CHAPTER 6

A Hut with Many Meanings

S imple and plain as it may appear, the ascetic hut is not so simple
after all, and neither was it put together with a plain motive. The
ascetic hut, the sine qua non of asceticism, condenses the rich imagi-
nary and complex practices of the ascetic tradition. The frequent apos-
trophization of the term “hut” resorted to in these essays is a recogni-
tion of its polysemic character, of how an ideogram of the hut harbors
the conceptual complexity of ascetic imagination. In the ideation,
imagination, and representation of the ascetic hut, we are drawn to the
heart of the ascetic project, to its fundamental deliberations and prac-
tices. A discussion of the ascetic hut is not particularly about the cul-
tural history of shelter or the doctrines of religiosity, even if both issues
are implicated; it is more precisely a discourse on the dwelling, on its
practicalities, contingencies, and paradoxes.
As a metonym of the ascetic discourse on the dwelling, the ascetic hut
becomes the site, subject, and medium of that discourse. It does appear
contradictory that an ideological group that has made an avowed dec-
laration of rejecting home would center its practices on the issue of the
dwelling. Does this say more about the inadequacy of ascetic principles
or the obstinate presence of the dwelling in human existence? It is at the
threshold of the dwelling that ascetic ideology has to make adjustments
to its hallowed methods.
Coursing through the terrain of asceticism is its recalcitrant rela-
tionship with residences and abodes. These are not simply the houses
that ascetics once lived in as laypeople and then renounced in the inau-
guration of their project but various sorts of dwelling places and struc-
tures that emerge in the trajectory of the project itself. These consequen-
tial dwellings also mark episodic moments in the ascetic process. The

152
 A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS153

question of the dwelling is encountered the very moment the ascetic-

renouncer steps into a countersocial space with the first, formal renun-
ciation of home. In Indic history, the forest constitutes that alternative
space where the theme of the dwelling is addressed in both its practical
and existential senses, but one that acquires didactic and metaphoric
significance.
In the discussion of the ascetic hut, the Buddha’s dwelling occupies
a predominant position and extensive domain. In both the literary and
visual repertoire of Buddhism, the Buddha is often invoked through
signs and objects (and soon with signs and objects) that include archi-
tectural artifacts. The iconography of this invocation is no prosaic matter
since the representation of the Buddha is a powerful and irksome theme
in the doctrinal debates of Buddhism. How the great teacher who has
passed away is to be represented, or to be recalled, as some texts posit,
forms a key aspect of the hagiography of the Buddha. Debates continue
in modern times around when and how the representational traditions
developed but, curiously, give little consideration to the intrinsic pres-
ence of architecture in that enterprise.
A copperplate from Bhārhut from the second century BCE shows a
range of early Buddhist shrines, called caityas, all related to the venera-
tion of some aspect of the Buddha (fig. 6.1). The caityas depicted are the
bodhi tree, stupa, a hutlike structure, along with a nāndipāda sign. Other
than the nāndipāda, which is a sign marking the Buddha’s birth,1 all are
architectural or quasi-architectural objects. This repertoire finds sup-

6.1 Copperplate
showing Buddhist
caityas, Mauryan
period (Rai Govind
Chandra, Indian
Symbolism [New
Delhi: Munshiram
Manoharlal, 1996]).
154THE HERMIT’S HUT

port in literature. The Buddhist Yoga Śāstras mention five types of

caityapūjā (shrine devotion) in honor of the Buddha by means of the fol-
lowing objects: stupa, gaha, kūṭa, puranacaitya, and abhinavacaitya.2
Whereas the significance of the stupa and tree are more readily ap-
parent,3 both pointing to established and conventionalized practices in
early Buddhism as well as earlier nonascetic and Vedic environments,
the identity and purpose of the gaha and kūṭa are ambivalent. Gaha de-
notes a home, and kūṭa a rooftop or pinnacle-like arrangement or a rela-
tion to a kuṭāgāra, a pavilion at the top of a building. The Bhārhut image
clearly shows a hutlike structure, in fact a double-roofed building, but
what is not obvious is whether it suggests a gaha or a kūṭa, or both (since
the image is of a house structure with a roof pinnacle). When a hutlike
structure appears among a group of caityas, it does generate ambiguity,
especially when a domestic provenance is indicated by the adoption of
the term gaha. What we can assume, though, is that a caitya framed as
a gaha or kūṭa makes an obvious reference to a dwelling in ascetic ar-
chitecture, opening up the whole panoply of interpretations and signi-
fications addressed in this study.
For its plain architecture, the ascetic hut is profusely multihued in its
meanings and receptions. Despite its appearance as an ordinary struc-
ture or event, the ascetic hut is an otherwise; it consistently presents a
polysemy, a source of proliferated representations and interpretations.
When we notice the architectonic device framing a Buddha figure from
Gandhāra, it is more than a simple visual technique for compositional
purposes. The cubic harmikā atop a stupa is also not just a memory of a
relic casket, as is often described; its literal translation of a “little dwell-
ing” contains a wide range of meanings. Similarly, the repetitious treat-
ment of pavilions and aedicules in certain Buddhist-Hindu architecture
and sculpture, as in the rathas of Mahabalipuram, cannot be treated
only as decorative features. “The work of art,” Ananda Coomaraswamy
noted, “is a reminder . . . the summons of its beauty is to a thesis, as to
something to be understood, rather than merely enjoyed.”4 The intention
of this study has been exactly that, to not merely describe the visual
matter at hand or make way for its aesthetic enjoyment but understand
its formations and performances.

