Chapter 4

Saints and spirituality

For monastic communities living together under a shared system of governance, we have seen how rules function as both the framework and texture for monastic practice, delimiting boundaries for behaviour and establishing rhythms for bodies living in close proximity to one another. As such, monastic rules constitute a ‘form-of-life’ for monks and nuns seeking to pursue a life of withdrawal and renunciation. But when it comes to the cultivation of specific virtues—whether defined in terms of holiness, purity, or perfection—Christian, Jain, and Buddhist monastics have also had other cultural and ethical models to draw on, including charismatic ascetic virtuosi who inspire acts of imitation and veneration. In this chapter, we turn to the privileged role that saints and their stories play in the shaping of monastic spirituality.

Defining ‘sainthood’

The word ‘saint’ comes from the Latin word sanctus, meaning ‘sacred’ or ‘holy’. In the history of Western Christianity, this language came to be applied not only to places (loca sancta) and objects (res sancta), but also to persons who were understood to be endowed with a special form of holiness. The corresponding Greek adjective, hagios, is the root for the technical term, hagiography, which refers to the literary genre of ‘writings about holy persons’ (i.e. saints’ Lives). In antiquity, the word hagios connoted not simply moral purity but the quality of being specially ‘set apart’ by or for God and thus the object of ethical imitation and reverence. Accordingly, Athanasius began his Life of Anthony by exhorting his readers both to ‘emulate’ and to ‘marvel at’ the saint’s asceticism.

Similarly, the 5th-century Latin writer Sulpicius Severus framed his Life of Saint Martin of Tours as an attempt to ‘write the life of a most holy man, which shall serve in future as an example to others’, presenting him as ‘a man worthy of imitation’. By the end of the work, Severus had shifted his purpose to that of extolling and expressing awe at Martin’s saintly attributes: ‘How insignificant is all such praise when compared with the virtues which he possessed … to such an extent did all the excellences surpass in Martin the possibility of being embodied in language.’ As Robert Cohn has put it, this ‘tension between imitability and inimitability’—between ‘likeness’ and ‘otherness’—speaks to something fundamental about the social function of saints.

There is no single equivalent to the word ‘saint’ in the non-theistic Jain and Buddhist traditions of ancient India. The closest linguistic analogues, however, may be found in the Sanskrit terms, jina, arhat, and bodhisattva.

In Sanskrit, jina (from which the word ‘Jain’ itself derives) means ‘conqueror’. It refers to someone who has vanquished all inner passions and the cyclical bondage to violence, and who thus has attained a form of omniscience. Paradigmatically, Mahāvāra is described as someone who ‘knew and saw all conditions of the world, of gods, men, and demons, whence they come, whither they go, … all conditions of all living beings in the world, what they thought, spoke or did at any moment’. In the Digambara Jain tradition, attaining the rarefied state of jina-hood is associated not only with comprehensive mental insight, but also with the renunciation of physical and worldly ties, including the need for clothing, food, and sleep. As Natubhai Shah has noted, devotion to the jinas among Jains involves intertwined acts of imitation and veneration. Monks ‘emulate’ the lives of such figures in ‘prayer, meditation, and conduct’, and many also ‘worship’ the jinas, venerating their images through the recitation of names, the composition and recitation of hymns, and the making of offerings.

In both Jain and Buddhist contexts, an arhat is one who has been deemed worthy or deserving of transcending suffering and attaining a state of complete self-realization (i.e. nirvana). In the Kalpa Sutra (2nd or 1st century bce), one of the most important canonical texts for Svetambara Jain monks, Mahāvāra is described not only as a jina but also as an arhat. In early Buddhist literature, some of Gautama Buddha’s companions were likewise accorded this status. During the late ancient period (c.386 ce), however, the question of who deserved to be called an arhat—including what limits there were to an arhat’s virtuosity—became hotly contested and led to schism in Buddhist communities. Among Theravādin Buddhist monks, the title of arhat still continues to be used as a high honorific for those who are capable of attaining nirvana. By contrast, Mahāyāna Buddhist communities understand arhats still to be limited by certain mundane forms of human weakness, and instead place a greater emphasis on the role and status of bodhisattvas.

The term bodhisattva is composed of two Sanskrit roots—bodhi, meaning ‘awakened, enlightened’; and sattva, meaning ‘being’—and thus marks those who are destined to attain full enlightenment. (In the Theravāda tradition, the word is often used to refer to the Buddha himself prior to achieving transcendence.) A bodhisattva practises the six ‘perfections’ (pāramita), which include generosity, morality, patience, perseverance, meditation, and insight. In some Mahāyāna traditions, four more perfections are added to the list: skilful means, resolution (or vow), power, and knowledge. Taken together, these ten ‘perfections’ correspond to ten stages of spiritual development, which start with joy and purity and culminate in the Dharma-cloud, a final stage that is likened to ascending a throne and receiving a crown, and to receiving the light of fully awakened wisdom and showering it down like rain upon the world. To attain this state, monastic practitioners must revere and worship the Buddha and follow in the footsteps of bodhisattvas who have already paved the path towards enlightenment.

