Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticism.

McDaniel, Justin Thomas

Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticism. By SHAYNE CLARKE. Honolulu: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I PRESS, 2014. Pp. xvi + 275. $52; Family in Buddhism. Edited by Liz WILSON. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2013. Pp. 298. $85 (cloth) (Rpt. [paper], 2014. $28.95.)

When reading a book about the history of Buddhist monasticism in India, one does not usually come across sections on pregnant nuns, monks getting divorced, and monastic childcare issues. However, Shayne Clarke's long-awaited book, Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticism, contains sections on these subjects and many more. It is one of the most refreshing books on early Buddhism to come out in quite some time and will help students and scholars completely rethink the very idea of celibate monasticism, the solitary life of a nun or monk, and the act of renunciation. While this book does not offer theoretical contributions on issues of asceticism, childhood, or gender in the study of religion and makes only a few short comparative gestures, it does offer a robust methodological example of ways of reading early Buddhist monastic codes and helps rewrite the history of early Buddhism. While one might crave a clear argument from Clarke in an introduction and a clear series of concluding thoughts and future considerations in a conclusion, Clarke spreads his argument over the entire book, very effectively in my view, and demands that the reader walk along with him through this fascinating series of primary sources. The book is more like a series of well-researched lectures than a book that tells a comprehensive story of monastic life. Each chapter could be read alone quite easily and still be understood. He does what a good writer does--he shows, he doesn't tell.

Clarke acknowledges his deep debt to the mentorship and influential writing of Gregory Schopen, the scholar most associated with the close study of the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya and well known for showing how Buddhist nuns and monks even in our earliest records were involved in seemingly nonmonastic and non-cloistered activities like commerce, property disputes, relic "cults," and material culture. However, he does not simply continue the work of his teacher. He focuses on childhood and motherhood to a much greater extent and uses Chinese and Japanese primary and secondary sources, looking at a wide range of materials for early monastic history. I particularly appreciated his bringing the work of Nobuyuki Yamagiwa and Shisuka Sasaki to the attention of the German- and Englishfocused scholars of early Buddhist history. He also writes for a more general audience, and this book certainly could be used for undergraduate courses, while being a thoroughly researched scholarly study. While he is directly critical of the work on early monasticism by Wilson, Ohnuma, Mabbet, Cole, Tsomo, Spiro, Young, and others (his sustained criticism [pp. 24-36] of Alan Cole's work is particularly illuminating), this book does not pummel the reader with petty academic score-settling. It seeks to paint a clear picture, based on available sources without over-reaching speculation, of how nuns and monks dealt with sexual relations, children, marriage, and familial responsibilities.

The book begins with an in-depth analysis of the association of the Buddhist monk with the single horn of the rhinoceros--a picture of a solitary ascetic, friendless and focused, walking alone, face to the wind. Clarke shows how this picture of the non-attached monk has worked to overshadow the considerable evidence that monks and nuns did not completely abandon their families after they ordained. I would have hoped that he would offer a bit more historiographical reflection on how scholars of Buddhism brought the "normative" ideal of Catholic monasticism, based in part on the rule of Saint Benedict, to the study of Buddhism (perhaps as a response in some ways to Schopen's well-known "Protestant Buddhism"), but he does offer a model of how to look at Brahmanic sources on family law and asceticism. Instead of a sustained theoretical reflection on how to think about the relation between family and monasticism in the study of religion, this opening chapter offers a review of the primary sources mined for this book and suggests ways of looking for what is not in the sources (pp. 29-36). Namely, a method of asking why the authors of the precepts in the various traditions of early Buddhism were so detailed in their explication of certain rules, but silent on others. He also explains the two types of monastic law that emerge from this period--precepts focused on individual action and precepts meant to create a certain sense of community.

Finally, he mentions and then demonstrates throughout the book that rules of the second type were often about creating an image of monastic deportment that would look appropriate to the surrounding lay community. Maintaining an aesthetic and behavioral ideal of monasticism was essential for the survival of a monastic religion, even though nuns and monks were often not censured individually for bending and breaking rules. Indeed, from the accumulated quotes of the Buddha explaining a precept, he often seems like a "softy." More often than not the reader gets the impression that the Buddha (or the writers of the rules using the Buddha's voice) was an understanding leader who let many infractions go as long as the image of an ascetic community was maintained. For example, Clarke mentions a story in the Dharmaguptaka-vinaya in which a nun is not rebuked for carrying an infant baby boy on alms rounds (where the laity saw the child and were alarmed), but the nun who ordained her was rebuked for allowing a lactating nun to ordain in the first place. However, the judgement was not harsh--the Buddha said that nuns shouldn't "knowingly" ordain pregnant or lactating women in the future. Clarke writes: "It is precisely this sort of social censure [from the laity], or fear of it, that seems to have provoked the authors/redactors to put into the mouth of the Blessed One a rule . . ." (pp. 124-25). Jeffrey Samuels (Attracting the Heart; Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 2010) showed that the importance of an ascetic image is important today in Sri Lanka, even though many in the laity know that rules are being broken behind closed doors.

