For a group of writers and ministers in mid-Victorian Britain, Christianity had about it a “muscular” quality, though, perhaps as Charles Kingsley suggests, the adjectives “manly” and “manful” might be more appropriate labels for the version of Christianity that “represented a strategy for commending Christian virtue by linking it with more interesting secular notions of moral and physical prowess” (Vance i). Indeed, in his Christmas sermon at Cambridge in 1864, Kingsley chaffed against the term “muscular,” preferring in its stead “manful”: “We have heard much of late about ‘Muscular Christianity.’ A clever expression … For myself, I do not know what it means … Its first and better meaning may be simply a healthful and manful Christianity; one which does not exalt the feminine virtues to the exclusion of the masculine” (quoted in Martin, 220). As Norman Vance suggests, that meant infusing Christianity with the “rough and ready tradition of physical sturdiness” (11), social reform, and an insistence on the whole person. A generation earlier and an ocean apart, another minister wrestled with the meaning of a “manful Christianity,” fusing secular and Christian traditions and constructing a religion that affirmed the manly or masculine in ways that both foreshadow and diverge from British muscular Christianity, and that allow us to understand better the links between the religious, social, and personal anxieties that pervaded Anglo-American thought during the nineteenth century.

Between the years 1826 and 1832, a young Ralph Waldo Emerson contended with personal and social forces that threatened to cast him into a maelstrom of doubt and anxiety about his position in society and the universe.

Perhaps the most significant body in Tom Brown's Schooldays is one that does not appear in the text itself: the body of Christ. As the word made flesh, the embodiment of the logos, Christ's materiality provides the doctrinal basis for Hughes's novel. Following F. D. Maurice, Hughes reads the incarnation as evidence of the value and sanctity of the human body and as the basis of human solidarity, the unity of all men as “brothers in Christ” (Vance 54–6). Thus Hughes's ideals of muscular Christianity, the interrelated development of the individual's physical and spiritual strength, and of Christian Socialism, the equality of all men, are grounded on the oxymoronic conjunctions of the material and the spiritual, and the individual and all mankind, in the incarnate Christ. Yet, even as it articulates Hughes's principles, Tom Brown's Schooldays reveals the ideological tensions inherent in his ideals. This essay will examine Hughes's attempts to resolve two of these tensions: the latent incompatibility of the values of physical prowess and spiritual aspiration that combine to form muscular Christianity and the conflict between the ideal of democratic equality that underlies Hughes's Christian Socialism and his implicit assumption of a middle-class perspective in the novel.

These ideological frictions are interrelated in Hughes's novel, the solution to one conflict providing the basis for another conceptual dilemma. Like Hughes's doctrine itself, the difficulties begin with a body or, rather, bodies: the ideologically charged bodies of Tom Brown and the boys of Rugby. The incommensurability of muscular Christianity's stress on both athleticism and spirituality first becomes apparent in Hughes's problems in depicting a body that adequately represents both values.

In May, 1992, nearly three years after completing my field study, I returned to Sri Lanka for three months. Though I was in Sri Lanka to explore an entirely new dimension of my research, I visited many of the lay nunneries where I had lived in 1988–89.

When I left the island in September, 1989, I thought that fewer women would renounce the world in the years to come, based on the trends since the 1890s that I had documented. Much to my surprise, however, the lay nunneries were far more crowded in 1992 than they were in 1989. In 1992 Lady Blake's had twenty-five lay nuns and three women who were training to don the ochre robe; in 1989 it housed eight lay nuns. The Madivala Upāsikārāmaya in 1992 had fifteen lay nuns; in 1989 there were eight. Kotmalee Dhīrā Sudharmā had died of throat cancer in April, 1991; Dhammāpālī Mäniyo had replaced her as the loku mäniyo.

In addition to the swelling populations in the lay nunneries throughout the island, there was a disturbing increase in the number of homeless lay nuns around the country, especially in the Anurādhapura area. In fact, in 1988–89, little did I know how prophetic the title of my book was: in 1992, I witnessed and interviewed lay nuns who were actually living in the gnarled and tangled roots of Bō trees in and around Anurādhapura. This was in stark contrast to the situation three years earlier; at that time, I noticed only one homeless lay nun in that area.

INTRODUCTION

Buddhists in the decades prior to independence in 1948 continued to hail lay nuns as exemplars of Buddhist piety, much as they had done since the 1890s. However, we must recognize a bias even in the elaboration of the feminine and its concomitant: widescale interest in female renunciation. As we shall see below, Ceylon Buddhists rallied support for lay nuns primarily for the benefit of the country. Moreover, the laity's strict control over the female renunciants attested to in the sources of the period, suggests a preoccupation with regularizing the lay nunnneries. In this period, the laity continued to experiment with ways to deal with the “social unacceptability (indeed unimaginability) of an autonomous group of women not under the direct regulation and control of some male authority.” The history of the Vihāra Mahā Devī Upāsikārāmaya (VMD) is an example of such experimentation. Despite institutional androcentrism, the sources of the period suggest that the elite perceived that a bhikkhunī saňgha, or something like it, was necessary for the survival of Buddhism in Ceylon.

