Religious social recluses can be defined in two ways. They can be defined as ascetics (sramana, tapasvin, arahan, and yogin), who are "engaged in the project of the metamorphosis of the self," or they can be defined as renouncers (the samnyasin, parivrajaka, vairagi, and bhikkhu), who, according to Indian historian, Romila Thapar, are people who "had deliberately chosen to dissociate themselves from the beliefs, rituals, and social obligations of a complex society with the aim of discovering an alternate path to salvation because of disillusionment with the existing ways."
"Ascetic" derives from the Greek "askesis," meaning "rigorous, laborious exercise." "Sramana" derives from the Indian noun "srama," meaning labor.
The Vinaya, which are Buddhist texts meant to instruct sramanas, say that the human being only needs four hissayas (that on which something depends): Pindiyalopabhojana (obtaining food by beggin), pamsukulacivara (securing clothing by collecting rags), puimuttabhesajja (urine as medicine), and rukkhamula-senasana (dwelling under a tree). For the ascetics, the first step begins with leaving the familiar and the comfortable and stripping down to extreme degrees.
The dwelling-spaces of ascetics are mentioned in some of the oldest Buddhist texts as well as documents from some of the earlist known parts of the Vedic period. The dwelling-space of a ascetic-renouncer has to contribute to an environment of "laborious exercise." As a human-made construction that offers stability, it also presents a unique challenge for a group of people who are attempting to reject social conditioning and shed desire.
The yaksa is a venerated, archaic being who lives in a trees known as a caityas. The Buddha was once mistaken for a yaksa when he was living an ascetic life in the wilderness. For these reasons, the caityas arch is a common architectural motif for the Buddha.
A caitya arch framing the Buddha and his students
A etching of the Buddha sitting under a caitya arch
Quote by the Buddha: "It can be expected that when a bhikkhu lives alone withdrawn from society, he will obtain at will, without trouble or difficulty, the bliss of renunciation, the bliss of seclusion, the bliss of peace, the bliss of enlightenment."
The Buddha also once said that people needed to go to "the forest, the root of a tree, a mountain, a revine, a hillside, cave, a channel ground, a jungle thicket, an open space, a heap of straw." He said that these secluded places were the ideal environments to achieve enlightenment.
On top of saying this, an important caveat was added by the Buddha. He said that the extreme renunciation of all things (society included) was a decision based on "mere taste and liking." He also stated that seclusion itself wasn't what lead to enlightenment. Enlightenment could only be reached with a "conductive environment," and if a person's seclusion was unconductive, then that person needed to pursue another path. Furthermore, the Buddha's sariputta (disciples) later stipulated that if the practicioner was "haughty and had no manners," then the solitary lifestyle wouldn't benefit him and he'd need be around other monks for them to essentially set him straight. A solitary lifestyle was certainly encouraged in Buddhist traditions, but there was ambivilance around what that lifestyle actually looked like.
Caves were found in the Barabar Hills, which contained stone huts dating back to 250 BCE. These huts likely belonged to the Ajirika, a sect of Buddhist ascetics. The caves contain "stark and rough interiors." These stone huts were known as guha.
Exterior of a caitya cave in Kondone
Interior of the Sudama Cave in the Barabar Hills (261 BCE)
Kuti and guha are exceedingly plain and rooted in nature, creating an effect called "ascetic primitism." This effect calls to mind "not the first human but the essential human...unmedicated, unorigional, nonconditioned." They're designed to be places free from distraction that allow for the "unity of atman (individual self) with brahman (universal Self)."
There are five pysical spaces that ascetics are allowed to occupy. These spaces are known as pancalenanis. They are the vihara, addhayoga, pasada, hammiya, and guha. The vinhara are the most common. They're monasteries that can be occupied by one or more residents. The guha, as I've mentioned before, are caves.
The ascetic movement goes back as far as the fifth century BCE, in direct response/renunciation to the early Vedic traditions of the householder, or gahapati. The ascetic, the vanaprashti, rejected the grama (socialized space) and went after the vana (wilderness) in an attempt to escape samsara.
