Reviewed by:
Jack David Eller
ABSTRACT: A richly-illustrated and thoughtful study of huts and other humble dwelling-places of Buddhist asceticism explores important issues of materiality, embodiment, primitiveness, and finality with implications far beyond the early Buddhist context.
Kazi Ashraf aptly characterizes the ascetic project as "operatic" (p. 1) in his interesting new book on Buddhist architecture, renunciation, and dwelling. As Shayne Clarke demonstrated in Family Matters in Indian Buddhism Monasticisms (reviewed elsewhere in ARD), another publication by University of Hawai'i Press and a fine companion piece to Ashraf's book, early Indian Buddhists did not sever all ties with the social world nor even with their families. The metaphor of the 'lone rhinoceros' was just that, a metaphor and not a lived reality. Renunciants, monks, ascetics, and self-mortifiers still live in the physical world (even if, as Christian evangelicals like the say, they are not 'of the world'-- although they are more of the world than they think). Thus, just as the family and all links to the lay world are not shattered by Buddhist vows and monastic life, so the other Buddhist metaphor that 'the roof rafters are shattered, the roof is destroyed' is more rhetorical than literal. Buddhist monks still had and have roofs, and dwelling places were and are as central to the tradition as to any other religious and cultural tradition.
In a richly-illustrated treatise, Ashraf investigates "how a hut belonging to the ascetic structures the world of elaboration" in Buddhism (p. 3), the hut and the monk's body being equal sites of dwelling (and the hut being a location for placing the body). In other words, "While asceticism is understood as a practice of renunciation and reduction, it also involves intrinsically an architectural project with immediate implications of spatial rootedness and material embellishment" (p. 3). Accordingly, in the introduction Ashraf presents the architectural motif of the hut, which was incorporated in various ways into much more impressive structures. From its origins as probably an actual humble hut, "the simple hut form acquired a special status, that is, became clearly and visually identified as a shrine" (p. 5). He also establishes that the hut plays a crucial role in the Buddhist ideology of 'homelessness' (the concept behind the operatic statement that the roof is shattered, that is, the 'home' is permanently demolished). Ashraf's main point, then, is that "while homelessness is literally the abandonment of architecture, dwellings and lodgings nonetheless remain key mandates for monastic ideologies and practices" (p. 10), if only because even monks must be somewhere but more profoundly because even the most other-worldly or unworldly ideas must be inscribed on the world, including and especially on the body, in some way. This is why he sees not only the hut but the "body- hut" as "the site and instrument of demonstrating an existentially reorganized life" (p. 21).
The first chapter focuses on the fundamental relationship between asceticism and architecture, including in Indian religious tradition before and parallel to Buddhism. Obviously, Hinduism promoted a practice of homelessness for various actors, such as "samnyasin (renouncer), parivrajaka (wanderer), vairagi (dissenter), and bhikkhu (monk or alms receiver)" (p. 26). Indeed, almost certainly all religious traditions have a practice of separating oneself from the mundane as a sort of preparation for or participation in a non- mundane role or ritual. Discussing the contrast between the ordinary householder and the 'forest dweller,' Ashraf makes the salient but often overlooked point that ascetics do not necessarily hate the world and life in it but rather have a goal of "achieving the highest human potential" (p. 28). We too often forget that 'asceticism' comes from the root for exercise or discipline, which is meant to convey both the labor that is entailed and the perfected state that is sought. Like an elite athlete, some of the dross of everyday life must be sacrificed in order to concentrate on developing one's potential and performing at a higher level. Before the hut there is nature itself, literally and metaphorically understood as the forest (or perhaps more generally the 'wilderness'), which serves "as a spatial laboratory for this new breed of human type" (p. 34-5). Therefore, in their ontological "decreation" (p. 38), nature was the primal setting or stage, and early Buddhism privileges the tree or the cave as the proper dwelling place for the enlightenment seeker.