Lives of monastic saints and ethics of imitation

In the ancient Greek world, the value of imitation (mimēsis) as an ethical model was a frequently discussed and debated topic. In his Socratic dialogue, The Republic, Plato writes about the limitations of mimēsis as a method for attaining divine truth. In Book 10, he discusses Socrates’ teaching about three kinds of beds. The first is the ideal notion of ‘bed’ in the mind of God. The second is the physical or material form of the bed made by a carpenter. The third is an artist’s painted rendering of a bed. For Plato, neither the carpenter’s nor the painter’s version of the bed can ever capture the true essence of ‘bed’ as it exists as a divine concept or idea. As such, for Plato, acts of imitation are inadequate and derivative, falling short of perfection as the philosopher’s highest goal. This is one of the reasons why he banished artists and artisans from the population of his ideal republic.

By contrast, Aristotle held a somewhat more optimistic and flexible view of mimēsis as a pathway towards perfection. In his Poetics, he distinguishes rote copying from more advanced forms of ‘simulated representation’. In this context, he discusses the effect that dramatic tragedy has on its audience: it causes its viewers to identify and empathize—to participate vicariously—with the characters and events being represented. As ‘the imitation of an action’, it arouses pity and fear with the goal of ‘effecting the proper purgation (katharsis) of these emotions’. For Aristotle, mimēsis as a form of representation had to be similar to and yet different from the audience’s life experience, simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, if it was to have this kind of cathartic effect.

Early Christian Greek communities inherited this recognition of both the possibilities and limitations of imitation with regard not only to literary or artistic representation, but also to religious practice. As objects of imitation, saints were, on the one hand, profoundly relatable and ‘emulatable’. And yet, on the other hand, by definition they also transcended the everyday experience of even the most pious believers. There was a similar ambivalence in Jain and Buddhist circles, where saints were viewed, by turns, as imitable and inimitable—they were eminently worthy of imitation, but at the same time they typically exceeded the moral capacity of those doing the imitating and thus became objects worthy of veneration. Stories about saints traffic in this ‘mimetic’ space, where human and superhuman capabilities collide. In this way, acts of imitation and veneration simultaneously highlight relational structures of sameness and difference between saints and their devotees.

A large proportion of saints’ Lives have been written by and for monks, and in composing and transmitting such stories monastic authors have typically promoted an ethic of imitation among their readers. As applied to the monastic calling, this ethic is crucially rooted in both past and present models.

First, this ethic traces its authorization back to the life and teachings of the religious founders and early heroes of the faith. From the earliest days of Christian monasticism, hagiographers—writers of saints’ Lives—have cited Jesus as the ultimate prototype for monastic practice, from his forty-day temptation in the desert to his bodily sufferings on the cross. As Edith Wyschogrod has written, ‘A background belief of virtually all Christian hagiography is that saints live their lives in the light of Christ’s life. Imitatio Christi is … the command that guides saintly conduct.’ This can be seen perhaps most vividly in The Little Flowers of St Francis, written sometime in the 1320s, over a hundred years after the saint’s death in 1226 ce. The work begins by underscoring how Francis ‘was conformed to Christ in all the acts of his life. For just as the Blessed Christ, when he began his preaching, chose twelve apostles to despise all things of this world and to follow him in poverty and in the other virtues, so St Francis, when he began to found the order, had twelve chosen companions who were followers of the most complete poverty.’ Just as Francis was conformed to Christ, so too his followers mirrored back the sanctity of the apostles.

In this example, we see how such literature established genealogies of sainthood, mimetic chains that crossed generations, beginning with Christ and the apostles and culminating in saintly figures like Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan brothers who followed in his footsteps. An important link in this chain for the formation of Christian monastic identity was the chorus of early church martyrs, who suffered as Christ suffered and thus served in turn as a model for the suffering of monks. Through their metaphorical death to the world and their perseverance in bodily trials until their own death, the monastic faithful were understood to have inherited the martyrs’ ‘crown of righteousness’ (2 Timothy 4:8). Thus, in one of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, the voice of God tells an unnamed Egyptian monk after nine excruciating years of resisting temptation: ‘These nine years during which you have been tempted were crowns for you.’ Accordingly, Athanasius of Alexandria, in his Life of Anthony (ch. 47.1), describes how, after the early Christian persecutions had ended, the monk Anthony ‘departed and withdrew once again to the cell, and was there daily being martyred by his conscience, and doing battle in the contests of the faith’ through his ‘more strenuous asceticism’.