THE POLYSEMOUS HUT

Recognizing that the hut unfurls a dense topic despite its elemental ap-
pearance, we can be certain, whenever it is represented or narrated, it is
part of a larger plot in a didactic narrative or landscape of imagination.
And the plot thickens as we enter the fray, as was anticipated with the
discussion of the aedicules on the seventh-century rathas at Mahabali-
 A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS155

puram in the introduction. Though appearing to bear only a decorative

motive, the aedicules, or little huts, actually condense over a thousand
years of reflection on the dwelling, beginning with its abandonment and
reconfiguration in the earliest practices of renunciation in Vedic culture
and the eventual production of the hermit’s hut.
Beyond its function as a pragmatic space, the hermit’s hut or the as-
cetic hut is a distinctive type in the broader category of imagined or
ideated huts. The ideation appears in many forms, as “first,” originary,
archetypal, or regenerative, in which the notion of the “first house”
privileges an ur-object as a progenitor of beginnings. A common char-
acteristic of that architectural genotype is the primitive constitution of
the building form. The notion of the primitive, as we have seen, is an
elusive topic harboring different meanings in different contexts, but all
share a common quality of implying something more than the appear-
ance. The presence of the primitive hut prevails more as an idea—the
something more—than its material and immediate formation as a non-
descript structure.
A full picture of the ascetic hut can be gathered from the fundamental
precepts of the ascetic project, the laborious struggle for deletion and
distillation aimed at arriving at the magnificent destination of a non-
conditioned state. In prosaic terms, the ascetic project indicates a sys-
tematic elimination of societal and material accretions that begins with
material stuff and sequentially, and with greater labor and subtler think-
ing, moves to the body site of the ascetic. The conceptual goal of a final
destination, whether in terms of the dwelling, living practices, or cor-
poreal condition, is conveyed through the semantics of the primitive. In
India, the emaciated hermit dressed in bark or some crude garb sitting
in front of a rudimentary structure is a conventional but telling portrait
of a theater of the primitive.
Going primitive or displaying it is, however, not the goal of the ascetic.
Achieving the primitive mode is a fundamental protocol in the ascetic
project, but the most important aim remains heading toward and arriv-
ing at a finality. To designate this final destination, ascetic ideology in
India adopted the term “last,” whether in a corporeal sense or its archi-
tectural analogue in the hut. The notion of the “last hut” brings the
meanings and purposes of Indic/Buddhist asceticism into a sharper
focus but, most important, in clear distinction to other forms of asceti-
cism. Despite its oblique or subtle presence, all ascetic intentions are
emblematized in the quasi-architectural idea of a last hut. The last hut
provides the most compelling imagery of that glorious but enigmatic
finality. Without specific textual or ritual references naming it as such,
the idea of a last hut understandably appears as speculative and a product
of retroactive imagination. A profiling of that hut is possible by way of
156THE HERMIT’S HUT

