Chapter One

The Rhinoceros in the Room

Monks and Nuns and Their Families

A nun gave birth to a baby boy. Not knowing what to do, she informed the Buddha of this matter.

The Buddha said, “I authorize a twofold ecclesiastical act for appointing a nun to attend her.”...

The two nuns held the child, and produced doubt [as to whether they had committed an offense].

The Buddha said, “There is no transgression.”

The two nuns slept together with the child, and produced doubt.

The Buddha said, “Again, there is no transgression.”

Having adorned the child, together [the nuns] fawned [upon him].

The Buddha said, “That should not be done. I authorize you to bathe and to nurse him. If he [is old enough to] leave the breast, you should give him to a monk, and let him go forth [into the religious life]. If you do not wish to have him go forth [into the religious life], you should give him to relatives, and have him brought up.”1

This series of four rules introduces monastic legislation to accommodate any pregnant nuns who give birth to baby boys within Indian Buddhist nunneries. Translated here from the Mahīśāsakavinaya, an Indian Buddhist monastic law code (vinaya) preserved in a fifth-century C.E. Chinese translation, the narrative recounts how a particular Buddhist “nun,” a bhikṣuṇī,2 Without any explicit or even implicit criticism of the birth of a son to an ordained Buddhist nun, the authors or redactors of this monastic law code, canonical Indian Buddhist jurists, put into the mouth of the gave birth to a baby boy. Buddha a series of rules to appoint a fellow nun to attend the newly delivered mother-nun.3

This narrative and other similar stories preserved in the extant corpus of Buddhist monastic law codes complicate generally accepted scholarly and popular views of Indian Buddhist monastic life. Scholarly consensus has painted a picture in which Indian Buddhist monks and nuns severed all ties with their families when they left home for the religious life; monks and nuns remained celibate, and those who faltered in their “vows” of monastic celibacy were immediately and irrevocably expelled from the Buddhist order.

But the vision of the monastic life that emerges from a close reading of “in-house” monastic law codes challenges this conventional picture and some of our most basic scholarly notions of what it meant to be a Buddhist monk or nun in India. The narratives in these monastic law codes often depict monks and nuns as continuing to interact and associate with their families. Far from renouncing familial ties, some monastics are described as leaving home for the religious life together with their children. Although we are not accustomed to thinking about the marital status of monks and nuns, Indian Buddhist monastic law did not require monastics to dissolve their marriages upon entrance into the religious life.4 Indeed, men and women are depicted within vinaya literature as sometimes even leaving home for the religious life together, as married monastic couples. Moreover, the authors/redactors of the extant monastic legal codes―the monks who quite literally made the rules, the authors of canonical Indian Buddhisms―legislated to accommodate not only pregnant nuns and monastic motherhood, but in certain circumstances even those who breached clerical celibacy.


1. Indian Buddhist Monasticisms

Modern Western understandings of Indian Buddhist monasticisms seem to have been based largely on two sets of images: (1) European notions of medieval Christian monasticism and (2) visions of the ideal monk from within modern, particularly Theravāda, Buddhist traditions and their canonical texts. Each of these images has served to shape the course and selectivity of scholarship on Indian Buddhist monasticisms.

Some of the earliest modern European references to Buddhist monks come from explorers and missionaries who traveled in Asia.5 Early travelers and subsequent scholars have referred to the Buddhist bhikṣu, the full-time vocational religious specialist, by a variety of names, including almsmen, bonzes, clerics, friars, monks, priests, and talapoins.6 Today, the most widely used term for Sanskrit bhikṣu (Pāli bhikkhu) (lit. “beggar”) seems to be “monk,” and this can be traced back at least as early as 1828, to Brian Houghton Hodgson.7

the founding fathers of Buddhist studies, Hodgson equated the Buddhist bhikṣu with his Christian counterpart; he tells us that “Buddhist monachism agrees surprisingly with Christian....”8

In the nineteenth century, scholarly understandings of terms such as “monk” and “monasticism” appear to have been shaped by medieval Benedictine notions of the monastic ideal. Susanna Elm suggests that, until very recently, “the historiography of monasticism as a whole, regarding its history both before and after Benedict, remains dominated and deeply influenced by the notions exemplified by Benedictine monasticism and its related concerns.”9

Recent studies in Christian monasticism, particularly in the field of late antiquity, are beginning to move beyond the idea of a monolithic monastic ideal or norm as represented by the (later) Benedictine Rule.10 By comparison, the field of Buddhist studies has been slow to reevaluate its own assumptions concerning the religious life. The name of Benedict may not necessarily spring to the minds of scholars of Buddhist history. Yet, I would argue that it is this image of the monastic ideal that is ingrained in many scholars’ presuppositions concerning the religious life of the Buddhist bhikṣu.11

A scholar of late antiquity might now find it reasonable to ask whether fourth-century Egyptian or Byzantine monks continued to interact with their families.12 For many scholars of Buddhist studies, however, such questions may seem misplaced. Indeed, Buddhism is about renunciation of one’s family―or so runs the received wisdom.13

Why would a nun or monk continue to associate with a family member whom s/he had just renounced or abandoned? It is precisely assumptions such as this that have guided the questions scholars of Buddhist history have asked and, more important, not asked. I contend that the assumption of a complete lack of contact between monastics and their family members has contributed to the construction of a scholarly and popular vision of Indian Buddhist monasticisms that is not supported by the preponderance of our premodern evidence.

When early scholars looked at canonical Buddhist literature with certain preconceptions about the monastic life, the images of “monks” and “nuns” that they saw largely confirmed their assumptions. Yet what they accepted as representative of Buddhist monasticisms was, I suggest, highly romanticized and rhetorically charged. Here we might consider an important example from some of the earliest known strata of Buddhist literature:14 the Rhinoceros Horn Sūtra, a Gāndhārī version of which is preserved on a birch-bark scroll from, according to Richard Salomon,15 perhaps the first century B.C.E. The following verses typify the renunciant ideal lauded by this text:16

Having given up son and wife and money, possessions and kinsmen and relatives...(*one should wander alone like the rhinoceros).17

Casting off the marks of a householder like a mountain ebony tree shorn of its leaves, (*leaving home, wearing) the saffron robe, (*one should wander alone like the rhinoceros).

Having broken the ties of a householder, like a bird who has torn a strong net, not returning (*as a fire [does not return] to what it has burnt, one should wander alone like the rhinoceros).18

The Rhinoceros Horn Sūtra contains explicit exhortations to abandon kith and kin, forsake wealth and material gain, and go forth and wander alone like the rhinoceros (or its horn).19 Something akin to this ideal arguably forms the cornerstone of modern scholarly understandings of Buddhist monasticisms.20 A few examples should suffice to establish not the validity but the centrality of this image as a vision of the Buddhist monastic ideal in scholarly literature.21

In his 1881 introduction to the translation of the Sutta-nipāta, the collection within which the Theravāda or Pāli version of the same sūtra is found, V. Fausböll comments that “in the contents of the Suttanipâta we have, I think, an important contribution to the right understanding of Primitive Buddhism, for we see here a picture not of life in monasteries, but of the life of hermits in its first stage.”22 Indeed, readers are not left to make up their own minds as to what constitutes “the right understanding of Primitive Buddhism.” Fausböll introduces his translation of the Rhinoceros Horn Sutta as follows:

Family life and intercourse with others should be avoided, for society has all vices in its train; therefore one should leave the corrupted state of society and lead a solitary life.23

It is here, I suggest, in “the life of hermits,” the abandonment of family and society in general, that we see Fausböll’s―and subsequent generations’―“right understanding of Primitive Buddhism,” a Buddhism that is clearly to be differentiated from that of “life in monasteries.” In other words, Fausböll seems to posit two Buddhisms: a pure or original form of Buddhism as exemplified by the Rhinoceros Horn ideal, and a later, presumably degenerate, monastic form.

Fausböll seems to have taken the Rhinoceros Horn Sutta as a window on what, in 1889, Monier Monier-Williams would call “true Buddhism...the Buddhism of the Piṭakas or Pāli texts,”24 a Buddhism which Monier-Williams clearly contrasted with “the changes Buddhism underwent before it died out in India,” including “its corruptions in some of the countries bordering on India and in Northeastern Asia.”25 More than half a century later, B. G. Gokhale repeats Fausböll’s earlier and still prominent view, suggesting that “the spirit of early Buddhism” is to be found in the Rhinoceros Horn Sutta.

If there is any one text in the whole expanse of Pāli Literature reflecting the spirit of early Buddhism it is the Khaggavisāṇa Sutta....The ideal described in the sutta ...is that of the lonely arhat, who has completely turned his back on the world and wanders alone like “the horn of the rhinoceros.”26

A few years later, in 1970, Melford Spiro, a cultural anthropologist known in the field of Buddhist studies for his work on Theravāda Buddhism among the Burmese, reiterates the received wisdom on the Rhinoceros Horn ideal, although this time in the abstract. For Spiro, this now seems to be a pan-Buddhist ideal, not simply a “primitive” or “early” one.