In Jain and Buddhist monastic discourse, the founding figures Mahāvāra and Gautama Buddha play roles as authorizing paradigms for followers pursuing the monastic path. Thus, in the Jain Kalpa Sutra, the lives of different jinas are presented as the same life recapitulated over and over again, and in the Buddhist Mahapadana Sutta, the Buddha himself narrates the life histories of past Buddhas, who are said to remember what their predecessors did and to follow their example.

In medieval Jainism, however, such mimetic genealogical connections became rather complicated. Stories often presented accomplished monks as devotees of Mahāvāra, and yet at the same time as public figures drawn into the orbit of the royal court in ways that ran counter to earlier ideals of monastic withdrawal. One such example is the biography of the 14th-century monastic luminary Jinaprabhasūri, which describes how Jinaprabhasūri’s ‘many excellent qualities’ mirrored Mahāvāra’s own ‘innumerable wonderful qualities’. And yet, Jinaprabhasūri’s life was characterized by close proximity and access to the Muslim sultan’s court. As the recipient of royal patronage, he lived in a specially built monastic residence right next to the sultan’s palace and installed an image of Mahāvāra on the premises. In so doing, he is said to have ‘emulated the accomplishments of the great monks who had preceded him’, and his deeds are celebrated as ‘exemplary’ for those who followed in his wake. His biographer inserts him into this mimetic chain despite the fact that his lifestyle looked very different from Mahāvāra’s rigorously ascetic withdrawal from the world.

Thus, we see how an ethic of imitation, with its valorization of sameness, could nevertheless find outlet in diverse expressions of monastic practice and piety. As John Kieschnick has noted, a very different ethos is cultivated in medieval Chinese hagiography, where stories abound of Buddhist monks who sought to emulate the Buddha in enactments of self-sacrifice. Just as the Buddha was willing ‘to sacrifice himself for others’ by throwing himself into the sea to feed the fish or by lying down before a tigress and her cubs (as told in Ārya Sˊūra’s Jātakamālā), so too various Chinese monks were said to have surrendered themselves to the bites of insects (as a form of compassion for those creatures), to have offered their own flesh to hungry wild animals or starving villagers, or to have given up their lives to rescue a child from kidnapping or a monastery from looting. One full chapter of the early Liang Biographies is dedicated to monastic heroes who ‘sacrificed their bodies’ (wangshen). Among the various tales collected there is one about a monk named Tancheng who mutely imitates the Buddha by lying down in front of a tiger to save a village. He is eaten but the grateful villagers are left in peace. In China, such stories were often compiled after a monk’s death by his disciples, who would then commission a skilled local writer ‘to work this material into an ornate encomium’.

This brings me to my second point with regard to the ethic of imitation, as it has pertained to the production of saints’ Lives. Namely, such an ethic is profoundly shaped not only by authorizing models from the past, but also by contemporaneous social structures, most notably the core relationship between mentors and their disciples. In receiving instructions from their elders, monastic apprentices are expected to obey without question or hesitation. As such, obedience becomes a cardinal virtue, a visible sign of the apprentice’s desire to conform his or her actions to the mentor’s example. Indeed, the transmission of stories about eminent monks may be seen as a natural extension of their disciples’ reverent obedience to the legacy of their teachers. As Elizabeth Castelli notes, such mimetic relationships between teachers and students are typically ‘hierarchical and asymmetrical’, with the former privileged as a normative model and the latter necessarily in a subordinate position. But sometimes those dynamics can be inverted in unexpected ways.

Two brief examples from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers will suffice to illustrate the complexities of early Christian monastic discipleship. The first is a pithy statement by a monk named Moses that underscores the replicability of obedience as a mimetic practice: ‘Obedience begets obedience; if someone obeys God, God listens to him’ (14.9). Here, the sense of Moses’ teaching is twofold. On the one hand, the obedience exhibited by the mentor monk will be replicated in the obedience of the disciple. On the other, the obedience of the disciple will in turn foster a posture of responsiveness (understood here as a form of reciprocal obedience) on the part of the mentor, whether that be a wiser, older monk or an attentive God. A similar sort of code switching can be seen in a second example: a story from the same collection about a domestic slave who ‘became a monk [and] lived for forty-five years content with salt, bread, and water’. His rigorous ascetic commitment prompted his original owner to adopt the same lifestyle: ‘his master withdrew [from the world] … and he became the disciple of his own slave, [serving him] in great obedience’ (14.31). In these two examples, monastic sainthood is framed in terms of mimetic obedience, but this obedience can sometimes take a reciprocal form that upends and restructures the core mentor–disciple relationship.

In the Lives of Jain and Buddhist saints, such mentor–disciple relationships are complicated by family lineages and the fact that the path to enlightenment in those tales sometimes spans several lifetimes. Thus, one Jain story about ‘The Monk Sukosˊala’ tells of a king named Kīrtidhara who becomes a monk and ‘wanders from place to place, performing extreme asceticism’, his body ‘emaciated from fasting’. His bald head shone with ‘a special lustre that had been imparted to it by the ritual of plucking out his hair that he had performed when he renounced the world’.