Just as the destiny of Buddhism was in the hands of the Colombobased, western intelligentsia, so too was the political scenario. The Colombo-based VMD project to re-establish the tradition of female renunciation during the 1930s – organized and fueled by Colombo politicians – reflects this phenomenon. In fact, the very people who determined the course of the politics of the island in the postindependence period sponsored the VMD project.

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, I explore the contemporary practice of female renunciation in Sri Lanka. Though the laity continue to support female renunciants as many have done since the 1890s, a vast majority of lay nuns at present are impoverished; they find it difficult to ensure the laity's patronage. Moreover, women are no longer encouraged to renounce as they had been in the past; instead, they are expected to fulfill the role society has determined for them as wife and mother.

For many Buddhists in Sri Lanka, the conflict between social and religious obligations is a recurring phenomenon. For women, the conflict is usually resolved by giving priority to social demands, and conforming to female stereotypes. This is certainly the case with the contemporary lay nuns: the dasa sil mālāvo. That lay nuns never lose their association with their lay role as nurturers is perhaps best illustrated in a typical obituary of a lay nun:

It is striking that no mention is made of Embuldeniya Sil Mātā's lay nunnery connections, such as her teacher, and students. In other words, she is first and foremost a wife and mother, despite her renunciation of lay life. By comparison, the death announcement of a monk connects him to his monastery rather than to his blood relatives:

INTRODUCTION

A few interested parties, laity and lay nuns alike, have taken steps to legitimate the lay nuns' vocation by changing their status from lay to ordained. With the support of the Korean government and interested Sri Lankan Buddhists, several Sri Lankan lay nuns travelled in 1988 to America where five accepted ordination into the monastic order from a dual saňgha; Ayyā Khemā took the vows of the bhiksunī the same time. According to the Vinaya, as we have seen, a dual saňgha is needed to initiate a woman into the order. The monks who participated in the ordination were from Theravāda and Mahāyāna communities in America, while the ordained nuns were drawn from the latter. This ordination of the Sri Lankan lay nuns did not go uncontested; most older monks living in Sri Lanka, who argue that the Buddha never wanted to establish an order of nuns in the first place, echoing the ascetic misogyny of the texts, argue that the lay nuns have not changed status. They have predictably declared that Mahāyāna intervention in Sri Lankan Buddhist affairs destroys the integrity of the Theravādin tradition. They are not alone; the majority of the Sinhala lay nuns I interviewed also regard the Mahāyāna ordination of their peers as illegitimate from the point of view of proper Theravādin practice. Like conservative monks, they claim that Mahāyāna Buddhism is a corrupt version of Theravāda and thus has no place in Sri Lanka.

In addition to those who have received ordination abroad, are other women who claim to be members of the monastic community without having been granted the dual ordination.

I have included here the translation of a published account of the life of Dhammāwatī Hewavitarane:

GOOD WISHES ON HER BIRTHDAY

Hlththatiya Dhammāwatī Hewavitarane Sll Mītīva

We bestow our respectable gratitude upon Dhammāwātī Hewavitarane Sil Mātā of the Srī Rahula Mātā Ārāmaya situated in Grandpass, Colombo 14, founder of the Helen Ranawake Ārāmaya of Kottawa, Pannipitiya, and founder member of Dhammāwatī Hewavitarane Home for aged lay nuns, who is celebrating her seventy-fifth birthday and sixty-fifth year of observing sil.

In 1906, on December 20, the head of our lay nunnery, Rosalin Hewavitarane, was born. Her father and mother were Don Charles Hewavitarane and Glisa Hamy Hewavitarane, respectively. In 1916, Miss Hewavitarane left her parents and observed sil under the guidance of Saddhammācārī Sīlavatī at the Srī Rahula Mātā Ārāmaya. From that day onwards, she learned the religion, devoting her life to pious activities and attending to her aged teacher. When her teacher passed away, she took over as the head lay nun of the Srī Rahula Mātā Ārāmaya and continued to render great service to the Buddhist religion. We would like to put into writing a little of the great service done by her:

1. (1) For the welfare of the ladies of the Colombo area, a “Kulangana Samitiya” was formed to help in wedding and funeral expenses.

2. (2) Publishing of Srī Rahula Mātā Magazine once every three months.

3. (3) Organizing and running of the lay nunnery for over 20 years.

4. (4) Conducting the Srī Yāśodārā Danasala in front of the Lankārāma at Anurādhapura for 12 years.