“The Householder Ascetic and the Uses of Self-Discipline”

Timothy Lubin, Washington & Lee University, USA
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This paper challenges the common assumption that asceticism is something that by definition takes place only on the periphery of everyday life, and only for “world-transcending” aims.  Drawing on the Sanskrit Vedic and Dharmashastra literature I will show that the earliest extant discussions of ascetic principles and practice appeared in the context of a ritual piety meant to be the norm for people “in the world and of the world.”  This practice took the form of special regimens (vratas) undertaken for particular purposes (especially as preparation for performing worship rites aimed at bringing material prosperity and a comfortable afterlife).  In the Brahmanical literature, the definition of lifelong vratas for “professional” ascetics constitute a secondary development (although such professional ascetics may have existed in earlier times, unrecorded by surviving texts).  The early Buddhist movement was likewise a self-conscious response to Vedic norms of piety, adopting and redefining much of the language and practice of Vedic vratas.  The Sanskrit tradition itself provides an elaborate analysis of ascetic techniques, emphasizing the themes of purification, rebirth, and virtual divinization marked by the systematic denial of distinctively human limitations (the needs for food and sleep, the desire for sexual gratification and other sensual pleasures, physical vulnerability and fallibility, and the impulse toward violence and deceit).  The ritual dimensions of Brahmanical asceticism dramatize the overcoming of these limitations; the textual sources assert that this overcoming provides access to benefits of both worldly (bhukti) and spiritual (mukti).  Hence, the Indic evidence points to the need for a general model of asceticism that can account for the full spectrum of practice, from short-term vows and regimens in everyday life to the feats of spiritual virtuosi.