To renounce the world, according to Buddhism, means to renounce all ties―parents, family, spouse, friends, and property―and to “wander alone like the rhinoceros.”27

In a 1975 article on Buddhist understandings of the Indian notion of karma, Richard Gombrich invokes the Rhinoceros Horn Sutta to make the point that “the first Buddhists were asocial, even antisocial,”28 a point often made about Indian renunciation:29

Once one had taken the Buddha’s message seriously enough to act on it, one abandoned all social ties, and had as little human company as possible―‘Go lonely as the rhinoceros’.30

It may be countered that views from the late 1880s or even the 1970s are not only old but also outdated, that they no longer hold any currency. Old they may be, but similar sentiments continue to feature in recent scholarship. Examples attesting to the ubiquity and centrality of the image of the Rhinoceros Horn may be found in a range of scholarly opinions, from anthropologists of Southeast Asia to specialists in East Asian Buddhism to scholars of Indian religions.31 Take, for instance, Gananath Obeyesekere’s 2002 statement that “Buddhism insisted that the monk should live ‘lonely as the single horn of the rhinoceros,’”32 or Bernard Faure’s 2003 statement, in his book on gender in Buddhism, that “the early ascetic or monastic attitude ...posits that ‘a bodhisattva should wander alone like a rhinoceros.’”33 Although admitting the existence of other Buddhisms in their 2003 work on the sociology of early Buddhism, Greg Bailey and Ian Mabbett tell us that “the monks who received the earliest Buddhist message were expected to live it as homeless mendicants, severing all ties with society.”34 Not surprisingly, Bailey and Mabbett cite the Sutta-nipāta in general and the Rhinoceros Horn Sutta in particular as “a probable locus for an early stage of Buddhist thought about a monk’s life.”35 In 2004, Gavin Flood contends that “the ideal monk has renounced the world and family ties, renounced a settled life in a home and wanders in order to seek his own liberation....The Sutta-nipāta, for example, compares the solitary ascetic wanderer to a rhinoceros horn.”36 Finally, and most recently, in a section entitled “Monks and Their Families” in her 2012 book on maternal imagery in Indian Buddhism, while clearly recognizing that life “on the ground” was much more complicated, Reiko Ohnuma maintains that “early Buddhist discourses such as the famous Rhinoceros Horn Discourse ...likewise make it clear that the life of the ideal Buddhist renunciant necessarily involves a rejection of familial ties.”37

For the most part, the scholars quoted above are careful not to conflate a prescriptive exhortation with a descriptive account of what Buddhists did.38 Others, however, have understood the exhortation as evidence of actual Buddhist practice in India.39 Although there is scholarly debate as to whether this ideal is in its origins pre-Buddhist, original, primitive, early, or otherwise,40 the quotations above offer an indication of the privileged position that the Rhinoceros Horn
Sutta holds not only in the early construction but also in recent scholarly understandings of the ideals of the religious life of the Indian Buddhist bhikṣu.41

But the Rhinoceros Horn may well turn out to be a red herring altogether: the renunciant ideal espoused by the Rhinoceros Horn Sutta is certainly not the ideal of mainstream monasticisms as known to us from the extant monastic law codes. In fact, Buddhaghosa, the fifth-century C.E. purported author of the Paramatthajotikā, a text in which we find a commentary to the Rhinoceros Horn Sutta, seems to have had trouble with the concept of monks who wandered alone, having abandoned kith and kin. This conservative commentator appears to have made sense of this form of the religious life only by explaining it away as something that not monks but solitary buddhas
(paccekabuddhas; Skt. pratyekabuddhas) do.42 Indeed, as Rupert Gethin has noted, the image of the Rhinoceros Horn seems to have appealed more to scholars of Indian Buddhism than Indian Buddhists themselves.43

What is missing from scholarly discussions of the Rhinoceros Horn ideal is a recognition of its function as rhetoric. In discussing the “domestication of asceticism,” Patrick Olivelle has argued that “Indian ascetic traditions...were never totally asocial or antisocial....Nevertheless,...in their rhetoric, images, and rituals [they] tended to accentuate their separation from familial and social life.”44 This accentuation is exactly what we see in Buddhist sūtra literature, and exactly what seems to be missing from “in-house” monastic law codes, a genre of Buddhist literature written solely for monastic and not lay consumption.45 As we will see, the Rhinoceros Horn ideal is perhaps best understood as ascetic rhetoric. I do not mean to suggest that this rhetoric has not played an important part in Buddhist renunciatory traditions. The image of the forest-renunciant has been a key figure in the history of Indian Buddhism, providing “a specific ideal of complete renunciation of which later Buddhists were well aware and to which they could return at moments of personal and collective crisis.”46 Yet one must clearly differentiate between the ideals of an ascetic tradition and those of settled monasticism, the subject of our inquiry. Indeed, it makes little sense to talk about “the ideal renunciant” as if there were only ever one ideal.

To be sure, in recent decades, the utility of the image of the Rhinoceros Horn for the study of Indian Buddhist monasticisms has been questioned, particularly in terms of monks’ continued involvement in financial and business matters.47 Moreover, there has been some degree of recognition that Buddhist monks in India did not always sever their ties with kin.48 Uma Chakravarti, for instance, wrote that the Buddha made “exceptions to a large number of vinaya rules” on the basis of kinship bonds, and that “Bhikkhus were allowed to maintain contacts with members of their families.”49 However, old assumptions are nothing if not persistent. Serinity Young, for instance, writes that “the vinayas...required [monastics] to abandon all family life.”50
Axel Michaels states that “Buddha...did―like Jesus―demand a radical break with family....”51 Of course, abandoning family life is not to be confused with abandoning one’s family, but the above scholars do not make this distinction. More often than not, such distinctions are in fact blurred. This is clear, for instance, in Môhan Wijayaratna’s work on Theravādin Buddhist monastic life:

The first step in becoming a monk or a nun is to abandon lay life, which means to leave one’s family. Buddhist monasticism led many married persons to renounce their wives or husbands; single men and women renounced the possibility of marriage.52

Wijayaratna’s statement concerning the abandonment of family echoes similar sentiments expressed by Fausböll, Monier-Williams,53 Étienne Lamotte,54 and other leading luminaries.55 Wijayaratna bases his study solely on Theravāda sources and primarily the Pāli Vinaya. His sources alone, however, cannot account for his conclusions. Indeed, should one choose to look for them, there are any number of passages in the Pāli Vinaya that suggest quite the opposite to the picture of Buddhist monasticism presented by Wijayaratna.56 Here I can conclude only that Wijayaratna is guided by his own preconceived notions and assumptions about the nature of Buddhist monasticism. This in turn dictates which passages he selects to tell his story. To my mind, Wijayaratna’s comments attest only to the pervasiveness of our modern assumptions about the nature of Indian Buddhist monasticisms.57

I will introduce here but one further example of the assumptions vis-à-vis family underpinning scholarship on Buddhist monasticisms. In her 1996 study Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature, Liz Wilson writes:58

The homeless life was quintessentially a wifeless life, for the early monks of the primitive monastic community. And so it is today, among most of the Buddhist communities of South and Southeast Asia....Higher ordination (upasampadā) in the Buddhist sangha dissolves familial and matrimonial ties. If one is married at the time of ordination, that bond is dissolved; spouses are thereafter referred to as “former” spouses. If one is not married at the time of full ordination, one renounces the possibility of marriage.59

Wilson’s depiction of the monastic life may be an adequate summation of Buddhism as practiced in some contemporary Theravādin monastic communities. Yet it is a leap to suggest that this was the case in India some two millennia ago. These views―from Fausböll to Monier-Williams, Wijayaratna, and Wilson―are neither argued nor debated; they are simply presented and accepted as the basic “facts” from which scholars proceed with their particular inquiries.

An uncritical adoption of the image of the Rhinoceros Horn as the ideal of Buddhist renunciation is not the only60―or perhaps even the best―way to account for modern scholarly notions of Buddhist monastic life. The scholarly opinions presented above go further and reflect ingrained assumptions about the nature of Buddhist monasticisms. Assumptions, by their very nature, are not usually expressed in explicit terms and hence are difficult to identify. Yet their presence may be discernible in the comments scholars make about the “nature” or “spirit” of Buddhist monasticisms. These assumptions, in my estimation, run something like this: Buddhist monasticism is antifamilial; one who becomes a monk or nun severs―or ideally should sever―all ties with family members: parents, spouses, and children; monastics have―or should have―no further contact with their former families; the act of renunciation somehow dissolves marriages; monks and nuns cannot remain married; pregnant women and nursing mothers cannot become nuns; nuns cannot have babies, and certainly cannot raise children in convents; monks and nuns must be―and supposedly therefore were―celibate; those who transgress the rule of celibacy are expelled without hope of redemption.61

If assumptions like these are accepted as the basic “facts” of Indian Buddhist monasticisms, we close the door to important questions about the lives of monks and nuns in India: Other than that of the Buddha himself, whose own son, wife, aunt and stepmother, and cousins are said to have joined the early monastic community, were there biological families in Indian monasteries? Did husbands and wives leave home for the religious life together? If so, could they take their children with them? What happens if a nun becomes pregnant? Can she have a baby and still remain a nun? If it is possible for nuns to have babies, are nuns’ babies brought up in a monastic environ-
ment? If so, who looks after the infants? What happens when the children grow up? What happens if a Buddhist monk or nun falls from the celibate ideal?62