A line from the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad: "The great unborn self, indeed, is he who among the senses consists of knowledge. In the space within the heart lies the controller of all, the lord of all, the ruler of all...He is the lord of all, he is the ruler of beings, and he is the protector of beings. He is the causeway that seperates and keeps these worlds apart. It is he that Brahmins seek to know by reciting the Vedas, by sacrifies, by gifts, by penance, and by fasting...It is he, desiring whom as their world, wandering ascetics wander forth...Rising above the desire for sons, the desire for wealth, and the desire for worlds, they lead a mendicant life."
Another text declares: "The household life is a dusty path full of hindrances, while the ascetic path is like the open sky. It is not easy for a man who lives at home to practice the holy life in all its fullness, in all its purity, in all its bright perfection."
"The ascetic is not a social deviant but a significant personality and a force to be reckoned with." In Buddhist tradition, asceticism plays a part in being human. It isn't just a practice to be pursued by a select few, but something that everyone's encouraged to practice in some way.
"The perfected ascetic marked the nexus of humanity and divinity...the fullest potential of humanity," and this potential could only be reached "through the endurance of self-inflicted suffering."
Being a householder and a member in a socialized environment meant being rooted in a cycle of aimless drifting, wandering, or mundane existence (samsara).
The forest presented itself as the best place for ascetics because it was considered the dwelling space of gods, it was dialectic with the human landscape, and it was heterotopic, meaning it was an area of otherness that allowed for new potential and possibility.
A painting of a yogi in front of his hut
Statues of Brahmanical hermits in front of their huts
The Buddha was said to have first reached enlightenment under a fig tree.
The Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification) texts say that all an ascetic needs is the root of a tree to take as an abode. The ascetic should "refuse a roof." The tree was also an appealing dwelling because it was "valueless, easy to get, and blameless." It wasn't a building, which could be associated with "valorization and social values."
According to Buddhaghosa, a fifth-century student of the Buddha, there were three classes involved with living under a tree. The strictest class meant you weren't allowed to clean up the tree's fallen leaves in any way. The semi-strict class meant you could allow passers-by to clean it up for you. The mild class meant you could allow monastery novices to clean up the space as well as "level it, strew sand, and make a fence" around it.
The term, vihara, is frequently mentioned as the dwelling-space for Buddhist monks. In texts such as the Rig Veda, they're associated with terms like "staying" or "residing," but also "to keep seperate." The word can also mean "distribution" and "strolling/wandering" and "a place for recreation." The meaning changed a lot throughout the progression of Buddhism in its earliest iterations, and can reflect the progression, evolution, and splintering of Buddhist practice. With asceticism comes the questions of what to strip away and how much to strip away and how to go about stripping away, which allows for many different interpretations and disagreement and ambilvilance.
In the ascetic traditions, the first step is always pabbaja (going forth), which involves leaving behind your home and your social existence and stepping into the wilderness. However, for many ascetics, it was okay if you weren't alone by yourself. It was also okay for you to gain a following. And oftentimes the solitary part of the path was somewhat temporary. You were expected to follow the life of the Buddha, but even though the Buddha was an ascetic, he also had a large group of followers and spent a lot of time in large cities and towns.
The idea of a hermit hut presents a paradox. Home is a practical, "situated condition" that requires a physical location. If we use the word "home" in its broadest terms, then you can't really live in the world without eventually finding something close to a "home." But the ascetic life was one of "sitelessness" and an opposition to stasis. So the ascetic-renouncer is constantly renouncing home, but in doing so is constantly finding another home from the act of renunciation. Basically, so long as you're somewhere, you're living somewhere, so there's no such thing as living nowhere. But if you're living somewhere, then you're probably still rooted in samsara. So the question is, how do you find this "nowhere" in order to get out of "somewhere"?
The Mahavagga texts instructed ascetics to stop wandering during the monsoon season. While the ascetics were in stasis, they began to gather together. These created the vassa-avasas (literally translated as rainy retreats). In old traditions of extreme isolation, you can trace the gradual socialization and organization of its members.
In old traditions of extreme isolation, you can trace the gradual socialization and organization of its members.
Another effect of ascetic architecture was to lead sramanas into a progression that led them inward and upward. They would cross stone torana (gateways) and spiral up pradaksina-patha (circumambulatory path).