a review of the archaeology, iconography, and ideology of Indic asceti-

cism and a hermeneutical inquiry of its architecture.
The idea of a last hut, whenever it appears, explicitly or implicitly,
brings the threshold to the foreground: a termination of one condition
and the beginning or promise of another that is superior. If dreams or
goals of termination characterize ascetic thinking, there are different
degrees and stages involved in it. The basic sense of the last hut begins
from the idea of gaha, the homely life that represents being-in-the-world,
with all the conditions of worldly and social attachment that engender
human motives of desire and attachment. This is the fundamental pre-
cept of the ascetic project, which receives its most sustained and in-
depth ideological articulation in Buddhism. The last hut in the most
basic and inaugural sense is the familial and social dwelling that must
be renounced before the ascetic enterprise can begin; this process is con-
ceptualized by Buddhists as entering the realm of homelessness, pabbaja
or anāgārika. From the pragmatic dismantling of the parameters of
home as a fundamental point of departure, the ascetic strategy is gradu-
ally built up toward a more conceptually articulated renunciation of the
last hut, one that engages complex theoretical framings.
Even after renouncing the social gaha, the novitiate ascetic is not
completely free from the need for lodging. Thus ensues an existential
struggle—between a complete abandonment and the fundamental need
for a dwelling, even if that means being in such primitive conditions as
a natural cave, under a tree, or on a tuft of grass. We have seen how the
Buddhist monastic codes listed four essentials, or nissayas, for a proper
performance of the ascetic project. These four essentials, which included
dwelling, clothing, food, and medicine, laid the foundation of the mo-
nastic codes and also revealed a tension and complicity between renun-
ciation and reconfiguration.
The struggle for a conclusive termination continues until the moment
of the ascetic climax, when (and since then) the last hut takes on a com-
pletely ideational quality by becoming analogous to the ascetic body.
In this ultimate equivalence, the body is the gaha, the final vestige of
socialization. Musings by various monks reflect this aspect: “This was
your old hut; you desire another, new, hut. Discard the hope of a hut; a
new hut will be painful again.”5 The arahan, one example of a perfected
ascetic, is described as “bearing his last body” (antimaśarīraṃ):6 the
ascetic, by attaining perfectedness, has finally broken the chain of being
born and reborn in phenomenal bodies and now lives in the last corpo-
real state. In most ascetic narratives, the body is a hut, a body-hut, whose
existing fabric must be deconstructed before the beginning of an en-
lightened life.
Vivaṭo-cchado, or the shattering of the ridge plate or roof of the body-
 A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS157

hut, is the most climactic and cataclysmic image of termination that the
Buddha applies in describing his experience of enlightenment. The criti-
cal moment coincides with the final goal of asceticism, of attaining
freedom from social fetters, achieving a second birth, purer and better,
or acquiring a nonconditioned state. Although the Buddha himself will
need actual dwellings even after his enlightenment, he is perhaps saying
that the need for a hut, even in psychological and existential terms, is
over after the cataclysmic moment. Desire is gone, replaced by an in-
formed detachment.

GOING PRIMITIVE, EXPRESSING PRIMITIVISM

From the perspective of the town, the hermit’s hut appears unmistakably
primitive, and that is its literal and immediate identity. We know that
going primitive was not without its contradictory articulations in the
practices of asceticism. The debate in the Cullavagga verses on monks’
housing is about structures that are seen as crude by the lay community
in preference for those that are not only well built but socially acceptable.
The community could not comprehend why enlightened people such as
ascetics chose to live in crude structures when they could have better
accommodations. But such simple structures are everywhere in the as-
cetic landscape, contemporaneous to that period and in previous times.
The developed iconicity of the hermit’s hut is based on this very produc-
tion of the primitive genre so consistently evident in Buddhist art and
narratives. The Buddha is depicted visiting Brahmanic ascetics who
themselves are shown in front of a coarse structure. The Buddha’s own
residence in the Jetavana, the gandhakuṭī, was no different from conven-
tional houses in villages and settlements of that time. It was certainly
rudimentary compared with the palace he abandoned in Kapilavāstu.
In various doctrinal tracts, the Buddha exhorts his followers to take up
shelter under trees, in caves, and in other natural conditions. The ex-
treme ascetics, such as the paccekabuddhas, did exactly that by making
an ideology of heading toward and living in primitive conditions with
their categorical declaration, “I refuse a roof.”
Clearly, such an ambitious declaration can come only from someone
who has a roof. And it is from this production of “this deliberate piece
of extravagantly coarse”7 structure that the ascetic or hermit’s hut was
distinguished from the general conglomeration of primitive structures.
It is obvious that the hermit’s hut, at least that discussed here, is both
aligned with and distinct from the common characterization of a primi-
tive hut. The primitiveness of the hermit’s hut is, however, both interim
and instrumental as the fuller property of the hut is gathered from its
wider performance in the ascetic narrative.
158THE HERMIT’S HUT

