The Hermit's Hut: Architecture and Asceticism in India

Introduction: The Architecture of Asceticism

1 Introduction The Architecture of Asceticism He looks at his house with (the words): Give us a house, O Fathers! —Gobila Gṛhya Sūtra1 I refuse a roof —Dhutaṇga practitioner2 With the declaration “Architect, you shall not build your house again,” Siddhārtha Gautama3 announces his arrival at the critical destination called nirvāṇa and acquires the qualities of a mahāsamana, a superascetic.4 Siddhārtha, likening his ascetically charged body to a building , describes the inconceivable and ineffable moment of becoming the Buddha. In that pairing of body and building, architecture is positioned for a portentous destiny in the Buddhist imagination. This is made evident when the Buddha provides a cataclysmic scenario for the momentous turn of the building-body. “The roof rafters are shattered,” he announces , and “the roof is destroyed.” The metaphor, while narrating the engineering of the ascetic body, is also evidence of the deeply imbricated significance of architecture in ascetic discourse and practices. The image of a building has already come to haunt the imagination of asceticism. Six years earlier, the Buddha, then known as Siddhārtha, had awakened in his magnificent palace in Kapilavāstu and, like so many others before him motivated by a similar compulsion, stole out in the middle of the night, leaving home and family, the very core of dwelling. Thus ensues the operatic process of renunciation and asceticism. Searching for answers to burning existential questions and looking for liberation from suffering, Siddhārtha wandered through forests and glades, living under trees or in basic shelter and visiting the āśramas of sages and hermits. While the ascetic Siddhārtha eventually found his climactic answer, as conveyed in the narrative of the destroyed house-body, and went on to propound a world-turning philosophy and disciplined institution of monastic practices, he, as well as his disciples and followers after him, was vexed by the fundament that he began with, the matter of dwelling. After renouncing house and home, even the Buddha required some 2THE HERMIT’S HUT form of lodging. So did his followers. Dwelling for the superascetic included living under a tree, in a cave, or in a simple shelter. Each became the occasion for a continual debate and struggle in various ascetic circles on the nature of dwelling, its minimal requirements, and its implications in the life of an ascetic. Some of these deliberations, continuing for hundreds of years after the Buddha, formed the core of ritual and regulatory texts for monks. Prescribed with an ideal life of wandering and alms collecting, the earliest group of Buddhist monks encountered the exigency of dwelling during the rainy seasons of northern India. The monks were urged to interrupt their wandering to take up temporary residence for the rainy period. The practice of taking temporary shelter from the rain led to the formation of stable and permanent monasteries. Even the Buddha was thus assigned lodging and an address. Though he moved from city to city, teaching and preaching, he nonetheless stayed in particular compounds in each city and lived in a dedicated building. From what we know, such buildings were simple and unassuming compared with the elaborate houses in the city, but the house of the Buddha, known as the gandhakuṭī, or the fragrant hut, came to receive a focused attention from monks and laypeople and remains a source of didactic and philosophical reflection in Buddhist asceticism. It appears that the matter of dwelling, addressed as a house or hut, is a critical factor in the trajectory of the ascetic project. To put it another way, the narratives of asceticism are deeply etched by the profile of a hut. In the Mahāyāna story of Vimalakīrti, a transformation of a mansion emblematizes the profound and subtle notions around “emptiness.” The story relates how the ascetically empowered merchant Vimalakīrti, upon learning of the impending arrival of a large emissary from the Buddha to his grand house, divests it of everything, makes it empty so that it can hold multitudes.5 Vimalakīrti is most likely an apocryphal figure, and so is the narrative of the transformation of the house, but in the Vimalak īrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, the story of the magical mutation of the house from fullness to emptiness becomes a discourse on ascetic prerogatives and motivations. Little was anticipated of how the story of a well-to-do man of the world transforming his mansion in the city to a plain, empty house...