From the cleanliness to the purity: bodily care in Buddhist monasteries from India to China
This lecture displays how, over time, Buddhist monks and nuns have, through their painstaking effort into regulating bodily care, defined the identity of the Buddhist saṃgha, overtly displaying it to the laity.
A Lecture by Ann Heirman, Professor of Chinese Language and Culture and head of the Centre for Buddhist Studies at Ghent University in Belgium.
An essential but often overlooked aspect of monastic life are the practices and objects regulating daily routine, such as bodily care. Bodily practices might be viewed as relatively simple and elementary, but it is exactly through their triviality that they give us a clear insight into the structure and development of Buddhist monasteries. This lecture displays how, over time, Buddhist monks and nuns have, through their painstaking effort into regulating bodily care, defined the identity of the Buddhist, overtly displaying it to the laity. In this effort of codification, implementation and recodification (in respectively India and China), a striking feature comes to the fore: a shifting focus from cleanliness, respect and decorum to purity and ritualization.
Ann Heirman, Ph.D. (1998) in Oriental Languages and Cultures, is professor of Chinese Language and Culture and head of the Centre for Buddhist Studies at Ghent University in Belgium. She has published extensively on Chinese Buddhist monasticism and the development of disciplinary rules, including Rules for Nuns according to the Dharmaguptakavinaya (Motilal Banarsidass, 2002), The Spread of Buddhism (Brill, edited volume with Stephan Peter Bumbacher, 2007), and A Pure Mind in a Clean Body (with Mathieu Torck, Academia Press, 2012).
Registration
h.m.van.der.minne@iias.nl
Picture by Superkimbo (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), Nunnery in Sagaing Hills, Birma