These are questions not usually asked in the field of Buddhist studies.63 I contend that they are not only worth asking but to a certain extent also answerable. To begin to answer them, however, we must turn away from the image of the Rhinoceros Horn and look to the evidence of the extant vinayas or Buddhist monastic law codes. We must turn away from what Buddhism may have been in its original conception. Given the dearth of early materials,64 what it may have meant to be a monk in the first few decades or even centuries after the Buddha’s passing is all but out of our reach. Indeed, if we know anything about monks who followed the exhortations of the Rhinoceros Horn Sūtra, it is perhaps only of their failures. Any monk who successfully cut off all ties to the world and wandered around like a rhinoceros would leave only the same traces in the sands of his-tory as the rhinoceros himself. If in fact we know―and can know―anything at all about Buddhist monks in India, then it should be self-evident that the monks about whom we can legitimately talk were not the wandering rhinoceroses; the latter’s tracks, if they left any, remain well covered. Rather, we must turn to what Indian Buddhist monasticisms had become by the time they can be tracked in the writings of the authors/redactors of our extant monastic law codes.65 Moreover, since later Central Asian, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, Newar, Sri Lankan, Tibetan, and other forms of Buddhist monastic practice are often judged against a perceived ideal of Indian Buddhism, a view of Indian Buddhist monasticisms that takes into account the voices of Indian monastic lawyers as heard through their own stories holds the potential to transform our scholarly narratives about the development of Buddhist monasticisms more broadly.66

2. Conflicting Visions of the Ideal Monk

All known Indian Buddhist traditions accept at least two genres of texts as canonical, namely, sūtra or discourses, and vinaya or monastic law codes.67 Whereas sūtra materials were accessible in some form to Buddhists both lay and monastic alike, the vinayas are presented
as strictly for monastic eyes and ears only.68 Unlike the sūtras, the vinayas are internal documents. Their importance for the study of Buddhist monasticisms lies, I suggest, in the fact that they transmit an “in-house” vision of what monks and nuns should and were thought to do, and how they ought to behave. Of course, this is not to be confused with what in fact monks and nuns did, and how they behaved. The vision of the monastic life that emerges from a study of the extant monastic codes is not what Buddhist monks told others, particularly the laity. Rather, it seems to reflect what they told themselves, what monks told other monks about their own institutions and traditions, and how they understood Buddhist monastic religiosity. Plainly stated, the sūtras deal primarily with abstract spiritual and philosophical matters; the monastic law codes deal with concrete, corporate, and institutional religious concerns: the nitty gritty of how best to run a successful monastic institution. The authors/redactors of the extant vinayas are primarily concerned not with ethics or morality69 but with the preservation of the religious institution and its public image.70 Indeed, as Gregory Schopen has observed, “the vinayas are, in fact, preoccupied―if not obsessed―with avoiding any hint of social criticism and with maintaining the status quo at almost any cost.”71

The monastic lawyers’ concern with the preservation of their institution’s public image is discernible on almost every page of the monastic law codes. Most, if not all, monastic rules are presented as promulgations in reaction to criticism ensuing from specific actions of particular monks or nuns. Social censure comes from a number of quarters: from fellow monks and nuns, from other heterodox religious wayfarers, from kings, and, most prominently and trenchantly, from
the laity.72 More often than not we are simply told that the laity, that is, brahmins and householders, to use Schopen’s translation, “were contemptuous, critical, and complained.”73 In a number of places, however, the content of this abridged criticism is fleshed out. In perhaps the most colorful expression, in the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya brahmins and householders charge, for instance, that “the mendicancy of the Buddhist mendicants has gone up in flames; the holy life has gone up in flames.”74 The Buddha is made to react to such criticisms equally colorfully, indicating the seriousness with which the monastic jurists react to lay disparagement: “the criticism of brahmins and householders falls like a thunderbolt,” he declares, before “therefore” (de lta bas na) promulgating a vinaya rule.75 Moreover, when rules are established, the Buddha is usually said to see ten benefits in the promulgation of such rules. Two of these benefits are telling with regard to
the connection between social criticism and its potential deleterious impact on the monastic institution, particularly in terms of patronage.76 The establishment of a vinaya rule curtailing certain actions is said to “make unbelievers believe” and “increase the faith of those who are already believers.”

Occasionally, one does get the impression that the monastic authors/redactors became so carried away in protecting their institution’s corporate image from any hint of scandal or rumor that they lost sight of the very issue they were trying to negotiate. Take, for instance, the rule concerning the teaching of the Dharma to laywomen brought about by the monk Kālodāyin, also known as Udāyin,whom we will encounter in Chapter 3. According to the version preserved in the Dharmaguptaka-vinaya,77 Kālodāyin went to the house of a prominent householder for alms. In front of the mother-in-law, he whispered the Dharma into the ear of her son’s bride. Wondering what was going on, the mother-in-law asks her daughter-in-law what the monk had said. When the daughter-in-law replies that he was instructing her in the Dharma, the mother-in-law states that the Dharma should be preached in a loud voice so that all can hear, not whispered in one’s ear surreptitiously. When another monk happens to overhear this, he reports it back to other monks who, in turn, inform the Buddha.78 In response to this situation we might expect that the Buddha would state, for instance, that a monk must teach the Dharma in a loud voice, as suggested by the mother-in-law, or that at the very least it not be whispered like sweet nothings into a laywoman’s ear. In fact, the monastic jurists here make the Buddha declare it to be an offense for monks to teach the Dharma to lay-women period.79 However, the ruling as formulated proves untenable when laywomen want to hear the Dharma.80 Eventually, after several amendments, the Buddha is made to state that a monk incurs an offense in teaching a laywoman more than five or six stanzas of Dharma unless in the presence of an intelligent man, viz., one who knows right from wrong.81

In the eyes of the ever-vigilant monastic lawyers (some would argue, the Buddha), only certain interactions seem to have required legislation lest they invite lay contempt. Continued familial and, to a certain extent, even marital relations seem to have posed little threat to the success of the monastic movement. That one could renounce the world together with one’s family or visit lay family members after renunciation, for instance, seems not to have elicited lay criticism and thus required little, if any, monastic legislation. Issues surrounding pregnant nuns and questions concerning clerical celibacy, however, clearly presented the monastic legislators with delicate and
difficult situations to diffuse. Here, as we will see in detail in Chapter 4, the jurists juggle the need to accommodate pregnant nuns and their desire to protect the image of the monastic corporation from aspersions. As one might expect, Buddhist monasticisms as viewed in “in-house” monastic law codes, in which we see the legal minds of our monastic lawyers at work to avoid any hint of social censure, offer a markedly different view of the religious life from that espoused in sūtra texts.

In order to highlight the value of vinaya texts for the study of Indian Buddhist monasticisms, I will survey three short passages that counterbalance the evidence from the Rhinoceros Horn Sūtra. While a more detailed discussion of these passages will emerge in Chapters 2 through 4, my aim here is simply to illustrate how different genres of canonical Buddhist literature can afford different views of monastic life. By way of experiment, let us consider a view of Indian Buddhist monasticisms based solely on passages from “in-house” vinayas. In what directions might the field have developed with these passages as the touchstones of received knowledge of Buddhist monasticisms? Let us go back to a time well before Hodgson. Imagine an early scholar who, knowing nothing about Buddhism, tries to describe or reconstruct a vision of religious praxis primarily on the basis of the extant monastic law codes.82

A story from the Dharmaguptaka-vinaya, preserved only in Chinese, recounts how a young monastic is sent to find his father, a bhikṣu, who had wandered off on his own for breakfast.83 In doing so, the father had awkwardly kept the rest of the monastic community waiting. A confrontation ensues. The father grabs his son, who in turn pushes his father, accidentally killing him. The boy is not found guilty of any offense, but only told that he ought not to have pushed his father. This story is not explicitly about fathers and sons; it is about murder, monastic definitions thereof, and whether the son is guilty of homicide. What is of interest to us, however, is the manner in which the story is introduced:

At that time there was a bhikṣu who left home [for the religious life] late in life. Taking his son he left home [for the religious life] (將兒出家). At breakfast time he went to another layman’s house. The bhikṣus asked his son, saying, “Where did your father go?”84

The full story will be dealt with in Section 7 of Chapter 2. For now it will suffice to mention that nowhere in the story is any implicit or explicit criticism made about this bhikṣu’s “renunciation of the world” with his son. This is presented as a commonplace occurrence. It is simply taken for granted that a monk could, and in this case did, leave home for the religious life with his son.

If this were the first passage our imaginary intellectual predecessor had encountered, what conclusions might he have drawn from it about the nature of Buddhist monasticism? A cautious reader would of course be wary of conclusions made on the basis of a single reference to a bhikṣu. Nevertheless, our reader must start somewhere, and he might infer that Buddhist bhikṣus could leave home for the religious life with their sons. Whether Buddhist monastic law somehow
required that the bhikṣu take his son is not mentioned, but certainly it would be impossible for a reader to conclude that Buddhist bhikṣus abandoned their children on the basis of this one passage.

