7 - Deconstruction of the Body in Indian Asceticism

Summary

Asceticism, modern scholarship has often argued, is a cornerstone of Indian religions. It was fashionable not too long ago to contrast Indian religions, with their life-and-world negating tendencies, to the life affirming religions of the west. Louis Dumont's (1960) seminal study, “World Renunciation in Indian Religions,” pointed out the inadequacy of that generalization by showing what Heesterman (1985) has called “the inner conflict of the tradition,” that is, the conflict between world-renouncing and world-affirming ideologies within the history of Indian religious traditions. Dumont's own emphasis on world renunciation as the dominant and creative force within Indian religious history has been recently subjected to review and correction (Madan 1987). Indeed, Dumont's structural dichotomy between the renouncer and the man in the world is tenable only at the level of ideal types: the lived reality of both the ascetics and people living in society was much more complex and much less tidy.

The more significant point of Dumont's analysis, in my view, is the dialectical and creative relationship and tension in which the ascetic and the societal dimensions of Indian religions existed and developed both ideologically and in their institutions and practices. This relationship is the point of departure for this paper, which examines the ascetic creation of the human body. But, like most aspects of Indian ascetic ideology and practice, the ascetic creation of the body can be understood adequately only within its structural relationship to the human body as social creation.