2 - The Ascetic and the Domestic in Brahmanical Religiosity

Summary

The theme of this volume is “Criticizing Asceticism” within the respective religious traditions that we are examining. The assumption is that the groups and individuals within those traditions who engage in the critique, as well as modern scholars who investigate such critiques, have a clear idea of what they are criticizing; that is, that they and we know what “asceticism” is. My own paper is entitled “The Ascetic and the Domestic” with the implication that, on the one hand, the two are mutually opposed and, on the other, we have a clear idea of what “domesticity” means. These are presuppositions that I will attempt to problematize here with material drawn from the Indian traditions, with the expectation that some of the issues I raise will be relevant cross-culturally in the study of religion in general and of asceticism in particular.

Scholars frequently speak of “domestication of asceticism” or “domestic asceticism”; some of my past works have also focused on these topics (Olivelle 1995a). The implied corollary, although often left unstated, is that asceticism is wild; at least that is the implication in other uses of the qualifier “domestic” as in “domestic animals” that are the opposite of ordinary animals, which are by definition wild. Such a conclusion appears to be supported by ancient Indian texts on ascetic life, texts that often oppose “wilderness” (araṇya)–the locus of the ascetic–to “village” (grāma)–the locus of domus, the home and the domestic, and of ordinary people engaged in social, economic, and ritual activities (Olivelle 1990; below pp. 44–62).