During his wanderings, Kīrtidhara comes to the house where his wife Sahadevī and his son Sukosˊala lived. Sahadevī chases him away so that her son would not be attracted to the monastic life, and she bans all ascetics from the city. When his son Sukosˊala learns of his visit, however, he seeks out his father. Finding him, he asks him to make him his disciple: ‘Consecrate me as a monk under your tutelage.’ The son plucks out his hairs, a renunciatory act that notably mimics his father’s own original ritual gesture, and then, having ‘received the vows of the monk from his preceptor’, he sets out with this father.

The rest of the plot narrates how the father and son—now mentor and disciple—withdraw to the forest for the traditional rainy season retreat before resuming their wandering life. As such, the story presents their ascetic path as a paradigm and pattern for later Jain monastics to imitate. The tale finally concludes with a complication and a happy resolution. Sahadevī—Kīrtidhara’s wife and Sukosˊala’s mother—dies and becomes a tigress in her next life. When she encounters the two monks on the road, they stand still in ‘a posture of meditation’, but she pounces on her former son and devours him from head to toe. As a result of his steadfastness, Sukosˊala become ‘Omniscient’ and is ‘released from his body’. His example leads his father to gain omniscience as well, and the tigress is finally ‘awakened to the Truth by Kīrtidhara’s gentle words’. After renouncing everything, she ‘died a pious death’ and ‘went to heaven’. Here, once again, the mimetic chain is shown to flow in both directions. Having followed his father on the path to renunciation, the younger disciple later leads his father-turned-monk on the path to omniscience, and his mother-turned-tigress to a state of awakening.

In an influential article entitled ‘Mimesis and Violence’, René Girard perceptively notes that ‘mimetic rivalry tends toward reciprocity. The model is likely to be affected by the desire of his imitator. He becomes the imitator of his own imitator.’ But Girard also observes that the urge to imitate can lead to violence between antagonists, a situation of conflict only resolved through the mediation of a scapegoat. In the case of Sukosˊala’s story, the boy imitates his father’s asceticism and succeeds to such an extent that he ends up being the one to guide his father to a shared condition of omniscience. At the same time, his mother becomes his mimetic rival for his father’s companionship, and violence ensues. The scapegoat in the story is Sukosˊala’s own flesh, which his mother-turned-tigress tears apart and devours until he is ‘released from his body’. This bodily sacrifice is what is required to resolve the conflict: the mother-tigress is awakened and renounces the world after the pattern of her son and husband, and a promise of happiness is extended to the reader as well, if he or she ‘learns about the greatness of Sukosˊala’. Girard’s insights into the complicated relationship between imitation and violence have been applied to early Christian monastic texts as well, where (as Brian Robinette puts it) the triangulations of ‘mimetic desire … can [also] tend either toward creative mutuality or violent rivalry, with many different shades in between’.

Ascetic saints, spiritual combat, and the making of monks

Girard’s observations about the relationship between mimesis and violence may be extended further in light of how monastic narratives often portray the ascetic life as a form of spiritual combat. Saints held up as exemplars for monastic imitation are often portrayed as engaged in martial contests with human and non-human foes. We have already encountered the image of an early Christian desert father being equipped for battle with the armour (‘breastplate’) of God, and the Jain monk Sukosˊala achieving victory by allowing his body to be torn to shreds by a vicious tigress. What role does the representation of spiritual combat play in the Lives of holy figures, and how does this relate to the portrayal of saints as mimetic models for the monastic life?

In his scholarship on the early Christian ‘holy man’, Peter Brown provides a helpful set of tools for answering these questions. For Brown, the representation of saintly figures in the late Roman world was about the adjudication of social and spiritual power. The Lives of saints represent them in various roles, each of which sheds light on the way that they functioned as channels of divine potency and charisma. As miracle workers, holy persons make their power manifest in imitation of Christ. As arbitrators and mediators between God and humankind, holy persons hold the power to ‘lift the vengeance of God’ by removing the effects of a curse or exorcizing a demon. As strangers to society, they stand ‘outside the ties of family, and of economic interest’, and thus personify a kind of objective authority, similar to that of the ancient Greek oracles. As healers and confessors, they bring the divine near to human supplicants by offering cures and blessings. As patrons and friends of God, they sponsor an economy of gift exchange, serving as intercessors and ambassadors at the divine court on behalf of their faithful clientele and receiving their devotion in turn. As preachers of repentance, they hold sway over human hearts, ‘stirring [them] to contrition’. As privileged liaisons between the human and natural worlds, they calibrate the order and balance of the cosmos. Finally, as ascetic athletes, holy persons train their bodies into powerful vessels for the rigours of renunciatory existence, which sometimes takes the form of visceral, violent combat with demons and other opposing forces.

