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 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.