If this one passage had piqued our reader’s curiosity, he might begin to look for further references to bhikṣus, perhaps in other monastic codes. Consider, for instance, a passage from the Mahīśāsaka-vinaya, again preserved only in Chinese.85 A jealous bhikṣuṇī sees her husband, a bhikṣu, smiling at another bhikṣuṇī with whom, we are told, he had an illicit affair as a layman. Taking a water jug, she smashes him over the head with it. The Buddha then establishes a rule
about bhikṣuṇīs waiting upon bhikṣus with water jugs and fans. The husband and wife, bhikṣu and bhikṣuṇī, are introduced as follows:

At one time there was a husband and wife (夫婦) who, the two of them, left home [for the religious life] at the same time (二人俱時出家). That husband-bhikṣu (夫比丘) went begging for alms, brought them back to where the wife-bhikṣuṇī (婦比丘尼) dwelt, and ate.86

Were our early observer to base his vision of Indian Buddhist monastic life solely on this passage, he might conclude conservatively that some bhikṣus were married and left home for the religious life with their wives. Whether this would mean that bhikṣus had to be married to leave home would remain unclear.87 Were he to recall the story of the bhikṣu who left home for the religious life with his son, then, on the basis of these two passages, he might infer that when bhikṣus
“renounced the world” they sometimes took their wives and children along, if they had any.

Finally, our imaginary scholar might consider a narrative from the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya which suggests that bhikṣuṇīs could have babies.88 In the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya, as in other monastic law codes, we find a number of passages dealing with bhikṣuṇīs who give birth. According to Buddhist monastic law, bhikṣuṇīs were not supposed to sleep in the same room as males. When a certain bhikṣuṇī gave birth to a son, she is said to have left him outside at night for fear of transgressing this rule. But when the boy’s crying causes a commotion, a series of rules is established with regard to living arrangements for newly delivered bhikṣuṇīs. Here, in this passage preserved in Tibetan and Chinese, we see the bhikṣuṇī formally request permission to spend the night in the same room as her son.

The Blessed One said, “Henceforth, with authorization, the bhikṣuṇī Guptā must request a resolution from the order of bhikṣuṇīs to sleep in the same room together with her son (與子同室宿羯磨; bu dang lhan cig tu khang pa gcig tu nyal bar dge slong ma’i dge ’dun las sdom pa). The request should be made as follows:...

‘May the noble order listen! I, the bhikṣuṇī Guptā, have given birth to a baby boy (我笈多苾芻尼生男; bdag gub ta las bu khye’u zhig btsas

Were our observer to generalize from this one narrative, he might construct a picture of Buddhist monasticisms in which not only did bhikṣuṇīs have babies, but they were also authorized by the Buddha to look after―or at least share sleeping quarters with―their children. The need to request permission might imply that this situation was not without problems, but that a formula was set forth detailing how to request permission in such cases suggests that it was not at all extraordinary. Indeed, it seems to have been common enough to require regulation. Our early scholar might well conclude that, under certain circumstances, bhikṣuṇīs were authorized to raise their babies.

Our hypothetical scholar might arrange the data from these three passages in a number of ways. He might conclude, for instance, that Dharmaguptaka bhikṣus had or could have children, Mahīśāsaka bhikṣus could have wives, and Mūlasarvāstivāda bhikṣuṇīs could have babies. To infer from this that Mahīśāsaka bhikṣus could also have children and not just wives would be tenuous. Were he to find similar references in all three monastic codes, however, then he would be able to make conclusions about pan-Buddhist, or at least Dharma-guptaka, Mahīśāsaka, and Mūlasarvāstivāda, monasticisms.

Our early scholar, of course, is entirely fictional, and these vinaya passages were not taken into consideration in the formulation of our most basic notions of Buddhist monasticisms.90 Rather, the
founding fathers of our discipline seem to have started with visions of the ideal bhikṣu such as those espoused in the Rhinoceros Horn and other sutta materials.91 These texts have been the field’s main points of reference and departure.

Lest my position be misunderstood, let me make clear that I do not advocate basing our knowledge of Indian Buddhist monasticisms solely on one or even all of the above vinaya passages. Rather, I suggest only that a balanced study of Indian Buddhist monasticisms cannot continue to ignore these and other similar voices from the textual record. We must consider all of the available evidence, and bring this evidence to bear on our scholarly assumptions. Incidental sightings such as those surveyed above of monks and their children or spouses in the extant vinayas can perhaps be best understood with reference to what Jan Nattier, borrowing from New Testament studies, refers to as the principle of irrelevance: “We may draw with some confidence on data found within a normative text. . .when incidental mention is made of items unrelated to the author’s primary agenda.”92 Our monastic jurists are not making a case for continued contact between monastics and their spouses, or between monks and nuns and their children. For them, no case needed to be made. That men and women might leave home for the religious life with, as opposed to abandoning, their spouses or children was simply part of Buddhist renunciation as known to our monastic lawyers. The canonical jurists, however, do make a case for the accommodation of pregnant nuns. This was something that had to be carefully negotiated and legislated given the probability that the presence of pregnant nuns would give rise to criticism concerning the celibacy of the community.

The canonical texts of Indian Buddhist monasticisms do not present a single, uniform vision of the monastic life. Buddhist sūtras extol a religious ideal in which monks abandon family, wealth, and
all possessions in favor of the religious life. Yet Schopen has shown convincingly that Buddhist monastic law codes go into great detail about contracts, debts, interest, loans, money, property, rights of inheritance, and wealth.93 The vinayas speak, in other words, to the this-worldly concerns of monks following the religious life. Likewise, whereas sūtras go into lengthy discourses on the value of meditation, for instance, Schopen has shown that Buddhist monastic law codes warn against rigorous engagement in contemplative exercises since it “makes you stupid”; in the law codes “ascetic, meditating monks...almost always appear as the butt of jokes, objects of ridicule, and―not uncommonly―sexual deviants. They are presented as irresponsible and of the type that give the order a bad name.”94 As we will see in the following chapters, the image espoused by the Rhinoceros Horn Sūtra seems to be antithetical to the religious life as envisioned by the authors/redactors of monastic law codes. In the monastic codes, most passages dealing with Buddhist renunciation do not mention, much less require, the severance of familial ties, even though that is exactly how they have been interpreted.95 How, then, are we to understand these two visions of the monastic life? Are they to be categorized, for instance, as old and new, ideal and realistic (or perhaps pragmatic), external and internal, or simply as different, incompatible, or inconsistent?96 While a comprehensive answer must await further research, a number of things are already clear. To date, the study of Buddhism―and the study of religion more broadly―has focused generally not on realia or social history but primarily on doctrine, philosophy, and ethics.97 This focus is another factor in shaping the picture of Buddhist monasticisms prevalent in modern scholarship, and may also help to explain the privileging of sutta texts. Moreover, as we will discuss at the beginning of the next section, when the monastic codes or vinayas have entered the discussion, at least until recently, the rule of choice has been that of the Pāli or Theravāda tradition, almost to the entire exclusion of the other five extant textual traditions.98

The modern Western understanding of Buddhist monasticism and the prevalence of the view that Buddhist renunciation somehow entails the complete severance of all familial ties cannot be attributed, solely, to the privileging of one type of canonical text over another (i.e., sūtra over vinaya), nor to the reliance on one tradition’s sources (i.e., Theravāda) at the expense of those of other traditions. Rather, I suggest that it stems from selective reading within the corpus of privileged traditions and genres, a selectivity guided by preconceived notions about what Buddhist monasticisms should look like and perhaps also by how they have been put into practice by schools of Buddhism in the modern world.

3. Indian Buddhist Monastic Law Codes

The number of Indian Buddhist nikāyas or monastic lineages is traditionally counted at either eighteen or twenty.99 It is thought that each of these nikāyas transmitted its own monastic law code.100 Only six such codes have survived in a form that may be considered complete: the Dharmaguptaka, Mahāsāṅghika, Mahīśāsaka, Sarvāstivāda, Mūlasarvāstivāda, and Theravāda vinayas.101

Of these six monastic codes, the Theravāda or Pāli Vinaya is the only complete vinaya extant in an Indian language (Pāli), although even this has long been recognized to be a translation.102 The Pāli Vinaya is the only Buddhist monastic law code to be translated into any modern language.103 Mostly untranslated, and largely unedited to critical standards, the other vinayas remain available only to specialists.104 Perhaps as a result, and especially in the West and among Anglophones, until recently105 scholarly discussions of Indian Buddhism in general and Buddhist monasticisms in particular have been almost wholly drawn from Pāli or Theravāda sources.106

To base our understanding of Indian Buddhist monasticisms on only one of six extant codes risks reducing what may have been a variety of religious traditions to one. To my mind, it is premature to accept one of six traditions as representative of Indian Buddhist monasticisms without first studying―reading, editing, translating, and rereading―the textual traditions of the other five. In the present study, I have attempted to make use of all extant Indian Buddhist monastic law codes preserved in Chinese, Pāli, Sanskrit, and Tibetan in order to ensure that what we see is not just an isolated viewpoint of a single tradition, but is broadly representative of the canonical jurists’ handling of family matters in all extant vinayas. The use of all available vinayas allows us to begin to build an argument for the trans-nikāya and pan-Indian ubiquity of our findings.