There is then a distinction between an ascetic hut and a primitive

dwelling, between a structure occupied particularly by an ascetic and
one, because of its literal architectonic and material properties, desig-
nated as primitive. The ascetic hut is a primitive structure or condition
constructed and aligned morphologically with rudimentary buildings
of a particular region. Such a structure does not propose any tectonic
distinction from those prosaic buildings nor does it present any advance-
ment in the general thinking regarding dwelling. The significance of that
structure lies in its participation in an ascetic discourse, the center of
which is occupied by the ascetic himself.
A divine aura and mythic hue often cling to the ascetic, especially
when considered with admiration by the nonascetic lay community.
Such appreciation has often elevated the ascetic to a godlike figure pos-
sessing extraordinary powers. The ascetic’s supernatural attribute is
often an interpretation of the ascetic as a denizen of the forest, a space
populated either by gods or beasts. Yet the glory of the ascetic is in his
human comportment, in his capacity to take human nature to its ex-
treme by human means.
The hermit’s hut, Michael Meister has proposed, is a special kind of
shelter; by sheltering a hermit-ascetic, a figure representing a recognized
spiritual potentiality, the hut is humanized in a way unlike the cosmo-
logical sacred monuments of early India.8 Laypeople consider the ascetic
as possessing extraordinary powers, a capacity derived not from a divine
gift, mythic imagination, or supernatural force; the extraordinariness
of the ascetic is an actuality, a human possibility, and a personality as
the Buddha has actualized it. The emphasis is unmistakably on the hu-
manity of the ascetic and the extreme distance he can go with it; this is
his superhuman self, that is, to be human and to use human potential
to arrive at the farthest reach of his species in order to discover what it
means to be a human in a nonconditioned way. The human way to reach
that shore, moreover, is via thought and intellect. As a core of his teach-
ing toward achieving the extrahuman goal, the Buddha on numerous
occasions rejected those positions prescribing that everything happens
through the will of god and every event is determined by past karma or
occurs by chance. The Buddha discarded these alternatives precisely
because they denied free will and human effort. The Buddha developed
a new and dynamic meditation system for focusing the mind; the wis-
dom produced through this process, as Akira Hirakawa noted, “was not
a mystical form of intuition but allowed a person to see things as they
are in a rational and free manner.”9
Slowly and cumulatively the extraordinariness of the ascetic unfolds
as the ordinary and the putative are taken to their natural limits, often
paradoxically, through an attempt to reach a kind of unnatural degree
 A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS159

or state. Mircea Eliade described how yogins, in order to achieve the

extrahuman condition of a perfected ascetic, aspired through their rig-
orous practice to bring stillness to the normative and natural conditions
of breathing and movement. The codification of such a practice emerges
in mastering the dynamic internal energy through an otherwise static,
seated posture of āsana: this has often been described as transcending
the human condition. All of this work was carried out by means of hu-
man agency and cognition. Raimundo Panikkar described such an es-
sential prerogative of the ascetic-monastic intention as suprahumanum,
something equivalent to the summit of human evolution. The idea of the
human reaching beyond his humanity through human effort may be
approached via the American poet Robinson Jeffers’ concept of “inhu-
manism.” Although this represents a modern philosophical attitude of
extreme humanism and Jeffers proposed the idea in the context of hu-
manity’s alienating relationship with both nature and itself (to recon-
struct a relationship in reaction to “the peculiar disunity and disloyalty
of modern man”10) and consequently with the aim of a condition that
accepts the greatness and beauty in things, the notion of inhumanism
emerges from and merges in the same pool of human existential thought
on the transformation of the human as in Indic asceticism. Inhumanism
produces, Jeffers wrote,

a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the re-

jection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman mag-
nificence. . . . This manner of thought and feeling is neither misan-
thropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and
may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining
sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It
offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love,
hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides
magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our needs to ad-
mire greatness and rejoice in beauty.11

Jeffers’ notion of “transhuman magnificence” aptly approximates in

a modern sensibility the idealistic and humanistic goal of the ascetic
project, even if some aspects of inhumanism are distinctly different.
Reaching the heart of humanity by way of an extreme humanism is
the central tenet of the ascetic ethos, and this is what makes the hermit’s
hut a civilizational project. Despite the usual primitive nature of its
construction, the hermit’s hut is not a primitive hut; it is a product of an
intellected and intentional enterprise. In other words, the hermit’s hut
may be primitivist, but it is not part of a primitive worldview. The her-
mit’s hut, in fact, is the last vestige of civilization in the sequential en-
160THE HERMIT’S HUT

