Between the second and sixth centuries CE, several new traditions emerged within Buddhism, including Mahayana Buddhism, Buddha images, and an emphasis on monastic seclusion. These new traditions coincide with the period in which the bulk of early Buddhist textual sources, whether Hinayana or Mahayana, were recorded and collated. Mahayana texts were initially the product of geographically and politically marginal members of the sangha in the peripheries of India. In reaction to the polemic of early champions of Mahayana like Nagarjuna, the more traditional monks in the Buddhist heartland began recording and collating their own texts. As such, the tradition of Buddhist scholasticism—the study, commentary, and debate over texts—also began in this period. All of these new traditions fed into a complex new conception of Buddhist asceticism—a newfound celebration of the ascetic tradition, however rarely practiced, that informed the sangha’s actions and identities thereafter.
In Chapter 1, I discussed the concept of the invention of tradition or memory. As developed by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983; see also Connerton 1989), the invention of tradition refers to a process whereby real or imagined histories are promoted to legitimate practices in the present—to provide modern practices the aura of historical precedent. Thus, as the British monarchy lost political power at the end of the nineteenth century, they created new rituals and traditions that were intentionally meant to seem timeless and unchanging. Similarly, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the new government of the United States constructed their capitol in a neoclassical style to recall both European capitols and the architecture of classical Greece and Rome. In both cases, traditions were invented as legitimations of political power in the present. What I did not discuss in Chapter 1 was how, precisely, traditions are invented and instilled in a population.
Anticipating the insights of Humphrey and Laidlaw (1994) and Bell (1992, 1997) on ritual practice (see Chapter 2), Hobsbawm argued that the invention of tradition was accomplished through a process of ritualization.
Inventing traditions, it is assumed here, is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition. (Hobsbawm 1983:4)
Hobsbawm’s use of the terms “ritualization,” “formalism,” and "repetition” bear striking similarity to many of the characteristics of ritual and ritual-like behaviors noted by Catherine Bell (1997): formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance. Formalism and invariance reinforce the invention of tradition through the repetition of restricted actions. Traditionalism refers to the use archaic or anachronistic elements or, in essence, older traditions. Finally, performance provides the necessary public venue in which an invention of tradition can be communicated to, instilled in, and created for its intended audience. Critically, this audience need not be large; traditions can be practiced by small secret societies just as much as they are by entire nations or world religions. Like Hobsbawm and Ranger, Bell also argued that ritual is more a process than an event. Following this insight and the similarities between Bell’s characteristics of ritual and Hobsbawm’s presentation of the invention of tradition, memory can also be understood as a process. That is, ordinary or invented traditions gain greater meaning and significance as they become ritualized and formalized. Just as in the study of ritual, these processes often leave clear material traces for archaeological study. The archaeological evidence of Buddhism between the second and sixth centuries CE provides numerous traces that suggest the invention of a new tradition of Buddhist asceticism, though this new tradition was more ideal than practice.
World History
