less hierarchical system of practices. Chan Buddhism, by contrast, is known for its more rigorous disciplines of meditation practice and stricter adherence to the Vinaya code.

A similar pattern pertained in both Korea and Japan. Buddhist monasticism was likewise introduced to these areas by travelling monks, underwent a process of cultural assimilation, and developed into multiple schools of thought and practice. In Korea, Buddhism was brought into dialogue with indigenous forms of shamanistic folk religiosities, while in Japan it came into intersection with Shintoism, which placed a strong emphasis on the instrumental efficacy of ritual acts. In both areas, the proliferation of monastic schools bore a strong relation to Chinese precedents. Thus, for example, in Korea, the Kyeyul and Poˇpsang schools were founded in the 7th century ce by Chinese monks who based their teachings on the Lu and Faxiang curricula mentioned earlier. Pure Land and Chan (Soˇn) movements also proliferated, with the latter becoming the most prevalent. The largest Soˇn denomination is the Jogye (Chogye) order, which oversees 840 temples, ninety meditation monasteries, and approximately ten million adherents, of which around 10,000 are monastics.

In Japan, the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries also witnessed the rise of multiple schools (e.g. Jōjitsu, Sanron, Hossō, Kusha, Kegon, and Ritsu), including certain esoteric and tantric sects (e.g. Shingon and Tendai). During the medieval period, other kinds of monastics also populated the Japanese landscape. These ranged from itinerant monks who engaged in a kind of perpetual pilgrimage, to mountain ascetics who lived in treacherous places at high altitudes, to mendicants who begged for subsistence from house to house, to an ascetic sect called Fuke whose members (called Komusō) walked the streets blowing flutes (shakuhachi) with baskets over their heads, a gesture meant to mark the absence of ego (see Figure 2).

2. Print of a Komusō monk in the Fuke school begging for alms from a courtesan and her attendant. Isoda Koryūsai (1735–90), Courtesan and Her Attendant Use Mirrors to Identify a Komusō.

Not all of these schools and practices survived, but as was the case in Korea the importation of Pure Land and Chan (Zen) practices proved to be extremely influential. Indeed, by the early 13th century, Chan (Zen) Buddhism in Japan had taken deep root, established as an independent religious order with multiple branches (e.g. Rinzai, Sōtō, and Ōbaku), all derived from Chinese traditions. Today, it is the most recognizable form of Japanese Buddhism not only in East Asia but also as a cultural and religious export in the West.

Buddhist monasticism may have taken root in Tibet as early as the 8th century ce. Medieval chronicles credit the establishment of the first Tibetan monastery at Samye to King Trisong Detsen (c.740–798), who is said to have founded it with the help of an Indian monk-scholar named Santiraksita and a practitioner of yoga meditation (yogin) named Padmasambhava. In this account, the foundation of the Samye monastery is associated with two important streams of Tibetan practice: intellectual scholasticism and esoteric prowess. But it would not be until the 12th and 13th century that formalized monastic schools developed, each with its own distinctive emphasis.

Four main schools or orders (chölug) came to dominate the medieval and early modern Buddhist landscape in Tibet. All have suborders with flagship monastic institutions that function as training centres headed by senior lamas (teachers) who embody particular teaching lineages.

The two earliest Tibetan monastic schools were the Sakyapa in western Tibet and the Kagyüpa, in central Tibet. The latter traces its teaching lineage to the early disciples of the famous Tibetan saint Milarepa (1043–1123), whose extraordinary life story we will revisit in Chapter 4.

Also based in central Tibet, a third school, the Gelukpa, emerged later in the 15th century but would go on to become the most populous and influential of the monastic orders. Indeed, the Dalai Lama—regarded as the successive incarnation of enlightened teachers—has served as the senior teaching figure in the Gelukpa order since 1546, and since 1642 has been regarded as the Tibetan head of state by his monastic followers.

Finally, the fourth school, Nyingmapa, began as a smaller-scale medieval teaching lineage similarly led by hereditary lamas, but it was later organized into a larger-scale monastic institution in the early modern period. A parallel pattern of development was followed by the Bon (P’önpo)—an indigenous Tibetan religious sect that likewise transitioned from a system of largely autonomous local lama leaders (called terpas or tertöns) to one dominated by monastic teaching foundations with more formalized programmes of training.

The primary distinction between these different Tibetan monastic schools lies in their relative emphasis on philosophical study versus esoteric tantra (Vajrayāna). The Gelukpa order stresses the importance of intensive training in Buddhist philosophy and debate—through a long and rigorous curriculum of study in monastic colleges—as foundational for any later advancement to tantric meditational and ritual practices. By contrast, the three other Buddhist orders (as well as the Bon sect) provide their monastic denizens with opportunities for earlier engagement with yogic tantra as an accelerated path to enlightenment.

In the proliferation of Buddhist monastic schools and movements from India to Sri Lanka, South-East Asia, China, Korea, Japan, and Tibet, we see once again processes of regimentation and routinization at work. Via practices of scriptural transmission and commentary, and through ritualized teaching lineages and curricula, different ways of being monastic emerged. As in the case of the ancient Mediterranean and medieval Europe, so too with Jainism and Buddhism (along with Daoism) in various parts of Asia: the result was a diversity of ‘monasticisms’—a complex landscape of monastic communities that require careful study to understand their rules of living, their ideals and worldviews, and their physical spaces and everyday life. It is to these themes that I turn in Chapters 3–5.