terprise of asceticism that considers achieving the ascetic goal as nothing

less than a sophisticated and cultured human pursuit; the hut is an in-
strument of that process. “Architecture,” as the architectural historian
Banister Fletcher rehearsed the conventionalized trajectory of a history,
“must have had a simple origin in the primitive effort of mankind to
provide protection against inclement weather, wild beasts and human
enemies.”12 The hermit’s hut complicates the conventions and assump-
tions of that description. The place of the hermit’s hut is not in a prere-
corded time and preconceptual context in which the primordial hut
might have been fashioned using whatever construction ingenuity was
at hand to respond to practical matters and environmental contingen-
cies. The hut is also not an ur-form, encountering the earliest problems
of dwelling and responding with the first bit of technology and material
resources available. If a single metanarrative is to be detected in the
ascetic hut, it is in the notion of “beginning,” in the uncompromising
and relentless praxis of proceeding, as most doctrinal literature de-
scribes it, toward an irrevocable finality that terminates the tentacles of
the samsaric world, and inaugurates a nonconditioned mode of being.
It is the preponderance of this idea, of a new beginning, that makes the
ascetic hut a thoughtful and intellectual project.

“MOUNTAIN PLACE IN THE CITY”

Two consistently interlinked conditions are borne by the idea of the “last
hut”: a contrived primitivization and an articulated passage. Con-
structed primitivism is laid out in a spatiotemporal schema in which the
passage is choreographed to form the teleological narrative of the last
hut. The Lomas Rishi Cave is a persuasive “construct” in which the
conditions of the last hut are presented in an architectural setting. There
are two distinctive depictions of the hut at Lomas Rishi: the outer hut
that functions as a portal and the inner hut that serves as a shrine or a
reified object. Between the two is a space of transformative potential, a
transitional space that represents the world of ascesis and homelessness.
This interim space also represents a condensed passage, a condition of
necessary sequence as an inherent attribute of asceticism.
Lomas Rishi as a whole is an allegory of the ascetic journey, the striv-
ing to reach the other end, at the threshold of which is the final hut. This
ascetic itinerary, inscribed spatially at Lomas Rishi, from the portal of
entry to the final hut, is elucidated in other representational modes. At
Lomas Rishi itself, the journey—the distance between entry and the last
limit—is phenomenological and spatial. One needs to traverse the actual
physical distance between the outer and inner huts, even if it is con-
ducted in the ritual framework of shrine devotion. The material-spatial
 A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS161

site of Lomas Rishi is a cave where a hut with a distinctive representa-

tional property takes the prime role in a narrative, and by doing so turns
the inert cave into an allegorical space. Embedded in the allegory is the
route map of an ascetic journey, of initiation and crossing the threshold
and arriving at some kind of termination or apex.
Inaugurating an entry into the world of asceticism, the outer hut si-
multaneously marks a departure from the normative, mundane world—
the well-crafted hut at the portal is just such a representation of the world
left behind—and an entry into a period of arduous labor in order to reach
the other limit, the climactic point associated with the inner hut, the
“last hut.” By being the location and occasion of the glorious “release,”
the last hut is also the point of a symbolic egress as the outer hut portal
is an ingress into the world of asceticism.
In rituals surrounding the Buddhist stupa, the trope of the journey
is physiological but with a higher degree of mental participation. One
enters the zone of ascesis through the gateways, or toranas, where cir-
cumambulation becomes an intensely ritualized and geometricized
version of the journey, with the final “abode” lying conceptually at the
peak of the stupa in the form of the harmikā. With smaller-scaled votive
stupas, the journey is completely condensed within the symbolic field of
an artifact and carried out through mental concentration. An identical
activity surrounds the mental and meditational use of the two-dimen-
sional maṇḍala or yantra.
Expounding the idea of the ascetic hut as an emblem of forest dis-
course, the ascetic themes of passage and primitivism are more intensely
evident in the aesthetical and ritual configuration of the Japanese
chashitsu (the room or structure in which a tea ceremony is performed).
The chashitsu may be geographically and chronologically distant from
Indic materials, but as indicated in the introduction, there is an intimate
shadow of the Indic ascetic hut. While the ascetic hut did not evolve into
as conceptually precise and aesthetically articulated a schema as the
chashitsu, the latter is a culmination of concepts and practices that have
their principal provenance in Buddhist India. For this reason, the
chashitsu can be profitably used to illustrate the twin themes of ascetic
spatiality.
Chanoyu, the tea ritual, developed in Japan over a few centuries, from
the shared tea drinking in the Zen monastic environment and ceremo-
nious drinking among aristocrats in the eighth century, and through
the successive elaboration by various tea masters. By the time the tea
master Rikyū had codified the various elements of the practice in the
sixteenth century, it had acquired a very precise meaning of choreo-
graphed passage and constructed primitivism. The codified chashitsu is
erected through aesthetic parameters derived by conflating the physi-
162THE HERMIT’S HUT