Each chapter of this book offers a series of excellent examples of this type of debate--how does the community maintain the image of a chaste group of unmarried women and men living close to each other, while understanding that when you have a large group of often young women and men together things happen? How also does a community of detached and supposedly cloistered monastics grow if many of the recruits either are married, may have young children, or are taking care of their extended family? In chapter two he looks closely at the sustained contact nuns and monks had with their family long after they ordained (earlier in the book he offers a nice section about the Buddha's own nuclear and extended family ordaining or being a part of his monastic community). I particularly enjoyed the sections called "The Family that Eats Together," "The Family that Stays Together," and "Like Father Like Son" (pp. 58-71). In this chapter he also offers a clear rebuttal to the very idea of a nun or monk metaphorically or actually "going into homelessness."

In chapter three he looks at the question of marriage and divorce among monastics, showing that, while there wasn't a particular Brahmanic law on divorce that Buddhist nuns and monks could draw on when developing their precepts, there were many provisions and creative ways to "dissolve" a marriage. He also shows that while monks were told not to give marriage counseling, they often did. Moreover, many married couples actually ordained together. While they were supposed to maintain celibacy and live separately after entering the community, problems did, predictably, arise, and the reaction was often not particularly harsh (pp. 92-96). Moreover, the married couples did not necessarily dissolve their marriage after ordaining. Clarke states: "Whereas some might expect that married ordinands must first declare their wives 'no longer a wife,' this seems never to have been made a part of monastic legislation. . .it would be unwise to expect this to be a prerequisite for entrance into monastic life" (p. 96). Monks could eat in the presence of their wives and maintain contact. Using the method for reading what is not there (different from arguing from silence, as the rules cover so many possible instances occurring in daily living), Clarke writes that "[T]hese activities receive no comment or censure; they are simply taken for granted" (p. 97). Indeed, I think they are only seen as strange if we bring a cloistered and completely gender-separated Catholic ideal (which was also frequently broken) to the study of Buddhist monasticism.

In chapter four, which I find to be the best written and researched in the whole book, Clarke looks closely at pregnancy and child-raising in monasteries. Here we see nuns raising children and nursing babies together. We see the difficult debates over how to tell if a woman is pregnant before ordaining and the nuns who become nannies. What I like about this chapter is that Clarke clearly shows that rules were meant to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. Indian Buddhist monasteries were not draconian, maximum-security, ascetic boot-camps. It is almost as if the authors of the various vinayas (he looks at several different traditions in Pali, Chinese, and Sanskrit) knew that rules were meant to be bent and often broken and creatively dealt with the consequences. For example, in a vinaya text in the Taisho (1428), a nun is concerned that nursing her infant and sleeping next to him at night in her monastic cell would break a precept, not because she wasn't supposed to have a baby while being a nun, but because the infant was male. The authors stated that she broke no rule and could stay with her baby at night (p. 126). In the Mahisasaka tradition the Buddha is quoted as saying that nuns could be appointed to help a nun who was a mother to help raise the child in the monastery. When I show my students photographs of children running around monasteries in present-day Thailand and explain that modern monasteries often serve the community as free daycare facilities, they are shocked. Clarke shows that this is an age-old tradition in Buddhism. However, what is different now is that the children are those of busy lay people who need monks to look after their children while they are at work. In the past it seems that nuns and monks themselves were the ones having the children.

Liz Wilson's edited volume, Family in Buddhism is similar in topic to Clarke's book, but most of its chapters take a completely different approach. Wilson's collection is a wide-ranging introduction to kinship bonds, marriage, raising children, and the debate over celibacy in Buddhist communities in Tibet, Japan, China, Sri Lanka, and in early Buddhism in South Asia. Although it does not claim to be comprehensive geographically or systematic historically, it should attract students and scholars who approach Buddhist Studies ethnographically as well as textually. In her short introduction, she points out, like Clarke, that monasticism is usually associated with homelessness, celibacy, detachment, and solitary asceticism. However, because the diverse chapters she is tasked with introducing are so eclectic, instead of discussing textual sources and previous scholarship, she spends more time focused on the idea of kinship that is found throughout Buddhist narratives coming out of multiple cultural contexts. She writes (p. 2):

The chapters show that the language of family and lineage constitutes a remarkably wide-ranging discourse that thrives in a variety of Asian Buddhist cultural contexts. Countering the widely held assumption in Buddhist studies that Buddhism began as a world-renouncing religion that is essentially antithetical to family life, this volume amply demonstrates that kinship making is a foundational form of practice in Buddhism.

In summarizing this view of Buddhism through the lens of kinship, she cites the work of Schopen and Clarke (drawn from the latter's UCLA dissertation, upon which his above-reviewed book is based) and wants to expand their pioneering work to see how the very idea of family life in Buddhism operates outside of early Buddhism.