Moreover, as I will discuss immediately below, although the dating of the monastic law codes is not without problems, the use of all extant vinayas may allow us to suggest that the picture which emerges from this study is not a late “corruption” of the monastic ideal but rather a very old vision of the religious life. Although the extant sources disagree about the dating, in the first few centuries after the demise of the Buddha, a great schism in Indian Buddhism is said to have resulted in the development of what we in Buddhist studies refer to, somewhat problematically, as sectarianism:107 the Sthavira–Mahāsāṅghika split.108 If we can show that the same or similar regulations as those found in the extant vinayas of the Sthaviras (i.e., Dharmaguptaka, Mahīśāsaka, Sarvāstivāda, Mūlasarvāstivāda, and Theravāda vinayas) are also found in the Mahāsāṅghika tradition(s), this, then, according to conventional wisdom and the principle of higher criticism, would suggest that these rules are in fact very old, dating from a presectarian tradition.109

As already mentioned, the task of dating our texts presents particular problems. We must be careful to differentiate between dates, where known, of composition or authorship of the extant monastic law codes and those of redaction and translation. Moreover, we must also distinguish dates associated with the content of the texts (composition/redaction/translation) from those of the manuscript evidence that has survived down to the present.

Catalogues and colophons of Chinese translations record the dates and names of translators, and, if accurate, these take us back centuries beyond the dates of our generally late extant Chinese printed editions and even manuscripts. For the Dharmaguptaka, Mahāsāṅghika, Mahīśāsaka, and Sarvāstivāda vinayas, extant primarily only in Chinese translation,110 this means the first quarter of the fifth century C.E.111 Yijing’s 義淨 (635–713 C.E.) incomplete Chinese translation of the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya dates to the early eighth century (700–712).112 Of course, these are only the dates of translation, not the dates of extant manuscript evidence. The earliest Chinese vinaya manuscripts date perhaps from the fifth to eighth centuries for the Dunhuang manuscripts,113 or the eighth century for the Shōgozō 聖語藏 manuscripts.114 It is not until much later that we find more complete manuscript copies or printed editions of a canon:115 the Nanatsudera 七寺 canon, for instance, was copied between 1175 and 1180,116 while the second carving of the Korean edition was completed in 1251 C.E.117 The standard edition used by scholars today is the Taishō edition, compiled in Japan between 1924 and 1935, on the basis of the second carving of the Korean edition and collated with several other printed editions and manuscript collections.118

Approximately one-quarter119 of the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya has survived in Sanskrit in an incomplete manuscript from Gilgit dated to between the sixth and seventh centuries.120 What appears to be a complete, or very nearly complete, Tibetan translation of the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya dates to the ninth century.121 We have a few early fragments of a handwritten copy of this Tibetan translation from Tabo dating perhaps from the tenth century onward,122 and Dunhuang fragments that may be roughly contemporaneous.123 The earliest complete extant printed edition of the Tibetan translation of the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya dates from the fifteenth century, although this edition is not accessible.124 The earliest editions currently available to scholars date from the seventeenth century.125

There are at least two dates that are often associated with the Pāli Vinaya, neither of which are the dates of composition. The earliest is that of the Aluvihāra redaction in Sri Lanka under Vaṭṭagāmaṇī Abhaya (29–17 B.C.E.).126 Yet we have no way of confirming what the canon looked like at this early time; extant Pāli manuscripts do not go back this far. Excepting four folios found in Nepal and dated on paleographic grounds to the ninth century,127 the earliest manuscripts we have for the Pāli Vinaya are from the late fifteenth century, the time at which Oskar von Hinüber tells us that “the continuous manuscript tradition with complete texts begins.”128

The other date associated with the Pāli Vinaya is the fifth century C.E., when the tradition was locked into a close word commentary in the Samantapāsādikā.129 The commentary itself, however, is also extant only in those same late manuscripts. If we accept that the fifth century is the earliest knowledge we have of the contents of the Pāli Vinaya, then this puts us roughly in line with the fifth-century translations of the vinayas of the Dharmaguptaka, Mahāsāṅghika, Mahīśāsaka, and Sarvāstivāda.

The dates discussed above are primarily those of translation and
transmission, not of composition. The painstaking work of tracking and tracing developments outside the texts by Schopen and others before him has placed the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya in northwest India around “the first or second century of our era.”130 As Schopen has noted, all extant vinayas presuppose a fully developed monasticism replete with durable goods and dwellings, and a highly organized infrastructure.131 Our vinaya texts mention doors, guards, keys, land acquisitions, locks, permanent endowments, safes, saunas, sharecropping agreements, slaves or serfs, and much more.132 However, evidence for this kind of monastic institution does not appear in the archaeological record until around the beginning of the Common Era.133 The monasticisms assumed already in the canonical legal texts, then, cannot plausibly be so early as to be contemporary with the Buddha or his first few generations of followers. If all of our vinaya
texts presuppose what are only late developments in the archaeological record, then it seems to follow that all of the texts are, as Schopen has suggested, uniformly late.134

Very little work has been done on the dating of the composition of the vinayas of the Dharmaguptaka, Mahīśāsaka, Mahāsāṅghika,and Sarvāstivāda. Although it may be that they came into existence only shortly before they were translated into Chinese in the early fifth century, at present I see no reason to place their composition any later (or earlier) than the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya, and certainly not by centuries. As a working hypothesis, then, I accept that all of our monastic law codes date to around the first few centuries of the Common Era, with the provision that a couple of centuries either side of this is a manageable margin of error.135 For the most part, the dating of the vinayas is of little consequence for the present study. An earlier or later dating of the composition of the vinayas would result only in a shift of the time frame, and would have little, if any, impact on my general observations about the importance of family matters in Indian Buddhist monasticisms as viewed through vinaya literature.

4. The Family

At the heart of this study lies the question of monks and nuns and their continued familial relationships. Before we get into the body of the study, it might be helpful here to say something about the family as it relates to the study of Indian Buddhist monasticisms. We will start by looking at what we know about the Buddha’s own family.

Soon after attaining enlightenment, Siddhārtha Gautama, scion of the Śākya clan, is said to have been surrounded by friends and family members, whether as renunciant wayfarers or lay well-wishers. A small band of ascetics first followed in his footsteps in the hope of attaining awakening. Eventually, an organized community of monks (and later nuns) developed, at first comprised mostly of the Buddha’s friends and family. This is what canonical texts, biographies, hagiographies, and legends tell us.

Details differ among the sources. One tradition, that of the Mūlasarvāstivādins, records in varying detail tales such as that of the Buddha’s half-brother, Nanda. After struggling to leave his lovely wife to follow his brother, the Buddha, in the religious life, Nanda landed in trouble by doting over and drawing her image on rocks when he was supposed to be engaged in meditation or recitation.136 We also find stories about the Buddha’s cousins, Ānanda, Aniruddha, Bhadrika, and Devadatta, who are all said to have joined the monastic order.137 There are stories about the Buddha’s mother,138 Mahāmāyā,139 and his aunt and stepmother, Mahāprajāpatī Gautamī, who pleaded withthe Buddha, and solicited the help of her nephew, Ānanda, to allow women to participate in the holy life as nuns.140 One might recall the stories of the Kāśyapa brothers of Urubilvā, who brought with them their one thousand disciples;141 the royal decree of King Śuddhodana, the Buddha’s father, according to which a son from every family of the Śākya clan was to enter the monastic order;142 the five hundred clan members who were tonsured by Upāli and subsequently ordained;143 the conversion of Udāyin, son of King Śuddhodana’s royal chaplain (purohita) and playmate of the Buddha;144 the Buddha’s uncles, Amṛtodana and Droṇodana, who, each together with some seventy thousand kinsmen, attained the first fruits of the Buddhist awakening, the stage of stream-enterer.145 One might mention two of the Buddha’s three wives―Gopikā and Mṛgajā―who, likewise, became stream-enterers, or his main wife, Yaśodharā, who entered the order of nuns and attained religious perfection;146 or even the Buddha’s son, Rāhula, who himself became a monk and, following closely in his father’s footsteps, attained arhatship, a religious goal achieved by both his mother and father―in fact, one achieved by many, if not most, of Gautama’s own family.147 Similar stories suggesting the importance of the Buddha’s own family abound in the narratives told by Indian Buddhist authors.

Despite the undeniable emphasis on the founder’s family in many of the texts detailing the biography of the Buddha,148 more often than not scholars have emphasized Gautama’s initial act of renunciation with very little recognition that his own family followed him into the monastic life. With regard to the fate of married women in Buddhism, Young, for instance, suggests that “the Buddha did not fulfill his obligations to his father, his son, or his wife. He deserted them all as part of his rejection of worldly life in favor of the ascetic life, and most of the sixty men who joined the order of monks in the first few months of its existence also deserted wives and families.”149 Likewise, Ohnuma states that “in his biography, the Buddha himself, on ‘going forth,’ dramatically leaves behind his wife, son, and parents, and forever renounces the worldly roles of husband, father, and son.”150 Ohnuma then observes that although the Buddha “continues to be referred to as the ‘father’ of Rāhula, he is equally depicted as the ‘father’ of all monks and nuns within the Saṃgha.151 Though he continues to recognize his former relationship with his family...it is clear that he is relating to them as a buddha rather than as a member of the family.”152

Lest I be misunderstood, there is no doubt that the Buddha’s initial “renunciation” of his family is dramatic, even if his family did subsequently follow him into the monastic life. Moreover, to be sure, one would not want to claim that the Buddha related to family members solely as a family member, and not “as a buddha.” However, I do see as problematic the fact that there is little, if any, indication in the above statement by Ohnuma, for instance, that Rāhula, the Buddha’s own son, and many other members of the Buddha’s own family, also became monks and nuns. Unless I am mistaken, scholars have tended to highlight only one-half of the story.

