Managing Monks: Administrators and Administrative Roles in Indian Buddhist Monasticism (South Asia Research)

358 Pages·2008·2.29 MB·English

by  Jonathan A. Silk

Managing Monks
SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH
series editor
Patrick Olivelle
A Publication Series of
The University of Texas South Asia Institute
and
Oxford University Press
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Patrick Olivelle
Managing Monks
Administrators and Administrative Roles
in Indian Buddhist Monasticism
jonathan a. silk
1
2008
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Silk, Jonathan A.
Managing monks : administrators and administrative roles
in Indian Buddhist monasticism / Jonathan A. Silk.
p. cm. — (South Asia research)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-532684-0
1. Monasticism and religious orders, Buddhist—India—Government—History. 2. Buddhism—
India—Doctrines—History. 3. Buddhist literature—India—History and criticism. I. Title.
BQ6160.I4S55 2008
294.3657—dc22 2007029120
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Preface
Understanding is possible only in context; things signify only in
relation to other things. Despite this indisputable and obvious fact,
far too many studies of Buddhism attempt to approach its worlds of
thought and practice without regard for their institutional contexts.
Some relevant studies do, of course, exist, with medieval China and
Sri Lanka having been particularly well treated. Indian Buddhism,
on the other hand, as so often seems to be the case, has generally
received less thorough attention. I therefore offer the present attempt
at a systematic examination of the administrators and administra-
tive roles of Indian Buddhist monasticism without apology. A more
comprehensive and synthetic appreciation of the management of
these institutions will no doubt be possible in the future. For now,
what I offer in the following pages is nothing more than a
beginning.
An anonymous reader who vetted the manuscript for the
publisher suggested that this book “will be considered as the Indian
counterpart to Jacques Gernet’s famous L es aspects économiques du
bouddhisme dans la société chinoise immediately after publication, in
spite of the fact that the evidence from China is infi nitely richer than
that from India.” To have one’s work compared to a masterpiece is a
great honor. But with due gratitude for the reader’s praise, I did not
aspire to produce an Indian parallel to Gernet’s work, if this is
even possible with the resources available. Rather, while Gernet
explored the interface between monastic institutions and
vi preface
surrounding society, particularly with respect to economic relations, my focus
has been much more narrowly set instead on those who direct the internal
workings of the monastic organization itself. Toward this end, I have been
particularly interested to discover who was tasked with taking care of the day-
to-day running of the monastery—who was to make sure that monks had food
available to them, that teachers had an audience, that meditators had a quiet
place to sit. In modern parlance, I have been less interested here in the sermon
itself, or in issues of church and state, than in who is charged with advertising
the preacher’s appearance, preparing the hall, setting up the chairs, making
the coffee, and buying the cookies. This interest, of course, did not evolve in a
vacuum.
T he project which has now resulted in the present book began as a chap-
ter of my 1994 doctoral dissertation, which centered on the Ratnara´si-sutra .
That Mahayana scripture is concerned to a considerable extent with practical
aspects of the cultivation of the Buddhist path. As evidence of this concern,
the text contains a lengthy discussion of the monastic administrator called
vaiyaprtyakara . In my efforts to understand what the sutra has to say about this
˚
fi gure, I devoted one chapter of the dissertation’s introduction to this term.
When I returned to this material some years later, I came to feel that a fuller
and more contextualized understanding of this administrator and his role,
and thus a more complete understanding of the sutra as a whole and the
polemics in which it is engaging, could only be attained through a wider sur-
vey of the administration and management of Indian Buddhist monastic insti-
tutions. I chose to carry forward this investigation by means of a census of the
central terms for monastic administrators or managers as they appear in the
literary and inscriptional sources relevant to Indian Buddhism. I thus studied
materials preserved in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Chinese, seeking to come
to terms with the range of vocabulary employed for those with managerial or
administrative responsibilities. One of the things I discovered is the wide
range of usages of even seemingly identical titles. This, of course, is only to be
expected. By their very nature, administrative terms are local and particular;
we would expect that the ways a term is used in one time and place will not
map perfectly or congruently onto the ways the same term is used in other
circumstances. The process of canonization and transmission undergone by
our main sources—scriptural materials, sutras, and the texts of monastic
rules and procedures, the Vinayas—however, has permanently erased from
view the original temporal and geographic localizations of these texts and the
communities whose views and practices they refl ect. What we have available to
us for the most part is a literary corpus within which original distinctions of
time and place have been leveled. Our much less abundant inscriptional
preface vii
sources and accounts of Chinese pilgrims to India, as well as older manu-
script materials, allow us to correct for this erasure only in small measure. I
have been able to go only as far as the sources will allow. I nevertheless hope
and expect that future research will refi ne and correct the picture I have
drawn here.
I t would be an error if my treatment of the variety of sources available to
me and my attempts to discover within diverse descriptions some common
threads were to lead to the conclusion that traditional sources were confused,