ognomy of the peasant’s hut (sōan) and the hut of the forest recluse
practicing within the ideology of wabi simplicity. The product of that
convergence becomes a paradigm, a very carefully fabricated primitivist
structure with a nondescript appearance containing a minimalist space.
The structure, with its thatch roof and natural materials, came to possess
what has been called a refined poverty.
Conceived not as an autonomous architectural object but as part of
a constructed landscape, the chashitsu is situated in a literal garden that
simulates a forest or mountain setting within which the choreographed
movement is enacted (fig. I.16). In that imaginary landscape, the
chashitsu is visualized as a mountain or forest retreat belonging to a
recluse. Before Rikyū and his time, there were practices in which a
mountain hut was constructed within the city to perform as a special
space for reflection. The notion of bringing the “mountain place into
the city” was a vogue expression among the literati of medieval Kyoto.
This practice involved the building of chashitsu within the city in the
manner of forest and mountain retreats, and the practitioner came to be
called a hermit in the city.13
The chashitsu, as a reproduction of the mountain or forest hut, em-
bodies a more cultivated and conscious simulation of the space of a
recluse in a forest. Kakuzo Okakura noted how the chashitsu, by imply-
ing a hut in the forest, becomes increasingly charged metaphorically
and symbolically.14 This chashitsu was considered superior to an actual
mountain retreat, since that was neither proficient nor aesthetic in
comparison with the contrived construct of a primitive hut in the hustle
and bustle of the city.15 This particular practice of construction implies
that primitivism needs to be understood, and enjoyed, in relation to its
adjacencies, whether with its unequivocal opposite, the culturally su-
perior structure, or its territorial antithesis, the city. An ideological
construction of the primitive involves playing the card of binariness,
as illustrated in tea master Shūkō’s description of a fine steed tied next
to a tired chashitsu.16
By the time of Rikyū, the chashitsu has become more than an aes-
thetic reconstruction of a primitive hut; it is now informed by Zen Bud-
dhist ideology. The image of the hut in the forest now alludes to a renun-
ciatory life, a passage into self-illumination. The garden path, or roji, that
leads from the waiting platform, the machiai, where guests leave behind
their principal social emblems (such as their swords) on their way to the
chashitsu, corresponds to the first stage of meditation. The roji was in-
tended to break the connection with the outside world and to produce
a fresh sensation conducive to the full enjoyment of the chashitsu itself.17
The passage to the hut included a number of articulated thresholds, from
the machiai to the tiny door, or nijiriguchi, each one corresponding to
 A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS163

stages in self-illumination. The nijiriguchi is the small opening through

which the visitor crouches and finally crawls into the chashitsu; the
whole act of bending down, bending the body, pushing and pulling
oneself out through a narrow opening took on significant meanings.18
Before the nijiriguchi became the crawl entrance for the chashitsu proper,
it had been the entrance to the whole space that included the garden and
chashitsu, thus marking a threshold of a special realm.19 The historian
Kumakura Isao has attributed the theater entrance as an origin of the
nijiriguchi as embodying a rite of passage from the realm of the ordinary
to the extraordinary, a process not unlike the gaining of a new life force
or rebirth.20
“His body cleansed,” as Kumakura has described the act of passage,
“the guest passes from one world to another and, with a sense of keen
awareness increasing at each step of the way, finally arrives at the tea-
house, whose interior has become less the realm of the connoisseur than
a sacred space.”21 In anticipating what it is like to be finally in the space
of the chashitsu, Kumakura has stated: “Because of its small size and
restricted character, the tea room placed great restraints upon the ac-
tions of people in it. Conduct became ritualized and, by means of refined
conversations and movements, people came to experience an increase
in awareness and an uplifting of the spirit.”22 Meanwhile, some fifteen
hundred years ago, in the cool and cavernous site of Lomas Rishi, where
the hustle and bustle of the everyday world and the phenomenal condi-
tions of light and wind have been largely eliminated and the only thing
an ascetic might have been aware of was his body and its movements
and the breathing and beating of his heart, there was, one can imagine,
a similar heightening of awareness and a promise of becoming a new
human, if not a superhuman.