Statements such as those quoted above give the impression that having gone forth from the home into homelessness, the Buddha and―if his renunciation is to be taken as a model for emulation―monks and nuns after him were no longer in contact with their families. One might even go further and suggest that Buddhist monks and nuns were, for all intents and purposes, socially dead. This is what has been suggested by Wilson, among others, who discusses the idea of Buddhist renunciation as “a death to the social world that leaves grieving relatives in its wake.”153

Given the assumptions that seem to undergird the study of Buddhist monasticisms, it is perhaps not surprising that many scholars simply have accepted the received knowledge without questioning it.154 In Spiro’s introductory essay to a volume entitled Religion and the Family in East Asia, for instance, Buddhist monasticism is described as follows: “Beginning with the Buddha himself, ‘leaving home’ has meant abandoning not only parents, but also...wives and children as well.”155 Spiro goes on to suggest that “it is not living in a family-like structure as such that the ‘goer-forth’ rejects in ‘leaving home,’ but rather living in his own biological family. And make no mistake about it. ‘Leaving home’ is a rejection of the latter family, despite the monks’ attempts to rationalize it.”156 Most recently, albeit in a much more nuanced fashion than Spiro, Ohnuma has stated that “it is clear that this act [i.e., renunciation]―ideally speaking, at least―does involve the rejection of one’s family and the severance of ordinary family ties.”157

By contrast, I suggest that the authors/redactors of Indian Buddhist monasticisms take for granted that biological kin might leave home for the religious life together. It is not simply allowed or permitted. Rather, I argue that renunciation with or as a family is tightly woven into the very fabric of Indian Buddhist renunciation and monasticisms as envisioned by the authors/redactors of our monastic codes. Moreover, even “ideally speaking,” at least when speaking of the ideals of the authors/redactors of the extant vinayas, there seems to have been little, if any, expectation that when one left home for the religious life one would either reject one’s family or sever all family ties.158 As we will see in Section 6 of Chapter 3, in the story of Mahākāśyapa, the Buddhist ascetic par excellence, even the strictest Buddhist asceticism, at least as presented in the Mūlasarvāstivādavinaya, far from requiring complete severance of all contact with one’s “former” wife, actually requires a monk to share his alms with her in times of adversity.

A further indication of the prevalence of these received views can be seen in Alan Cole’s entry on Buddhism and the family in the Encyclopedia of Buddhism. The entry begins as follows:

Given that Buddhism is regularly understood as a monastic movement dedicated to “leaving the family” (pravrajyā), the technical term for becoming a monk or nun, it might seem odd to ask about Buddhism’s relationship to the family. Why, after all, would Buddhism as a religion of renunciation have anything to do with family life? However, a closer look at the structure of Buddhist rhetoric, as well as Buddhism’s various societal roles, reveals that Buddhism’s relationship to the family and
family values has several unexpected layers.159

Unhappily, Cole’s entry replicates a number of problematic assumptions common to the study of the history of religions in general and Buddhist studies in particular.160 Cole’s assertions aside, it is his discussion of the role of family in Buddhism that warrants our immediate attention:

Arguably there are at least four basic categories of Buddhist discourse that focus on familial issues: (1) a discourse on the negative aspects of family life, the language of renunciation; (2) a symbolic language in which identity within the monastic setting is understood as a kind of replication of the patriarchal family, a kind of corporate familialism; (3) guidelines for correct conduct at home, pastoral advice from the Buddhist establishment; and (4) specific lineage claims that sought to establish an elite family within the monastic family, a more specialized form of corporate familialism.161

The third and fourth categories proposed by Cole are outside the purview of the present study in the sense that they do not deal with Indian Buddhist monastics and their families per se. Pastoral advice given by monks and nuns to laymen is found, to be sure, in certain genres of Buddhist texts. Likewise, lineage claims are also a part of Buddhist monasticisms (particularly Chinese and Japanese, but also Tibetan). Neither of these categories, however, has much to do with mainstream Indian Buddhist monastics and their families, either biological or matrimonial.

With regard to his first category, Cole suggests that the language of renunciation focuses on “negative aspects,” “the unsatisfactory and even dangerous aspects of family life.”162 To be sure, some aspects of “Buddhist discourse” focus on “negative aspects” of family life; this we have already seen in the Rhinoceros Horn Sūtra, a text quoted at length by Cole in his contribution to Sex, Marriage, and Family in World Religions.163 Here one might also cite part of the stock phrase found, for instance, in the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya that often introduces a householder’s motives for entering the religious order, viz., “I am now old and cannot pursue wealth. Furthermore, my relatives are all dead. I ought to forsake the lay life and leave home [for the
religious life].”164 We might also consider the claim leveled at the Buddha in the Pāli Vinaya, for instance, in reaction to the ordination of “very distinguished young men belonging to respectable families of Magadha,” viz., that renunciation breaks up families, “making (us) childless...making (us) widows....”165 According to Bailey and Mabbett, however, this complaint occurs only once in the entire canon.166

Cole’s second category, that of symbolic language used to create a monastic “family,” draws on a common trope in studies of monasticism.167 At least in the case of Indian Buddhist monastic law codes, however, there is little in the way of familial language used to address other members of the monastic community.168 This was established long ago by I. B. Horner in reference to Theravāda monasticism: “neither Order looked to anyone or to any kind of being as their ‘father’ or their ‘mother.’”169 In attempting to arrive at an acceptable translation for Pāli bhikkhu (Skt. bhikṣu), Horner notes that “bhātar, the accepted word for ‘brother,’ and one in current terminology, was never apparently regarded as synonymous with bhikkhu, and indeed never seems to have been connected with members of the Order.”170 Moreover, with regard to the term for ‘sister,’ Horner states that “with this absence of bhātar as a term used in the religious life, it is curious that monks used its opposite, bhaginī [sister]. But it should be noted that they addressed laywomen as well as nuns as bhaginī. Hence the word bhaginī is clearly precluded from containing any unique reference to bhikkhunīs.”171

To my mind, Cole provides another excellent example of the degree to which modern assumptions about the nature of Buddhist monasticisms and renunciation have constructed and constricted scholarly inquiry. We do not ask questions about monastic families, monks’ wives, or nuns’ children simply because, like Cole, we do not expect them to have any.172 Were the present study to be limited to Cole’s “four basic categories of Buddhist discourse that focus on familial issues,” I would have little to say about Buddhist monks and nuns and their families. In contrast to Cole, this study addresses the continued biological and matrimonial relationships between monks and nuns and those whom they have “abandoned” in favor of the religious life, whether among family members who have likewise entered the religious life or among those who have not.

To be sure, not all scholars have overlooked the importance of family and the continuity of kinship ties in Indian monastic Buddhism; certain themes vis-à-vis family have been studied. Valuable
contributions have been made by those who have seriously delved into the depths of the monastic law codes, texts in which one cannot help but notice the frequent mention of monks and nuns and their children, parents, siblings, and spouses. André Bareau, for instance, has dealt with the reactions of families to monks’ ordinations.173 Likewise, Schopen has written on the rights of monks to inherit family property,174 their obligations to support their parents,175 and Indian
notions of filial piety.176 John Strong has discussed the Buddha and his family, in particular his wife Yaśodharā and son Rāhula, and their“family quest” for enlightenment.177

In Japan, where studies in Buddhist monastic law are more commonplace than in the West, Nobuyuki Yamagiwa has discussed a number of monastic rules that allow monks to interact in various ways with laymen and laywomen to whom they are related, interactions that would otherwise incur offenses.178 Yamagiwa has also dealt with monastics’ obligations to prescribe medicines for sick parents.179 In a short section on “renunciants and their families” in his work on Indian Buddhist monastic life,180 Shizuka Sasaki mentions continued contact between “renunciants” and their families, and states in this regard that “Buddhism does not deny this kind of familial affection” and that “it was never the case that severing connections with former relatives was encouraged.”181

With the possible exception of Schopen’s, however, these particular studies have had a limited impact on the wider field of Buddhist studies or religious studies. Though Schopen’s work is widely read and cited, his focus is predominantly on Indian Buddhism in terms of the legal and financial aspects of monasticism. Moreover, Schopen’s work has often highlighted the differences between Mūlasarvāstivādin

monasticism and the monasticism presented in the (Theravāda) Pāli

Vinaya, and hence in our modern handbooks.182 Indeed, given his emphasis on the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya, there has been, I suggest, a tendency to see the weird and wacky world of Mūlasarvāstivāda monasticism as portrayed in this monastic code as somehow unrepresentative of Indian Buddhism. In contrast to the work of Schopen, the present study highlights the similarities between the Mūlasarvāstivāda and Theravāda traditions, and all of the others in between. The study of family matters suggests that the Pāli Vinaya is not so different from the other vinayas, especially when reread in light of the other, often narratively richer, monastic codes. Moreover, far from being aberrant, I contend that the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya may be very much representative of what Indian Buddhist monasticisms had become in the first few centuries of the Common Era.183 All extant Indian Buddhist monastic law codes suggest that monks and nuns could continue to interact with family members both lay and monastic. While this has been known to most specialists of Buddhist monastic law, the full religious and social implications of this for the study of Buddhism in India and beyond have yet to be laid out. The present study attempts to do just that.