Furthermore, the starkness of the hermit hut's design meant that is was "integrally connected to the dweller." These dwellings demanded a "spatial my-ness" that made it difficult for someone attempting to go beyond the "my."
Hermit huts were sometimes measured with sugata-spans. The word Sugata roughly translates to "one who has gone to the better" and is mainly used as an epithet for the Buddha. A sugata-span measurement is literally just the estimated measurements of the Buddha. There's been some controversy over these measurements, with some measurements referred to as "freakish." The average sugata-span is about 25 cm. The Pratimoksa Sultra states that a hut should be twelve sugata-spans long and seven sugata-spans wide, so roughly 3 meters by 1.75 meters.
The human body is sometimes equivicated to a dwelling in Buddhist texts. It's referred to as the "last hut," meaning your last ever dwelling-place keeping you rooted in samsara.
A stupa is a Buddhist shrine. It is a domed hut polysemous with death and commemoration. The stupa is sometimes referred to as a "initiation hut" where "one dies to get reborn," or the garbhagrha, or "womb chamber." The stupa is the final resting point of the ascetic. It's a place where the ascetic reaches a zero point of nirvana, or a "usnisa," which is the climax of ascetic medition. "At the zero point, there can be no identity." "All that is mortal is contained within, all that is immortal exceeds the structure."
On the top of the stupa's dome is a harmika. The harmika is a little structure that symbolize the "world tree" or the "cosmic axis in Buddhist belief" which sits on top of a "world mountain." The harmika is sometimes decorated with human eyes, suggesting that the whole stupa could be made to resemble a meditating ascetic, with the harmika the head, the stupa body the torso, and the stupa base the crossed legs.
The nature of the hermit dwelling is a "perpetual human dilemma," containing two contrary ideas. You are constantly experiencing a "being-in-the-world" while also constantly "being outside it."
Head of the Fasting Buddha, Gandhara
Layouts of various cave spaces occupied by ascetics
Geoffery Harpham, an academic and author, argues that the ascetic lifestyle is "a constructive dimension of human life." He posits that an inherent aspect of being alive in a culture is "an ambivalent yearning for the precultural, postcultural, anticultural, or extracultural." Essentially, there's a teeny-weeny part of all of us that wants to live in a little hut on the fringe of society because part of being alive on this Earth is discontent with being alive on this earth. And the ascetic-renouncer and his hermit hut reflects that. He's both a symptom of discontent and someone on a mission to escape discontent.
Asceticism may be inherently paradoxical for many of the reasons I just discussed. This is partly why Buddhist philosophy frequently encourages a rejection of dualism, where things can only be one thing or the other. However, even though "it is not enough, for Buddhist asceticism, to merely posit an opposite with the constructed binary. It is also not...simply a dialogical structure where one infiltrates the other, informing and shaping each other...It reserves for itself a very particular and dedicated axis leading toward the enigmatic goal of self-transformation." Essentially, while the core of asceticism is the stripping down of the soul to reach whatever the prevailing social environment has covered, the ascetic is constantly on a path that leads him back to the prevailing society.
"The hermit's hut is dwelling at the social fringe and presents its undeniable and contrived coareseness as a badge of honor. Like other figures on the social fringe, the hermit-ascetic defines a certain kind of cultivated estrangement and alienation but as prerequisites for a larger goal. The ascetic hut is inhabited by a very particular dweller who, not unlike the escapee or renegade, is more or less a solitary and self-absorbed creature but operating from and within a more defined and clearer sense of ideology, intellection, and purpose. The ascetic has a project: the plan to transform himself...Being an extra-societal being, as one on the fringe of society, is an interim stage for becoming an extraordinary figure."
Line from the book, Ten Foot Square Hut: "I am now sixty years old, and this hut in which I shall spend the last remaining years of my dew-like existence...It is a cottage of quite a peculiar kind, for it is only ten feet square and less than seven feet high...but in this little impermanent hut of mine all is calm and there is nothing to fear."
Etching of ascetics around a fire (third century)
A statue of the Brahmanical ascetic, Kasyap, in his hermit kuti (second century)