To get a more textured sense of the role that competition and combat play in the literary representation of saints as models for the monastic life, and how ascetic practice is portrayed as a venue for the exercise of spiritual power, let us turn to the biographies of two famous solitaries, one from late ancient Egypt and the other from medieval Tibet. The first is Anthony, the desert hermit and so-called ‘father of Christian monasticism’. The second is Milarepa, the revered Buddhist yogin and wandering teacher.

At the beginning of the Life of Anthony, its author Athanasius addresses his readers, praising them for having ‘entered on a fine contest with the monks in Egypt, intending … to measure up to or even surpass them in [the] discipline of virtue’. These readers had asked Athanasius about ‘the career of the blessed Anthony’, that they might ‘lead [themselves] in imitation of him’ and ‘emulate his purpose’. Thus, from the start, Athanasius frames his work as being designed to foster imitation of Anthony as a model of one who contended in a monastic ‘contest’ (Greek, hamilla). The word he employs here typically designates athletic competitions, including races and feats of strength. Other similar vocabulary is used throughout the Life to describe Anthony’s ascetic struggles, including the Greek noun athlon (‘contest’) and the Greek verb agōnizesthai (‘to fight, struggle, compete for a prize’).

The portrayal of Anthony’s monastic life as a contest or competition is exemplified by his clashes with demonic forces. During his early ascetic practice, Anthony endures repeated attacks and temptations by the devil, who beset him with ‘memories of his possessions, the guardianship of his sister, the bonds of kinship, love of money and of glory, the manifold pleasure of food, the relaxations of life, and, finally, the rigor of virtue’. The Life depicts Anthony as engaged in a battle over the power of memory, with recollections of life’s pleasures (‘a great dust cloud of considerations’) at war with his memory of Scripture as a guide to virtue.

This visceral spiritual combat is described as simultaneously an internal and external struggle. Satan ‘hurled foul thoughts’ at Anthony, or beset him with ‘titillation’, and Anthony would fend off these temptations through prayer and fasting. The devil first assumed the form of a seductive woman and later appeared to Anthony as a ‘black boy’ (an ancient ethnic stereotype adapted here and elsewhere in early Christian monastic literature as a cipher for sexuality and erotic power). In each case, Anthony successfully resisted the temptations posed and thus prevailed in his ‘first contest (athlon) against the devil’.

Doubling the intensity of his ascetic practice, Anthony relocated to the tombs well outside his village and arranged for friends to provide him with bread for sustenance. There he was attacked by demons with even greater ferocity: he was whipped ‘with such force that he lay on the earth, speechless from the tortures’. Later, when he locked himself in his cell, the demons transformed into a menagerie of beasts and made terrifying noises, raging against him and wounding him in his body.

After these trials of sexual desire and physical assault came temptations of money and wealth. When Anthony moved to a ‘mountain’ and ‘a deserted fortress’, the devil laid a silver dish and pieces of gold along his path. But Anthony was not distracted, nor did he grow tired of the ‘contest’ (agōnizesthai). His renown as a monastic combatant attracted the attention of many aspiring monks, who ‘possessed the desire and will to emulate his asceticism’, and as a result, ‘there were monasteries in the mountains and the desert was made a city by monks, … and like a father he guided them all’.

The Life of Anthony concludes by emphasizing how this ‘multitude of ascetics’ were of ‘one mind’ as they ‘aspired to become imitators of his way of life’. The end of his life was marked by the performance of various miracles: he made demons (in the form of hyenas) flee with a word; he healed a paralysed young woman; he was instantaneously transported from one bank of the Nile to the other; he demonstrated clairvoyance; he prayed and relieved a woman from stomach pain; he experienced divine visions; he exorcized demons and cured people of mental illness. All of these acts elicited responses of wonder and amazement from his disciples and other observers. Indeed, the final chapters of Anthony’s Life negotiate a delicate balance between describing how monks imitated his example and how he became a subject of veneration in both life and death.

The Life ends by emphasizing that Anthony became ‘famous everywhere … in Spain and Gaul, and in Rome and Africa’. In fact, the Life itself became the primary vehicle for the spread of Anthony’s monastic example across the Mediterranean. Athanasius’ work became the closest thing to a New York Times bestselling novel in the early Christian world. Within the span of only a decade or two, Gregory Nazianzen, the bishop of Constantinople, referred to Anthony’s example, calling Athanasius’ biography ‘a rule of monastic life in the form of a narrative’ (Or. 21.5).

Translated into Latin, the Life would eventually come into the hands of Augustine during his time in Milan. In Book 8 of his Confessions, Augustine tells the story of how a Christian named Ponticianus (‘who held a high position in the Emperor’s household’) paid him a visit in his home and told him the story of ‘Anthony, the Egyptian monk’. Augustine had never heard about Anthony before, or about the existence of such monastic communities in the desert. Ponticianus told Augustine how, during a garden stroll outside the city walls of Trêves (modern Trier), two of his friends had come upon a house where some monks lived, and there they found ‘a book containing the life of Anthony’. Picking it up and reading it, one of them abandoned his career and became a monk. After reading further, the two jointly decided to relinquish ‘all they possessed’. Later, the two friends told Ponticianus of how they had ‘dedicated their virginity’ to God.

Hearing this story from Ponticianus caused Augustine’s conscience to gnaw at him and prompted him to walk out into the garden where his famous ‘conversion’ took place. In fact, what Augustine narrates in his autobiography is as much a monastic calling as it is a conversion—a calling modelled after that of Anthony. Augustine hears ‘the sing-song voice of a child in a nearby house’ repeating the refrain, ‘Take it and read, take it and read’, and interprets this as a ‘divine command’ to open his Bible and read the first passage he finds.

This interpretation is specifically inspired by Anthony’s story. Augustine writes: ‘I remembered how [Anthony] had happened to go into a church while the Gospel was being read and had taken it as a counsel addressed to himself when he heard the words Go home and sell all that belongs to you. Give it to the poor, and so the treasure you have shall be in heaven; then come back and follow me. By this divine pronouncement, he had at once been converted to you.’ Immediately thereafter, Augustine opened a scriptural book containing Paul’s letters and read a passage from Romans 14:1, which exhorted him to eschew ‘reveling, drunkenness, lust, wantonness, quarrels, and rivalries’, to ‘spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites’, and to ‘arm’ himself (as if for spiritual combat) ‘with the Lord Jesus Christ’. This scriptural/oracular message—a textual variation on Anthony’s aural revelation—led Augustine to retire from teaching, to withdraw to a life of contemplative retreat, and eventually to found his own monastery in North Africa.

Augustine’s experience is just one example of how Anthony came to serve as the preeminent mimetic model for the Christian monastic calling. In medieval and early modern Europe, Anthony’s battles with demonic temptation would later serve as the inspiration for the monastic Order of St Anthony, which established a network of hospitals to care for people afflicted with a disfiguring ailment called St Anthony’s fire. In this order, Anthony’s reputation as a healing saint became the subject of iconography, including a painted panel on the famous Isenheim Altar (c.1515; Alsace, France), where Anthony is depicted sitting in the desert surrounded by medicinal herbs and fighting demons afflicted with the characteristic pustules of the disease (see Figure 4). Applied to settings ranging from art to medicine, saints like Anthony proved to be eminently adaptable in the pieties and practices of later monastic communities.

4. Painting of St Anthony’s battle with demons, by Mathis von Aschaffenburg (Isenheim Altar, Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1512–16).

As a subject for hagiography, the Tibetan Buddhist ascetic Milarepa (1028/1040–1111/1123 ce) offers an interesting counterpoint for comparison. Despite the fact that his rigorous renunciatory practices, commitment to a life of solitude, and attraction of disciples bear certain resemblances to that of Anthony, in the Tibetan cultural context Milarepa is not considered a monk, but rather a yogin. This distinction is crucial and yet complicated when it comes to the representation of Buddhist holy figures.

In Tibet (and throughout the Buddhist world), monastics are persons who take vows of ordination indicating their obedience to a canonized monastic rule (the Vinaya Piṭaka) and who thus yoke themselves to a residential community (sangha) populated by other ordained monastics. In the history of Christianity, ascetic hermits and their counterparts living under a communal rule have both traditionally qualified as ‘monastics’, but this is not the case in the history of Buddhism, where ‘the monk or nun is not an independent ascetic’ but rather someone who dedicated his or her life to being part of a religious community. A Buddhist yogin (or a female yoginī) is one who is dedicated to the practice of meditation (yoga). Such a figure can live a solitary, celibate life, but this is not necessarily the case. Some yogins establish small communities, taking on the role of lamas (teachers of the path, or dharma). Others associate themselves with previously existing temples or monasteries. Some maintain active sexual lives in conjunction with meditational practices, as is true with certain forms of tantra (a form of ritualized meditation involving the visualization of deities). As such, yogins could occupy a range of social niches within local Buddhist communities.