5. A Preview of the Inquiry

Chapter 2, entitled “Family Matters,” introduces a number of early Indian inscriptions in which monks, nuns, and laymen are identified in terms of familial relationships: So-and-so, mother of monk Y or nun Z. We also find inscriptions referring to nun X, mother of Soand-so, or nun Y, along with her daughter(s), or to laymen who are identified as sons or daughters of monastics. These inscriptions could be explained away as records of children who were abandoned and forsaken by their parents when the latter “left home for the religious life.” Extant Buddhist monastic law codes, however, preserve stories about men “leaving home” to become monks with their young children, and children who, after joining the monastery, still call their monk-fathers “Daddy.” We also encounter narratives of mothers and daughters who leave home for the religious life together. Here the monastic law codes may allow new interpretations of the inscriptional evidence.

Narratives from the monastic law codes raise questions of interpretation with regard to the phrase “to go forth from home into homelessness.” This phrase has generally been understood literally. I
argue that evidence from Buddhist monastic law codes suggests that it is best understood figuratively. For the monastic legislators, the authors of Indian Buddhist legal codes, there seems to have been no question that monks and nuns could take their families with them into homelessness. Moreover, in texts which are commonly accepted as belonging to among the earliest strata of Buddhist literature available to us, we find presupposed within monastic communities the existence of monks and nuns who were biologically related to each other. In my view, this throws doubt on the scholarly assumption that monks and nuns were required to forsake their families.

Chapter 3, “Former Wives from Former Lives,” investigates the status of monks’ “former” lay wives. These women have often been overlooked in the study of Indian Buddhism, and it is generally assumed that we know nothing about them.184 In the case of Buddhist monks’ wives, however, there is ample evidence in Buddhist narratives. In some stories, these “abandoned” women are presented as hostile to their husbands; in others they are depicted as still very much
attached to them. We not only see stories about monks’ visiting (and sometimes being seduced by) their wives, but we also catch a glimpse of the financial situation of some of these “deserted women.” Furthermore, in some stories, monks and nuns act as go-betweens in arranging marriages for their own children. Accordingly, in this chapter I discuss the marital status of married men and women upon entering Buddhist monastic orders. Although various forms of marital dissolution were known to the authors/redactors of some monastic law codes, monks and nuns were not required to dissolve their own marriages; “former” wives, that is, lay wives, are not to be confused with divorced wives. Far from always and necessarily abandoning their wives, the monastic authors/redactors seem to have envisaged that monks might go forth into the religious life together with their wives.

Chapter 4, “Nuns Who Become Pregnant,” looks specifically at issues surrounding monastic motherhood. Indian Buddhist epigraphical records tell us that some nuns had children; they do not, however, specify whether mothers became nuns or nuns became mothers. In the corpus of monastic law codes, however, we see that monastic jurists not only envisaged the possibility that pregnant women might enter nunneries, but―even if only to keep it under wraps in order to control their community’s public image―they also legislated a place for motherhood in Indian Buddhist nunneries. All known Indian Buddhist monastic law codes allow pregnant nuns to give birth to children and to breast-feed and raise their newborns within the convent while practicing the Dharma.

In Chapter 5, “Reconsidering Renunciation,” I suggest that a close examination of the issues surrounding family matters both presupposed and legislated by the authors/redactors of the extant monastic law codes may shed more light on the religious life of Indian Buddhist monks and nuns in the first few centuries of the Common Era than the romanticized portrayals based primarily on Pāli sutta literature that are prevalent in modern scholarly and popular literature. I also suggest that family-friendly forms of monasticism may have been more common in India than previously thought.

6. Reading Indian Buddhist Monastic Law Codes

Sources for the study of monastics and their families in Indian Buddhism are, in general, few and far between. In part, this is to be expected. John Boswell, for instance, has noted that “conjugal relations, reproduction, and the interior life of the family are, in fact, among the most reclusive and private respects of human existence, jealously guarded from public view in most cultures, and less likely than almost any other interpersonal activity to leave written records.”185 Although Boswell is writing on Christendom, there is no reason to think his observation concerning written records for family life is any less applicable to Indian Buddhism. Moreover, in the case of India the situation is particularly difficult since we lack many of the historical and social records that historians of the same time period in China, for instance, might reasonably expect to have at their disposal.

For the study of Indian Buddhist monasticisms, by far the richest sources are monastic law codes.186 However, these vinayas are not a direct window on what monks and nuns actually did. Rather, the law codes provide us with records of what some monks (some would argue, the Buddha) seem to have thought other monks and nuns should and should not do. Yet few of the questions which I ask of our sources are ones that Indian Buddhist traditions ever seem to have formulated explicitly or dealt with in any great detail.

The extant monastic codes all follow a twofold division into (1) rules of comportment and deportment for individual monks and nuns (prātimokṣa rules) and (2) institutional law governing the activities of the monastic corporation or saṅgha, collected in what are known in Pāli as khandhakas and attested in the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya as vastus.187 In the first division, approximately188 two hundred and fifty rules for monks and three hundred and fifty rules for nuns are arranged hierarchically in terms of the gravity of the infraction, ranging from the most serious, pārājika offenses, covering among other things breaches of celibacy and the taking of a human life, to the least serious, śaikṣā rules concerning matters of minor etiquette, such as not slurping one’s meal. The second division, the khandhakas or vastus, are arranged thematically. They contain sections dealing with various topics such as, alphabetically, the allocation of corporate (monastic) chattels, confessional ceremonies, disciplinary proceedings, medicines, ordination, schisms, and so forth. However, there is no section in any known vinaya that deals specifically with monastic families. If the absence of specific texts devoted either wholly or even partly to our topic in the monastic corpus is significant, then family may have been of little concern to our monastic authors/redactors. In other words, matters surrounding monks and nuns and their families seem not to have been perceived as necessitating any serious monastic legislation.

But if there are no Indian Buddhist monastic legal texts dealing specifically with the question of family matters, how then are we to answer the questions that we might ask of our texts? I have attempted to bridge this gap by exploring a wide range of vinaya narratives dealing with issues that are seemingly unrelated to each other and most of which, at first sight, appear to have nothing whatsoever to do with the question of family. Evidence often comes from the most improbable of contexts. Passages dealing with topics as diverse as monks’ visiting barbers, monastics’ seeking meals, and nuns’ personal safety often reveal important insights into the religious life as the elaborate narratives unfold.

All of the extant vinayas contain an enormous amount of narrative material, some more than others. Sylvain Lévi describes one of these monastic codes―the most elaborate, that of the Mūlasarvāstivādins―as “written with art, overflow[ing] with miscellaneous matter of all kinds. The rules often have the appearance of being mere pretexts for relating long histories, heroic, comic, fabulous and romantic ...a complete canon in itself.”189 In addition to lengthy narratives of previous lives and various sūtras embedded within the monastic codes, many of which also circulated as independent texts or in anthologies such as the Divyāvadāna, most of the hundreds upon hundreds of vinaya rules are introduced with a frame-story outlining how each rule came about.

The frame-stories introducing vinaya rules relate incidents set, at least narratively, in the lifetime of the Buddha. As discussed above, the actions of a certain monk or nun, and often a group of monks or nuns, give rise to lay criticism of Buddhist monastics. The incident is then reported back to the Buddha, who thereupon promulgates a rule making the action performed by the monk or nun in question to be a monastic offense, the exact type of which is determined by the gravity of the incident. The monk or nun protagonist whose actions bring about the establishment of the rule is generally neither found guilty of any offense nor punished, since, according to the common legal principle nulla poena sine lege, there was as yet no law to transgress. The protagonist is generally referred to in vinaya literature as an ādikarmika, a term which is often translated, perhaps confusingly, since technically there is no offense, as the “first offender.”190 Although the rules and regulations of Buddhist monastic law are presented as the Buddha’s reactions to accounts of what monks and nuns did, we might step back and interpret this legislation as early monastic lawyers’ reactions to what monks were said to have done, were thought to do, or might foreseeably do, reactions mostly intended to protect the public image of the monastic institution.

Generally, these frame-stories explicitly address only one issue at a time. Inadvertently, however, they provide us with a rich array of incidental or secondary details. In addition to what the authors/redactors of these texts may have wanted to tell their readers, or even themselves, they reveal to us information about their assumptions concerning the religious life of monks and nuns in India. It is precisely the very casual and unselfconscious nature of such details that offer us candid
glimpses of monastic life as envisioned by the authors/redactors of the extant law codes. To give but one example, in a stock phrase found throughout the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya, monks and nuns who are seen constantly going to the houses of barbers and other craftsmen are assumed to be going to the houses of their relatives or families.191 Although the narratives in which this stock phrase is found tell us nothing about monks’ visiting their relatives or families, the point remains that in Indian Buddhist monastic literature, when a monk is seen frequenting a lay house, the natural conclusion to which the authors/redactors have other monks jump is that the monk is visiting his relatives. While the modern reader might assume that the monk is being criticized when he is mistakenly thought to be visiting his family, in fact there is not a hint of criticism, either expressed or implied. Rather, this stock phrase suggests the degree to which visits home by monks may have been not only unproblematic in the eyes of the monastic jurists, but also entirely commonplace in Indian Buddhist monasticisms. It is precisely assumptions such as those implicit in this and other stock phrases and narratives employed and crafted by the monastic authors/redactors that I seek to highlight and contrast with our own.

