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There is no evidence for Buddhist monasticism either before or during the Mauryan period. To judge by his inscriptions and the language used in them, Aśoka himself did not know anything about Buddhist monasteries. However, I. B. Homer talks about the historical “success” of Buddhist preoccupation with lay values and sensibilities; she talks about its survival value, but not about its costs, not about its impact on what it meant to be a Buddhist monk, or the way in which it must have put limits on individual monks' choices and foreclosed some old and previously available options. These too need to be brought into some kind of focus, and they might in the first instance be most easily seen in the ways in which these monastic codes deal with asceticism. Asceticism was dangerously individualistic, prone to excess, culturally powerful, and not easy to predict: precisely the sort of thing that could create problems for an institution.

This Chapter shifts from the analysis of the symbolic role of Buddhist monks to the performative aspects of Buddhist monks. Whereas a monk has limited influence over how he is represented, as covered in chapter 2, he exerts far greater influence over what he practices. Living in an environment saturated with fear takes a toll on Buddhist monks. The routinized terror and frequent trauma have a significant impact on southern Thai Buddhist monasticism. After several years, southern Buddhist monks actualize their politicized depictions through their practices, while some further politicize their roles with calls for a strong Buddhist nationalism.

This chapter turns away from the discourse on motherhood examined in the rest of the book to look at the relationship between motherhood and Indian Buddhism as it actually existed “on the ground.” It draws on the work of Gregory Schopen and Shayne Clarke to show that Buddhist monks and nuns in India—in spite of their renunciation of the world—continued to experience a variety of familial entanglements, with parents and children alike; likewise, nuns who were mothers often continued to act as mothers, and the Saṃgha went out of its way to accommodate motherhood within the monastery. The chapter tries to make sense of this contradictory data, in part by drawing on contemporary monastic biographies from around the world. The chapter also draws on modern Buddhist material to explore the possibility that mothering itself might be interpreted as a form of spiritual cultivation fully compatible with Buddhism’s goals.

This chapter examines the status of Buddhist monks' “former” lay wives by drawing on Buddhist narratives. In some stories, monks' former wives are presented as hostile to their husbands; in others they are depicted as still very much attached to them. There are also accounts of Buddhist monks and nuns acting as go-betweens in arranging marriages for their own children. This chapter begins by considering monastic education concerning sex with one's wife and goes on to discuss the status of married men and women upon entering Buddhist monastic orders, along with that of married monastics beyond India. It also explores marital dissolution and divorce in the Indian context and shows that monks could continue to visit and interact with their “former” wives in full compliance not only with the letter but also with the spirit of the vinaya texts. Finally, it tells the story of Mahākāśyapa, who embodies ascetic values in Indian Buddhist monasticisms.

After the departure of Ruggieri for Europe, the Jesuits were expelled from Zhaoqing by a new mandarin, who coveted their house. This represented the low point in the career of Ricci. The missionaries relocated to Shaozhou, a small prefectural town in northern Guangdong. Ricci refused the offer to move into the famous Nanhua monastery, signalling his subsequent break with Buddhist accommodation. Meanwhile, new reinforcements came from Macau, but two European Jesuits died of illness, while two Macau born Chinese Jesuit brothers were more acclimatized to serve as Ricci's helpers. An important development is Ricci's friendship with Qu Rukui, a Confucian scholar and the son of a famous mandarin from Suzhou in the Jiangnan area, the richest and culturally most advanced region of China. Qu's advice convinced Ricci to forsake Buddhist robes and adopt the dress and demeanour of Confucian scholars, which represented a major turn in the policy of cultural accommodation.

This chapter discusses a critique of the authors of the Rāṣṭrapāla, which set out to defend the Buddha's Dharma against the tide of monastic laxity and wantonness to which they saw it succumbing. Accusing their monastic confrères of fawning after patrons and consorting with householders, they describe a saṅgha that had accommodated itself to its socioeconomic environment with considerable aplomb. And they were, to say the least, not very happy about this. The Rāṣṭrapāla is in many ways a Puritan tract, portraying its authors' disillusionment with what the institution of Buddhist monasticism had become in their day. Like the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reformers in the Church of England, they championed an ascetic vision, a return to the righteous times of the first disciples.