The book is divided into three sections. First, "Historical Families, Imagined Families" contains articles by Gina Doogan on Imperial Buddhist nuns and monks in early modern Japan, David Gray on Tantric sexual practices, Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa on family lineage in Tibetan Buddhism, and Jeffrey Samuels on child ordination in modern Sri Lanka. This section feels somewhat like a catch-all of articles that didn't quite fit into the second and third sections. The editor does not offer much justification for why she placed them here (there are only two sentences introducing the section!), simply stating that monasticism was sometimes a way of creating a new type of family. However, individually they are fascinating. I especially found Gray's contribution an excellent short introduction to an oft-misunderstood and salacious topic. Looking at the Hevajra, Guhyasamaja, and Cakrasamvara tantras he shows that instead of merely describing sexual acts that often involved incest, these texts construct a "social identity, modeled on the South Asian joint family, for members of a religious community" (p. 43). Just as a family demands self-abnegation, duty, sacrifice, and thinking of others, the monastic life promotes these ideals as well. The guru is the head of the "tantric family" and every member has a role to play. Ritual and meditative practice helps maintain this obedience and formation of "family-like" bonds.

The second section looks at parents and children. Alan Cole writes on the medieval Chinese Buddhist ghost festival and its promotion of filial piety. Vanessa Sasson, one of the leading scholars of the role of children and women in the making of early Buddhism, looks at Indian Buddhist stories about the Buddha's mother Maya. She demonstrates how "the textual focus on the Buddha's renunciant agenda side-lines his maternal connection" and reduces her role "to that of a mere container for the fetus she carries" (p. 10). Wilson's own contribution is on the mother of the Buddhist "saint" Sivali. This contribution is particularly provocative in that, like Sasson, she criticizes the fact that biographies of famous monks and Buddhas discount the role of their mothers, but that Slvali's narrative shows that maternal influence was significant in the making of a saint. Here we find a balanced account that takes women's agency seriously, but acknowledges the androcentrism of early Buddhist narrative.

The third section focuses on wives and husbands in monastic life. Ranjini Obeyesekere studies the wife of Gautama Siddhartha, Yasodhara. Amy Paris Langenberg looks at Sanskrit stories criticizing the role of the husband in family life and encouraging men to take up the monastic life. Philip Green shows the tension between the ideal of "wifely dependence" and the promotion of "individual agency" in descriptions of Indian female ascetics. Finally, Lori Meeks looks closely at monastic marriage in Japan. I found her chapter illuminating because she shows that marriage among Japanese nuns and monks was not simply a product of Meiji reform or limited to the Jodo Shinshu. Indeed, she writes "by the mid-to-late-Heian period, most monks . . . were living with women, raising biological heirs, and amassing private property" (p. 256). It was the last practice--amassing private property--that seemed to justify marriage and raising heirs in Japanese monasteries, as the private monasteries needed a system of passing down possessions and keeping particular monastic families in control. Furthermore, celibacy was not a mark of prestige or purity in Japan. Through a deep exploration of primary and secondary sources, Meeks shows that education, social prestige, ritual knowledge, and established institutional power were often marks of monastic life.

While one would have liked to see a contribution from a scholar of Southeast Asian or Korean Buddhism, and perhaps a greater attention in the introduction to modern ethnographic accounts (nearly every article is historical and/or textual), this is a very good introduction to the multiple avenues of research in the emerging field of family in Buddhism. It also reveals how much work is left to be done.

These two books would form a good pair in designing a seminar on family, sexuality, and property in Buddhism. They both, in very different ways, demonstrate a novel way to approach the history of Buddhist societies. However, there were missed opportunities in Wilson's introduction and Clarke's thorough study to make this a growing sub-field in Buddhist Studies. They are both limited in their scope, as they don't make comparative gestures towards the study of monasticism and asceticism (Catholic, Lutheran, Brahmanic, Taoist). I would have liked to have seen an effort to find interesting parallels to the role of family in Amish, Mennonite, Hasidic, Sufi, Yamabushi, or other religious communities that blur the line between monastic communities and non-cloistered, non-celibate, familyoriented, and orthopraxic communities more broadly. The communities that Gray and Meeks look at, for example, seem closer in comparison to Sufi brotherhoods like the Naqshbandi or Qadiri than to Catholic Carthusans, Cistercians, or Dominicans. Clarke and Wilson both seem to establish the Catholic tradition as normative in the history of monasticism, but they do not state why. Furthermore, they do not makes a distinction between cenobitic, anchoritic, mendicant, and itinerant approaches to monasticism. Moreover, there were no sustained overtures to theoretical studies on the social-psychological, soteriological, bio-genetic, economic, and phenomenological studies of monasticism and asceticism by Agamben, Flood, Weber, McGinn, Derrida, and several others. In this way, the two books have limited use in the fields of Religious Studies, Contemplative Studies, or the Sociology of Religion. Still, for students and scholars of Buddhist Studies they are ground-breaking and speak to exciting ways of rethinking the male-dominated and eremitic characterizations of Buddhist monasticism that have become normative in the field.

JUSTIN THOMAS MCDANIEL UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA