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From Riches to Rags: how new clothes for the dead become old robes for monks1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2013

RITA LANGER
RITA LANGER*
Affiliation:
The University of Bristol, Rita.langer@bristol.ac.uk
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Abstract

The process whereby existing rituals are taken up and re-envisaged is a well known phenomenon in ritual studies. The offering of a piece of white of cloth to the officiating monks during the Theravāda Buddhist funeral ceremony provides a particularly good example. This custom originates in pre-Buddhist funerary rituals, which included the symbolic covering of the dead body with a new, uncut piece of white cloth intended as a new garment for the deceased, but which was afterwards donated to the officiating priests. The present article examines how in the Buddhist funeral the donation of the cloth came to be associated with the monks’ ascetic practice of making their robes from discarded rags (paṃsukūla). A comparison of the lists of “rags” in the Theravāda and Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinayas and in the Visuddhimagga and Vimuttimagga, alongside a historical exploration of the attitude of the Buddhist laity towards monks who adopted ascetic practices, sheds new light on the significance of the paṃsukūla offering. Further, the manner in which an old pre-existing ritual is accommodated within a different conceptual framework provides a clear instance of the primacy of ritual continuity over ritual meaning.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 125 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2013 

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Footnotes

1

A very early version of this paper was presented at the conference of the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in March 2010 in Philadelphia (USA). I would like to thank my fellow panel organisers (Pattaratorn Chirapravati, Erik Davis, Rebecca Hall, John Holt and Justin McDaniel) for their comments and support at the early stage. I would also like to thank Rupert Gethin, John Kieschnick, Mudagamuwe Maithrimurthi, Burkhard Quessel, Paul Williams and Indaka Weerasekera (to name but few) for their help and comments. And finally my thanks goes to JRAS, Charlotte de Blois, the anonymous reviewer and the editing team for making this paper possible. It goes without saying that all mistakes are mine.

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