Broadly speaking, then, the vinayas preserve two types of monastic law: rules governing the activities of individual monks and nuns, and those regulating the activities of the monastic community as a corporate entity. In this study, I will discuss examples of both types of monastic legislation. The rules for individual monks and nuns are found in vinaya literature in two different contexts. They are collected in lists known as prātimokṣas, short texts that probably were used primarily for ritual recitation at confessional ceremonies. The exact same rules also appear in much longer sections known as vibhaṅgas, in which the rules are presented along with rich frame-stories and various other canonical legal interpretation, including word commentaries and detailed exceptions to the rule, presumably intended to guide monastic jurists in the application of said rule. Rules such as those found in the prātimokṣas stating, for instance, that nuns should not ordain pregnant women appear at first sight relatively clear cut. Yet these so-called prohibitions in fact tell us very little. They do not tell us, for example, whether nuns ordained pregnant women; only that they were not supposed to ordain them. Neither can we tell how successful the rule was: did nuns thereafter stop ordaining pregnant women? The very existence of the rule and the provision of some type of punitive procedure for a lack of adherence admits the possibility that it would not always be followed. We cannot tell from the rule itself exactly why it was enacted. Were pregnant women presenting themselves for ordination in such numbers that a rule needed to be established? If so, why? And what precisely does the rule seek to prevent? Is it the ordination of pregnant women per se, or are there other factors such as social censure and lay criticism at play here? While the rules as embedded in the prātimokṣas do not throw light on such questions, as we will see, the detailed legal traditions explicated in the vibhaṅgas do.

In fact, when the family members of monks and nuns are mentioned in the prātimokṣas, it is generally, if not invariably, only to introduce exemptions to rules, none of which deal with family matters themselves. A monk, for instance, commits a minor offense in sewing a robe for a nun to whom he is unrelated, such as a stranger, a friend, a former lover, or even his own wife; there is no offense, however, if he sews a robe for a nun to whom he is biologically related, such as his mother, sister, or daughter. Similar rules not only presuppose the existence of kith and kin within the monastic confines, but they also allow the otherwise unallowable in cases of interaction with a monastic’s own family members.

Although the prātimokṣas, which are thought to belong among the earliest strata of Buddhist monastic law, presuppose continued contact between monks and nuns and their families almost from the beginning of Indian Buddhist literature,192 they turn out to have less value for the purposes of the present study.193 It is not that their content is unimportant or insignificant. Rather, the prātimokṣas lack both narrative context (i.e., frame-stories) and canonical legal interpretation, as discussed above. Indeed, while it has been commonly held that vinayas are dry, boring, legalistic texts,194 those characterizations would squarely hit the mark if confined to the prātimokṣas. Yet the prātimokṣas represent only a tiny fraction of the extant corpus of Buddhist monastic law codes; as for the rest, nothing could be further from the truth.

The second type of monastic legislation is made up of rules governing the monastic community as a corporate body, not the activities of individual monastic practitioners. Like the prātimokṣa rules, this type of legislation is usually embedded in thick narrative. Unlike the prātimokṣa rules, either within or without a narrative context, these regulations often come in the form of blanket prohibitions lacking any sanction or directive to be applied in case of noncompliance. For the purposes of this study, the main difference between the two types of monastic legislation is perhaps best illustrated by contrasting the legal effectiveness of a prātimokṣa rule, which makes it an offense to ordain a certain type of person, with a blanket prohibition, such as those found in the vastus or khandhakas, which bans the ordination of another class of persons. Take, for instance, the prātimokṣa rule discussed above which makes it an offense to ordain a pregnant woman. This rule does not prevent the ordination. Rather, it stipulates the punishment to be meted out to a nun who ordains a pregnant woman. In other words, the ordination itself is and remains valid; the pregnant woman’s new status as a nun is in no way affected by the minor offense incurred by the ordaining nun. This is one of the limits of this type of monastic legislation.

Although the existence of a prātimokṣa rule may act as a deterrent, the rule itself neither proscribes nor necessarily prevents the action it is designed to curtail. In Buddhist monastic law, the only way to prevent certain activities is to ban them outright with a blanket prohibition or direct command directed not to individual monks or nuns but to the monastic community as a corporate entity. We find this type of legislation predominantly in the thematically arranged chapters (vastus or khandhakas) of the vinayas. In the Chapter on Ordination, for instance, certain people―the deformed, the sick, and the ugly, for example―are specifically barred from ordination.195 Unlike the prātimokṣa rule, this type of monastic legislation does not allow any wiggle room: noncompliance is not an option―unless, of course, one ignores the legal system entirely, but that is a very different matter. A monk or nun does not incur an offense in ordaining such people; quite simply, they cannot be ordained.

In the following chapters it will be important to recognize these two different types of monastic legislation and their limitations. This will allow us to understand better not only the rules and regulations that were promulgated, but the choices made by and options available to Indian Buddhist monastic jurists. As we will see, it would have been a simple matter to prohibit the ordination of pregnant women entirely by adding them, along with the bald, blind, deaf, and mute,
to the list of those who may not be ordained.196 This, however, was not done; indeed, what the monastic lawyers chose not to do is often more telling than the choices they made.

In discussing family matters in Indian Buddhist monasticisms, I have found it useful in the following chapters to marshal two types of evidence from the extant monastic law codes. The first comes from reading the vinayas not for the information they purport to report, but for the incidental details that betray the authors/redactors’ assumptions vis-à-vis the monastic life. I have used this type of evidence predominantly in Chapter 2 in discussing monks and nuns and their continued familial relationships, and in Chapter 3 with regard to monks and their “former” wives. The second type of evidence is more straightforward. At least as they are presented in Buddhist monastic law, issues surrounding nuns’ pregnancies and monastic motherhood are dealt with head on by our monastic legislators. The jurists legislate these issues not through rules for individual monastic practitioners, but in terms of corporate policies dictating how the monastic community is to deal with such situations. Accordingly, in Chapter 4, in connection with the phenomenon of monastic motherhood, there is little need to read the texts against the grain for incidental details that might throw light on the authors/redactors’ presuppositions.

Although it is impossible to know for sure what Indian Buddhist monks and nuns did or thought some two thousand years ago, we can know what the Indian authors/redactors of extant Buddhist
monastic law codes told other monks and nuns about their traditions. Buddhist monastic law codes or vinayas provide us with much more than merely normative monastic visions of the religious life as envisioned by their authors/redactors. The present study is a survey of what Indian Buddhist “in-house” narratives reveal about the monastic life in general and the concerns and values of their authors/redactors in particular. Where possible, I have tried to verify or support the data from these internal monastic law codes with sources external to Indian Buddhist traditions, such as epigraphical, literary (Sanskrit drama), textual (civil legal documents from Central Asia), and modern ethnographic sources. When the external evidence is found to corroborate the internal, the probative value of the monastic codes seems to be confirmed, if not increased. This is especially so in the case of Sanskrit drama, which is often ambivalent, if not antagonistic, toward Buddhist monasticisms. When, for example, we read in both Sanskrit dramas and Buddhist monastic law codes that monks and nuns were acting as matchmakers for marital and sexual liaisons, we would seem to be on relatively firm ground in asserting that this was a problem not just in our monastic texts or in our authors/redactors’ minds, but also in the cultural milieu of the India of the monastic jurists. The veracity of these claims is further increased when corroborating evidence is found in other genres of Indian literature, such as learned brahmanical treatises, texts that share an ambivalence and antagonism toward heterodox religions such as Buddhism.

7. A Note on the Scope of the Present Study

Rather than engaging in an in-depth study of one particular monastic tradition in this book, I have chosen to sketch out in broad brushstrokes various stances vis-à-vis monks and nuns and their continued familial relationships as portrayed in the six extant monastic law codes. It is impossible to deal with every passage in which mention is made of monastics’ kith and kin. Many of the narratives presented exist in multiple versions. In general, I present only one version of a specific passage since anything else would burden the reader with an excess of detail. I have introduced only as much as I thought necessary to make a case for the continued importance of familial relationships between monks and nuns and their families, both lay and monastic.

The present study is an attempt to show how and why a close reading of Indian Buddhist monastic law codes is essential for a nuanced understanding of Buddhist monasticisms in India. In highlighting the richness of the vinayas, I hope to make apparent what should have been self-evident. However unfashionable, I intend to call attention to what we still lack but so sorely need even after more than a century of scholarship: detailed studies, critical editions, and annotated translations of the entire corpus of extant Indian Buddhist monastic law codes. These basic resources will enable us to fill in the gaps in our knowledge with studies of individual monasticisms, studies that in turn will allow us to reconfigure the contours of the Indian Buddhist monastic landscape. The present study is experimental and exploratory. My findings are intended as a reconnaissance report to lay the groundwork for future studies of individual monasticisms.