Technologies of the Self: Courtly Artifice and Monastic Discipline in Early India

Abstract

AbstractThis paper attempts to link the growth of courtly and monastic practices as related historical phenomena in early historic India. The consolidation of urban courts and monastic communities represented a departure from the Vedic way of life in the context of new social relations and increasing urbanisation. Urban society and Buddhist monasticism, as scholars have pointed out, were linked materially and sociologically. This paper explores this linkage further. At the level of practice, courtly comportment and monastic discipline, centred around artifice and discipline, respectively, can be seen as direct inversions of one another. This opposition, however, was complementary and reveals a number of shared assumptions about “reality” leading to a common “hermeneutics” of phenomena, despite contrary ontological approaches and implications for practice.