I recently read this book, which I would like to share my impressions of. Or at least my impressions of the first essay, entitled “The Politics of Alms gathering: Asceticism, Exchange, and the Alimentary Ethics of Ancient Buddhist and Jain Mendicants”. It is a fairly short book consisting of just two essays, so it is the type of thing which is easy to read and review. The first essay was quite interesting. I feel as though a Jain reading it would be irritated and maybe have some counterarguments. Nevertheless, I’ll just present it relatively uncritically, as this is more of a summary or a book review than a full analysis which would require further follow up research. 

Sutherland frames ancient Indian monastic communities in a way I haven’t heard before, though which in retrospect is rather intuitive. The idea is that Jain, Ajivika, Buddhist, and even Hindu renunciates all at one point in time late in classical antiquity followed a relatively similar pattern of monastic life (and continued to do so into the middle ages, and to some minor extent still do) centered around relatively extreme renunciation and ascetic practices, including wandering throughout cities and villages, isolation in the forest for extended periods of time, and a pretty extreme impulse towards maintaining some iteration of “purity”. Namely, purity of the sort which would be required to attain moksha, or nirvana, which sometimes could be termed “ritual purity” though that concept is not really inclusive enough to describe this.

Lets pause on this for a moment. This is unique and interesting to me because while we sometimes think of sramanas as sort of consisting of one distinct class of monks. We often think of them as being united by some implicit non-vedic doctrines, or perhaps a shared prehistory which is no longer accessible to us. Thinking of them as instead united by a shared practice is a different idea, an interesting one to me, and one which might offer a more obvious explanation of how it is that Brahminical ascetics were effectively part of the same system, social milieu, and world of ideas.

Continuing on, This whole ascetic programme created a problem, because now you have renunciates who basically don’t engage in the normal social world at all except in one particular respect, which is how they get their food. This link with normal society, though very thin, is a potential vessel for contamination. What if the food you take entails violence in some way? Now you’ve got that karma, that papam. What if the person giving it to you is ritually impure? Now you’ve got that on you as well. (Side note on that: Actually, just as this is a problem for the ascetic, it is also a social function of an ascetic. The ascetic, assuming he is powerful enough, has the spiritual power to “burn through” or “digest” the karma of the laity, which they themselves do not possess. In this sense giving the ascetic food relieves the laity of their papam via the symbolic act of donation, and allows the ascetic to dispense with the karmic debt in a sort of specialized form of spiritual labor. Though obviously this entails risk on behalf of the ascetic). What if you start storing up the food? Now you’ve got acquisitions and property which opens the door to materialistic living and an abandonment of ascetic practice. What if the food tastes really good? Now you’ve become mired in attachments as well. So these monks are in a situation where they have to be really really concerned about what types of food they take, who they take it from, and under what circumstances. This puts them in an odd situation where they are nominally independent and free of social strictures and conventions, while also being totally at the mercy of the productive classes of society for their food, while also being subject to risks imposed by the “sinful” acts of that same society.