As we shall see in the case of Milarepa, he straddles a number of the aforementioned categories: in his biographies, he is identified as a yogin, a lama, and a practitioner of tantra. Milarepa’s meditational practice as a yogin stands in opposition to the monastic communities of his day, which were critiqued as too caught up in contemporary politics. And yet, Milarepa’s biographers also sought to present his life as an example for monastic readers to imitate, as a model for implementing alternative ways of being a monk. Milarepa is also honoured as a lama in his role as a teacher and mentor to a community of disciples. And yet, like Anthony, his aspiration was to separate himself and practise his austerities in solitude. Finally, as a practitioner of tantra, Milarepa demonstrated certain ‘supernatural’ or miraculous powers over the natural environment and other people, but in contrast to some of his contemporaries (including his own guru Marpa) he specifically eschewed marriage and sex in his commitment to an ascetic path. This crossing or blurring of categories is one of the factors that have contributed to Milarepa’s status as the Tibetan holy man par excellence. Another is his heroic reputation for overcoming karma and attainment of liberation over the course of a lifespan, a trajectory that his biographers specifically model after that of the Buddha.

I refer to biographers in the plural because several medieval versions of Milarepa’s biography survive. Two of the earliest narratives about his life were written by his 12th-century disciples, Ngendzong Repa and Gampopa. Later versions would incorporate poems attributed to Milarepa himself. By the 13th and 14th centuries, literary compendia such as The Twelve Great Disciples and The Black Treasury combined ‘structured and well-crafted biographical narratives … with extensive song collections’, as well as ‘elaborate descriptions of the yogin’s death’. These were the primary sources that paved the way for what became the standardized version of Milarepa’s Life, written in the 15th century by Tsangnyön Heruka (1452–1507), the iconoclastic tantric lama who called himself the ‘Madman of Western Tibet’. In what follows, I briefly trace the contours of this biography, paying special attention to how the Life of Milarepa came to serve as a mimetic (and somewhat transgressive) model for Tibetan Buddhist piety for a wide readership that included monastic audiences.

Tsangnyön Heruka’s Life of Milarepa is divided into two parts. Part One consists of the first three chapters and concerns Milarepa’s problematic conduct prior to his decision to seek the path to transcendence. Part Two consists of chapters four to twelve and narrates his sufferings under his teacher Marpa, his reception of the dharma instruction, and his life of meditation and self-abnegation leading to full enlightenment.

Chapters one to three describe Milarepa’s genealogy, birth, and upbringing in a wealthy family. His happiness in childhood was interrupted by the death of his father when he was seven years old, and by his family’s subsequent oppressive treatment at the hands of his paternal uncle and aunt, who took their possessions and forced them into abject servitude. Desperately mired in poverty and encouraged by his mother, Milarepa turned to black magic to enact revenge upon his relatives. Having sought out and studied with two lamas specializing in such arts, Milarepa casts a spell that kills thirty-five guests at the wedding feast for his nephew, sparing his uncle and aunt only so that they would know the consequences of his retribution. Later he sends a hailstorm to destroy all the crops in his uncle’s village. These malicious acts of revenge serve as the backdrop for Milarepa’s remorseful decision to repent, renounce the world, and seek out a lama who will teach him the true dharma path to enlightenment.

The first three chapters of Part Two (chapters 4–6) tell the story of his search for a teacher of dharma. After two different teachers prove insufficient, Milarepa ends up at a ‘remote hermitage’ at the feet of Marpa Lotsawa, who is identified as ‘a direct disciple of the great Indian adept Nāropa’.

Marpa becomes Milarepa’s mentor, but subjects him to a draconian series of commands meant to prove his mettle and his preparedness to receive the oral teachings of dharma. Marpa conscripts him to hard labour, commanding him to build four towers and then to tear each one down before he is able to finish. Marpa also resorts to verbal humiliation and physical violence, rebuking Milarepa, beating and kicking him, and throwing him to the ground. As a result, Milarepa’s back bled and ‘festered with sores’. In the midst of these depredations, Milarepa finds inspiration by reading the biography of Taktungu, a famous bodhisattva ‘who, while penniless, was able to renounce life and limb for the dharma’. Eventually, Marpa relents, accepts him formally as his disciple, and reveals his larger purpose: ‘I have only tormented [Milarepa] in order to purify his negative deeds’. To mark his new status as a yogin, Milarepa has his head shaved, changes his robes, takes the vows of a layperson, and receives ‘the bodhisattva precepts’.

The remainder of Part Two (chapters 7–12) narrates Milarepa’s life of meditation, solitude, and arduous mortification of his body, a path that leads to full enlightenment at the time of his death. Inhabiting a series of remote caves, he pursues a strict ascetic regime, persistently refusing to take a wife and instead committing himself to practise the dharma in emulation of his teacher. In Heruka’s biography, Milarepa’s austerities serve as an explicit critique of the ‘worldly pride’ of monks (those who wore ‘golden’ or ‘saffron’ robes and who get distracted by ‘wealth and fame’). At first, Milarepa’s diet consists of gruel (only one load of barley flour a year). Later, he survives only on nettles. As a result, his body ‘became like a skeleton … covered with soft green hair’. His clothes hang in tatters and eventually fall off. He makes these rags into a ‘modesty sleeve’ for his penis; otherwise, he remains naked. When his devoted sister comes to visit, she finds him wasted away, with eyes ‘sunken into their sockets’, with his ‘bones stuck out’. One of Milarepa’s songs included in the Life (ch. 10) goes so far as to compare him to a ‘rotting corpse unseen by vultures’. And yet, despite these signs of physical deterioration, Milarepa demonstrates tremendous feats of bodily control, including ‘transforming [his] body into any desired form and levitating in space … transforming [his] body into blazing fire, gushing water, and the like’, and even transporting his body from one place to another in flight.