THE HUT-BODY
The narrative of the ascetic hut is very much a story of managing the
body. The double theme of the last hut—the structure of passage and
primitivism—is played out in two narrative strands, one that is clearly
architectural, where the schema is constructed and presented in material
and spatial terms and finds its eminence in the physiology of a building
(hut). In the corporeal mode, the same notion is schematized in the
ritual and physical body of the ascetic. The body is a key protagonist in
all hut narratives, which is to say again that there is no hermit’s hut
without the hermit. In converse, and tautological terms, the ascetic hut
finds its fundamental significance from the ascetic. It is the asceticized
body upon and with which the great ascetic experiment takes place that
consistently thematizes the hut. In analogical development and reciproc-
164THE HERMIT’S HUT

ity between the hut and the body, the properties of one begin to be re-
flected in the other as the ascetic figure matures from its revolutionary
beginning in the fifth century BCE (although ascetic culture is older than
this time, it is often described as revolutionary since it presents a suc-
cessful social alternative and a clearly articulated ideology).
There is a thematic consistency in a hermit with primitive garb living
in a rudimentary hut after having dissociated from an elaborate, social-
ized life. But how do passage and primitivism play out in a carnalized
condition? In the architectural narrative, the lay of the ascetic land is
traversed and enacted by ritualized or sanctioned movement, circum-
ambulation or a journey by the involved ascetic. The ascetic hut is located
in that geographic matrix as a destination, locus, or portal. By being
designated as the next dwelling after the inaugural renunciation of home,
the hut, or viharā, becomes the anchor of the ascetic’s lived world despite
the perplexity shown in (Buddhist) injunctions regarding growing at-
tachment toward the structure. Depending on where the ascetic is in his
stage of pursuit, the hut or dwelling space may be an interim arrangement
for proceeding toward the next round of the ascetic struggle; the hut or
space could very well be a gateway for advancing to the next phase.
A more elusive incorporation of movement involves the ascetic body
itself, with a literal carnalization of the schema of passage and primitiv-
ism. Already present in Vedic discourse and practices as a reciprocity of
body and building, the Vedic theme of interiorizing the structure and
meaning of the fire ritual confers a rich deposit of meanings on the ascetic
figure and provides conditions for the maturation of that figure. The
corporeal interiorization of sacrifice is by far the most important way of
structuring the gravitas of the glorified ascetic; the image of the Buddha,
for example, becomes iconic because of his status as a perfected ascetic,
a mahāpuruṣa, or superman, and the subsequent codification of the at-
tributes of such an ascetic. With a building, or a representational struc-
ture, considered as an alter ego of the perfected ascetic, the iconicity
engages the reciprocity between architecture and the dweller. The twin
characterization of body and building establishes a relationship to a third
and distinctively metaphysical coordinate, a cosmological one. Following
a triadic setup involving body, building, and cosmos evident in late and
post-Vedic thinking, a homology of the mystical body of the ascetic is
established with the cosmic plane; this is enabled by the symbolic sub-
stance of the Vedic sacrificial structure in which the rite is fundamentally
a cosmogonic act, creating and maintaining the social as well as the cos-
mic order. This is the prelude to the notion of a “cosmic hut”; the term
“cosmic” describes a further proliferation in the meaning of the ascetic
structure in which it receives new symbolic value drawn from the triadic
relationship.23
 A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS165

The “cosmicized” hut, wherever it appears, becomes an embodiment

of ascetic corporeality, sacrificial dynamic, and the supernal structure;
it is a particular designation of the ascetic hut in which ritual and sym-
bolic systems from a cosmological structure or cosmogonic process are
engaged in its fabrication. On such occasions, the ascetic hut performs
less with phenomenological or existential persuasions regarding the
dwelling and more with an exoteric symbolic content linked with an
extrahuman landscape, the cosmos. It is exoteric because it is no longer
inscribed within a closed system but reaches out beyond the scale and
scope of the body with a cosmic claim. The occasions are also representa-
tive of a time when the hut and its dweller, especially because of the
dweller, have acquired a glorified status in the larger community.
While there is no single hut typology that corresponds to a cosmicized
edifice, there are specific constructional elements whose significance sur-
passes the immediate utilitarian or functional usage for a far more hal-
lowed performance. The kaṇṇika, or roof plate, the śikharā, or roof pin-
nacle, the harmikā, the small structure located on top of a stupa, and the
doorway/portal have been consistently deployed to prop up the cosmic
hut. Two architectural-spatial operations have been especially critical in
the production of such a hut: the pillar of ascent and the hole in the roof.
It has been mentioned how the pillar and the roof hole, an integrated
theme in Vedic ideology, is transferred from the Vedic metaphysical uni-
verse to the symbolic repertoire of asceticism and binds the ascetic and
the idealized hut in a singular conception. The reified pillar supports the
sky and constitutes the instrument for vertical ascent and, most impor-
tant, provides a climactic condition along the route of ascent. The climac-
tic point is the summum bonum of the whole operation, a point in the axis
where the kinetics of ascent is transformed and registers as a “rupture of
plane.” The intersection is then seen as a special portal that is accessible
by a ladder, rope, post, or such contraptions of climbing in order to be
“suspended from above.”24 This practice is reflected in the shamanic ritual
of climbing a tree or post, or the ecstatic climbing to heaven, which Eliade
described as the “universally disseminated symbolism of magical flight.”25
In the psychophysiological constitution of the ascetic, the march up
the axis is visualized and experienced as meditational states, as “rising
planes of consciousness” during yogic labor. Many Buddhist texts term
these sequential states as abodes, or viharās, retaining a reference to
physical viharās. The final viharā coincides with attaining the highest
state of enlightenment, which is also coincidental with the appearance
of a protuberance in the cranial foramen region of the ascetic’s head.
In plastic representations of the Buddha, the valorized protrusion, the
uṣṇīṣa, comes to be depicted as the most vivid expression of an ascetic
success story. Stella Kramrisch, describing the uṣṇīṣa as a “point limit,”
166THE HERMIT’S HUT

