Reclusion Is Social

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.

Reclusion—separation from society as a religious practice and lifestyle—was social in medieval Japan. Reclusive monks interacted with people from all walks of life. These monks’ interactions with laypeople drove the popularization of Buddhism in the medieval period (eleventh through sixteenth centuries) as something that catered to the interests and ideals of regular people, not just those of the state and monastic establishment. When interpreted alongside texts, the archeological record reveals how the growth of Buddhist practices for the populace emerged from reclusive monks’ activities in relation to people, not because they were alone in the woods writing stuff down.

Early medieval Buddhist monks had a problem with Buddhism. Buddhism in Japan had become all about acquiring lands, deriving revenue, and cultivating relationships with members of state. Disillusioned, the monks did what any reasonable, indignant person would do. They took off their nice robes, put on some dirty old black ones, and went off to live in the woods. The “official monks” who remained in monasteries continued to live regimented lives tightly linked to the workings of state. 

Distanced from urban and monastic centers, reclusive monks, as they are known, had free time in the forested mountains. Freed from monastic constraints, they meditated whenever they wanted, stayed up past their bedtimes, and thought about what they read rather than only reciting the same scriptures on holidays. Their effective renouncement of official, state-sanctioned “renunciation” initiated major changes throughout Japanese Buddhism. 

The traditional labors of Buddhist practice and study involved communal monastic living, reading scripture commentaries, and copying texts. Recluse monks distilled Buddhism into new, easy-to-do religious practices such that simple scriptural recitations, single-object contemplation, and daily work as a layperson could generate merit and even enlightenment.

Good Buddhists no longer had to be retired emperors, demonstrating their faith and commitment by spending big bucks on monastic donations. Good Buddhists could speak the name of the Buddha, even just once at life’s final moment, to achieve salvation. This appealed to more Buddhists and potential Buddhists than ever, inspiring new and enduring movements like Pure Land, Nichiren, and Zen, which have remained among the most popular and visible forms of Buddhism in Japan—and abroad—until the present day. All this came from monks ostensibly separated from society and the populace.

Recluse monks may have written doctrinal treatises to explain these new practices, but these texts do not describe the regular people, nor their experiences, on which this development supposedly rests. Texts uphold an image of the recluse monk as totally separate from the secular world and do little to describe how these monks made their new practices available to the masses. 

The archaeological record reveals another side to the story. In my own work, I read these archives—the written and the material—together to explore the daily lives of practitioners deliberately trying to “hide” themselves, living in hermitages called bessho or “separate places.” Although separate from urban and monastic centers, these hermitages were built near provincial populations. 

When we look at the material remains of these sites, it becomes clear that these monks incorporated their lay neighbors into their ritual practices and spaces. Numerous bessho contain caches of excavated bronzes in ritually buried pits created to deposit hand-copied Buddhist sutras, including images, scripture cases, and inscriptions. Many of these deposits also contain the daily objects and inscribed names of donors whose families lived in the settlements bordering the hermitages. The trails and roadways connecting hermitages to settlements are moreover dotted with ruins of ritual spaces—small Buddhist chapels and shrines to local deities—shared by both village and hermitage residents, all containing locally-made ceramic vessels for transporting all manner of goods and essentials that villagers brought, and dropped, as they moved between homes and hermitage. 

Such social contexts are not visible in texts, but they are undeniable in the archaeological record. It is disingenuous at this point to say scholars of religions only focus on texts, though I still make the critique every time I give a talk about my research. Archaeology helps give us access to the lost, forgotten, the hidden, and the unwritten. 

Despite its monastic ideals, Buddhism has always been entangled with lay communities and its monasteries with settlements. Landscape archaeology and paleoenvironmental approaches indicate early South Asian Buddhist monasteries were established and thrived in relation to settlements and urban centers.

Religious narratives valorize attempts at “hiding” and praise the productivity of reclusion, but there is always another side to the story. For Athanasius, writing of the new monastic movement in Egypt, the desert had become a city. When Thoreau lived alone on Walden, he regularly visited with his friends and family in Concord. Buddhist recluses thrived in contact with society. Reclusion is social. Medieval Japanese recluses rejected one form of community, but they found and developed another.