The final two chapters of Heruka’s Life of Milarepa catalogue his human and non-human disciples and his places of retreat (which became destinations for pilgrimage visitation and meditation among his followers), and then tell the story of his death by poisoning. His biographer underscores the fact that the poison had its effect only with his consent. Up until his final breath, Milarepa remains in control: he miraculously transports his body to various places to appear before his disciples, he confers his staff and robes upon his disciple Rechungpa, and he orders his body to be cremated. When he dies, ‘dissolving his body into the sphere of reality’, he proves worthy to have achieved enlightenment.

Throughout the standard version of his Life, Milarepa is presented as one who mirrors the Buddha himself and likewise serves as an exemplary model for his followers, among them monastic communities who appropriated his legacy. The structure and ending of Milarepa’s biography underscore the connection with the Buddha’s example. Just as the Buddha performed twelve great deeds, beginning with his birth and ending with his passing into parinirvāṇa, Milarepa too is said to perform twelve ‘supreme deeds’, which correspond to the twelve chapters of his Life. Chapter one in the Life of Milarepa begins with the phrase E ma ho (‘Thus did I hear … ’), which is the same phrase attributed to the Buddha’s cousin and close disciple Ānanda, words that signified ‘his perfect recitation from memory of the Buddha’s teachings at the first monastic council’. Indeed, Milarepa is described by one of his own disciples as a buddha or bodhisattva ‘from the start’. Finally, Milarepa’s death replays key elements of the Buddha’s passing: his death by food poisoning; the failure of the funeral pyre to light until the appearance of a beloved disciple; and a dispute among his followers over the cult of relics.

This mimetic framework is reinforced in Milarepa’s relationships with his mentor Marpa and with his cadre of disciples. These relationships constitute a ‘dharma lineage of enlightened activity’. The Life emphasizes the ‘pristine connection’ between master and student: they are ‘equal in kindness’ and their ‘minds … are intermingled’. His followers are exhorted to ‘follow [his] example and practice’ by meditating in the places where he meditated and by transmitting his sacred biography. In this context, one of his songs extols ‘those who act and practice with my life in mind, those who write or teach or listen to it, read it or pay it respect, and those who emulate my life’. Indeed, the biographer Tsangnyön Heruka himself would later be celebrated as a privileged incarnation of Milarepa, with one 13th-century historian (Chökyi Wangchuk) noting an incarnation lineage—‘a series of manifestations with identical qualities’—that culminated with Heruka.

Despite the fact that Milarepa’s biography was framed as a critique of complacent monastic practice, ordained Tibetan monks in fact played prominent roles as devotees and literary caretakers of his memory. Six of Milarepa’s closest disciples were fully ordained monks, and the Life itself concludes with a colophon identifying the work as ‘a feast for monks who renounce the world’ as well as ‘a feast for renunciants who’ve relinquished attachments’. One of his closest followers, Gampopa Sönam Rinchen, was responsible for ‘promoting Milarepa’s tradition of yogic practice within a monastic framework’, and scores of monks played an instrumental role in composing, editing, copying, and preserving the various versions of his Life. Milarepa’s literary lineage extended to female monastics as well. One notable case is Orgyan Chokyi (1675–1729 ce), a nun from Dolpo, Nepal, who was the first documented woman to write an autobiography in Tibetan. As Kurtis Schaeffer has observed, this ‘Himalayan hermitess’ partially modelled her own life story—especially its recurrent themes of tears and suffering—after Heruka’s biography of Milarepa.

As in the case of the Christian St Anthony, we also have examples of how Milarepa’s legacy was reappropriated in the visual culture of Buddhist monks. One of the earlier proto-versions of his Life contains painted illustrations that subtly reshape the yogin into a monastic saint. On one folio, both his mentor Marpa and his disciple Gampopa are depicted in the robes and hats of monastic scholars. Elsewhere, other disciples of Milarepa are depicted in the distinctive garb of fully ordained monks with their right hands raised to their ears in a gesture of singing, a posture clearly meant to copy Milarepa’s standard depiction. Such representations established a ‘direct equivalence’ where the monastic image of the devotee stood in for (but also redefined) the image of the saint. Thus, we see how even a non-monastic saint could serve as a mimetic model for monastic piety, but at the same time how monastic devotees could reshape the image and legacy of that same saint to their own purposes.