or that the terms and titles in question did not have concrete or clearly delim-
ited meanings and uses in specifi c communities. It is much more likely instead
that the diversity of depictions that has reached us hides the individuality of
what were, in the beginning, distinct local usages. In addition, and from an-
other perspective, it may be that different genres of literature, or different
types of sources, employ terms in, once again, distinct ways. But this cannot
be always and entirely the case. If it were, the administrator discussed in the
Ratnara´si-sutra would be unrelated to the administrators whose roles are de-
scribed in the Vinayas, for instance. We would then have to hypothesize that
the Ratnara´si-sutra belonged to a community not governed by a Vinaya, which
is to say, that it was composed in a nonmonastic community, something which
is demonstrably untrue. There must be some relation between the worlds of
the scriptures and those of other genres of Buddhist literature, inscriptions,
and so on. I believe that further studies will be able to help us gain a clearer
and more nuanced understanding of such problems. For the present, however,
while I have remained aware of the dangers of confl ation—and have duly
sought in my presentation to avoid forcing one source’s understanding upon
another—I maintain my faith that this type of study, gathering together a
wide range of material and attempting to make some sense of it, constitutes a
real contribution to our knowledge of Indian Buddhist institutions. It is not
perfect, it is not complete, and it is doubtless not always correct. It is, however,
an attempt to survey a fi eld hitherto rarely plowed. To follow that metaphor for
a moment, it may be that my own plowing is not always as deep as it might
have been, nor the furrows as straight as others might have made them. I
hope, nevertheless, that what I have been able to do will invite others to culti-
vate the fi eld as well.
I cherish this hope not only for the inherent interest of the subject, nor
only for the central role that the study of institutions can and should play in
helping us to paint a broad and holistic picture of Buddhism as a religion. The
subject is also important for those more specifi cally concerned with Buddhist
spiritual cultivation. For Buddhist authors themselves have debated the status
of administration within the monastic community, engaging in polemics over
viii preface
its value relative to meditation and study or preaching. This evident tension
within Buddhist sources themselves, if nothing else, validates our attention to
this topic and calls forth our efforts at understanding.
Although it began life as a chapter of my doctoral dissertation, this project
took on a form similar to that it has now primarily in 2001–2002, during a
year I was able to devote to research, supported by a Morse Junior Faculty Fel-
lowship awarded to me by Yale University. For this, I remain very grateful.
When I returned to the project several years later, I received valuable advice
from Shayne Clarke, then a graduate student at UCLA. Richard Salomon read
the manuscript for Oxford University Press, and kindly made known to me his
identity when he shared several corrections and observations, for which I
thank him. The work as it now stands was substantially completed in 2005,
and only in one or two places have I been able to add references to studies pub-
lished later. It may be, of course, that I have overlooked important works, and I
hope and trust that readers will be kind enough to bring those, as well as
errors, alternate interpretations, and other oversights, to my attention.
I owe my fi rst acquaintance with the Ratnara´si-sutra to my colleague at
UCLA, Gregory Schopen, who alerted me to the importance of monastic in-
stitutions in the study of Buddhism. Much of what I know about monastic
Buddhism I learned from reading his work and from speaking with him about
this and other topics over the years, and I remain grateful for his tutelage. His
extensive, even unparalleled, familiarity with the monastic literature of the
Mulasarvastivadins, preserved in Sanskrit and Tibetan, has produced insights
and introduced discoveries of great interest. These studies allow entrée to the
world of Mulasarvastivada monasticism, often in a very organic and inte-
grated way.
The book that I have written is designed to serve two functions. In the
fi rst place, it is designed to provide, from a relatively narrow starting point, a
context for the discussions of the Ratnara´si-sutra on administration and thus
for what I understand as a sort of “debate” over the proper roles and vocations
of a Buddhist monk, particularly in Mahayana sources. In the second place, it
is designed to serve as a collection of materials, a resource and reference from
which interested scholars might draw for their own further studies. No such
collection can be complete, and this one is not. Nor can any study hope to offer
every possible interpretation or suggest every interesting hypothesis. And the
present study, again, does not. But I believe that it does set forth the basic
sources and does introduce the main materials on Indian Buddhist monastic
administration and management available so far in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan,
and Chinese, interpreting them through comparative study and English trans-
lation in all cases where this is feasible. I understand this presentation of
preface ix
m aterials, in fact, to be one of the primary aims of the Oxford University
Press series South Asia Research, and I owe a particular debt to the series
editor, Patrick Olivelle, for the faith he has shown in my work by including it
in this series.
F inally, it remains to thank my family. They played virtually no part in the
production of this study, and indeed may be said to have positively hindered it
at times, tempting me to go to the park or the beach instead of sitting at my
desk. But truth be told, they have been astonishingly undemanding and hum-
ble for years on end, allowing me extensive freedom to indulge my interests in
topics they doubtless fi nd boring beyond belief. For this, I cannot thank
enough my wife, Yoko, and sons, Benjamin and Oliver.