identified it as a critical threshold or a “zenithal pole of realization,”

“where this world ends and that world begins, the point limit of the
manifest and the unmanifest, the Bindu.” The point limit described by
the uṣṇīṣa in the context of an ascetic physiognomy finds an analogical
expression in the topology of the stupa as the harmikā, and in cosmo-
logical geography as the hut at the top of the “world-mountain.”26
The intention here is not to rehearse the idea of the cosmic house but
propose an understanding of the iconized ascetic hut and the formation
of the increasingly intricate analogy between the physiognomy of the
perfected ascetic and the physiological structure of the iconized hut.
With the last hut as a sign of a critical threshold, a thematic unanimity
binds the kaṇṇika, harmikā, śikharā, and āmalaka (the climactic ele-
ments on a temple top) in architecture to the uṣṇīṣa in the figure of the
perfected ascetic. The kaṇṇika is identified as the roof plate that binds
the roof rafters of a building together at its peak. As a mysterious cubicle
residing at the geographic tip of the Buddhist stupa, the harmikā marks
a threshold condition. Identified with the myrobalan, the āmalaka is a
fruit-shaped element located at the apex of a Hindu, and in many cases,
Buddhist temple tower.27
A comment in the introduction pointed to a hiatus in the historical
development of Brahmanic-Buddhist temples beginning roughly in the
third and fourth centuries. The temple form seems to have developed
without antecedence, especially considering that the open-air sacrificial
space was the ritual norm in the immediately earlier environmental and
historical contexts of Vedism. It would appear that the temple building
emerged in a historically unmoored manner unless the seemingly sudden
and mysterious appearance is explained by the concept of the cosmic
hut-body. If the ascetic dynamic is conceived of as the “interiorization
of sacrifice,” that is, an incorporation of the Vedic fire ritual, then the
analogic hut—in which the hut is a mirror of the ascetic—externalizes
the psychophysiological dynamic of the perfected ascetic. It is the valo-
rized ascetic hut that may have formed the first instance of built shrines,
as Alfred Foucher and Coomaraswamy observed in the production of
the double-tiered roofed huts. This is perhaps the most plausible expla-
nation of the movement from the Vedic fire ritual to the hermit’s hut
and onward to temples in the historical evolution of temple architecture
in India.
Mediating between the fire altar and temple is one aspect of the mul-
tifaceted property of the hermit’s hut. From the performance of the puta-
tive hut as a pragmatic structure responding to the requirements of
dwelling to its reception as an iconic hut condensing the ascetic ideology,
the ascetic structure proceeds to encompass both the intellected practice
and cosmological symbolism of the proliferated profile of the ascetic.
 A HUT WITH MANY MEANINGS167

The ascetic hut, deterritorialized from the lived situation of the forest
space, circulates as an idea representing both the practice and discourse
in asceticism and retaining a tension with normative social space; the
project of bringing the “mountain place into the city” represents that
artifice. The symbolically expanded idea of the hut, informed by cosmo-
logical content, takes the hut and relocates it at the tip of the imaginary
topography of a world mountain. Beginning with the plain hut as the
epitome of renunciation, of the abandonment of the dwelling for a re-
configured condition, we arrive at the same object but now thickly laden
with significance ranging from the existential to the cosmological. What
was a dissent to the dwelling now presents the dwelling as a fundament
of renunciation.