The second chapter turns to the larger question of 'home' in ascetic thinking, Ashraf claiming that the Buddhist concept of pabbaja or homelessness "also maintains a lingering presence of domesticity in ascetic ideology" (p. 49). He examines the Vedic term grhya for home, noting its materiality as well as its social and ritual rootedness: home was where the "sacred hearth fire" (p. 58) was and where family rituals were conducted. For the Vedic householder, then, to be in the world required "the maintenance and continuation of the ritual fire in order to uphold the moral, cosmic, and social orders" of the grhya (p. 63). This explains why "the snuffing out of the ritual fire, that is, the total rejection of the sacrificial praxis, remains the ultimate goal of the ascetic project" (p. 64). But while the ideal of homelessness is endless wandering, Ashraf insists of course that such wandering is also punctuated by stopping and ultimately by dwelling, which exposes the monk (Buddhist or otherwise) to the "paradox of dwelling" (p. 71).
The original Buddha's final enlightenment supposedly occurred while sitting under a tree, which leads us to the third chapter and the subject of the Buddha's place or house. The 'Buddha's house,' he explains, 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" (p. 78). These imaginaries of Buddhist dwelling shape material structures, from their basic design to the fine adornment of those structures. For instance, many statues and buildings depict the Buddha under a tree or bough or in a cave or actually occupying a hut. Naturally, since he was more than an ordinary man, the "place of the Buddha" was and is portrayed as a "fragrant house" or gandhakuti, complete with flowers and perfumes. And ultimately, since the Buddha is 'thus gone,' the hut and its attendant architecture function as sites "in which the Buddha's presence could be recaptured for and by devotees" (p. 99). One of the most significant such places, Ashraf finds, was the harmika or cube atop the stupa, the name of which literally means 'little dwelling' and which stands in for the 'hut on the mountain' and works as the "zero point," "the last vestige of embodiment or incorporation" (p. 104) in Buddhist experience.
As mentioned, humans dwell in the world and in their bodies, so the fourth chapter expands to consider the 'two houses' of building and body. Just as Buddhists dwell in physical places, so Buddhist enlightenment dwells in the body, leaving such marks as the usnisa or protuberance on the head. In short, as anthropologists have become comfortable in acknowledging, the "narrative of body and building, as far as the ascetic discourse is involved, delineates a curious condition of twinness in which the two morphologically and systemically distinct subjects are paired with varying degrees of mutuality" which is more than a metaphorical statement but "a literal bodily and material fusion" (p. 128)
In the fifth chapter, Ashraf raises a subject that should be of high interest to anthropologists, namely the subject of 'primitivism.' In this case, the specific question is a "constructed or construed primitiveness of almost all ascetic and renunciatory practices" (p. 131). As in much of Western thinking (especially but not exclusively 'cultural tourism'), 'primitive' tends to equate to 'ancient' and, still more basically, 'authentic.' But whether in early Buddhism or in twenty-first century America, 'the primitive' is a paradigm—and an imagination—of the society that is anything but primitive. Similarly if not equally for both, the "intentional primitiveness of the hermit- ascetic"--or of the tourist, the artist, or the anthropologist—represents "extrasocial being" (p. 140) and "a set of dissatisfactions with normative society and a desire to establish an alternative norm" (p. 141). And who in the modern world—or the ancient Indian world—does not have a set of dissatisfactions with the society around them?
The sixth and seventh chapters bring the thought- provoking study to a close. Ashraf reiterates that an analysis of the humble hut takes us to a discourse on the "practicalities, contingencies, and paradoxes" of the dwelling itself and of dwelling in general (p. 152). The hut certainly has many meanings and connotations, not the least of which are "a contrived primitivization and an articulated passage" (p. 169). It is also at once a cosmic space and the most intimate space, our very body. In the closing pages, Ashraf evokes the image of the 'last hut' which communicates a kind of finality that he contrasts with the Christian message of other-worldliness and eschatology. Unlike Christianity, in Buddhism "there is hardly any concern with regaining a lost or past 'paradise'"--or returning to the 'first hut' or the primal and perfect order before the dissatisfactions intruded; instead, the "finality of Buddhist asceticism is a first-time and onetime event; it is neither a regaining...nor an approximation of an ideality" (p. 174). The 'last hut' of the Buddhist ascetic is not a search for the beginning but for a new beginning, and Ashraf's informed research encourages us to seek new beginnings for thinking about asceticism, space, and the body that we dwell in.