Living with the Dead as a Way of Life: A Materialist Historiographical Approach to Cemetery Asceticism in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms
Abstract: This study challenges the long-standing scholarly conception that ascetic practice was incompatible with the institutional imperatives of the Indian Buddhist monastery in the \"middle period.\" Drawing upon the rich narrative tradition in Indian Buddhist law codes (Vinaya), I emp...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
[2019]
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| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Year: 2019, Volume: 87, Issue: 3, Pages: 824-859 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Tipiṭaka. Vinayapiṭaka
/ Buddhism
/ Asceticism
/ Dead person
/ Cemetery
/ Residency
/ Meditation
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| RelBib Classification: | AG Religious life; material religion BL Buddhism KBM Asia |
| Online Access: |
Presumably Free Access Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | Abstract: This study challenges the long-standing scholarly conception that ascetic practice was incompatible with the institutional imperatives of the Indian Buddhist monastery in the \"middle period.\" Drawing upon the rich narrative tradition in Indian Buddhist law codes (Vinaya), I employ a new hermeneutical approach in order to demonstrate that cemetery (śmaśāna) asceticism remained central to the Buddhist monastic lifestyle. I begin with an extended methodological discussion that locates my approach—what I call materialist historiography—in a genealogy of scholarship that reads literary texts for an anthropology of everyday life. I then draw from a wide range of Vinaya narratives to argue that, despite the increasingly vocal presence of a Brahmanical purity party, the ascetic practices of residing in the cemetery, meditating on corpses, scavenging for goods on the charnel ground, and stripping corpses of their funeral shrouds remained an everyday affair in the monastery. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfz040 |