123 – Child ascetics in historical and contemporary South Asian Jain and Buddhist communities
What does it mean to live the life of a child ascetic in historical and contemporary South Asian Svetambara Jain and Theravada Buddhist communities? What capacities are attributed to children and what eligibility criteria are used to assess a child’s readiness to join an ascetic community? What does it mean, in practical and theoretical terms, for minors who join such communities? What disciplinary practices regulate the lives of child ascetics? How do the religious practices of children relate to the needs and concerns of lay people, including the parents and close relatives of child ascetics? Papers in this panel explore these questions. Using a culturally flexible definition of childhood that allows for different understandings of maturity, panelists investigate the lives of child ascetics in historical and contemporary South Asian Jain and Buddhist communities. The presenters on this panel employ historical, textual and contemporary sources to discuss the variegated lives of young ascetics, past and present.
Nalini Balbir uses textual and ethnographic lenses to focus on child initiation among Svetambara Jain communities, past and present. Abhishek Jain analyzes early through late medieval textual materials to answer questions about how Svetambara Jain authorities construe children’s eligibility and assess their motivation for mendicant life as mendicants. Nirmala S. Salgado addresses questions about how disciplinary practices are cultivated and established in the lives of contemporary novice Theravada Buddhist nuns. Liz Wilson compares laity-serving life-management practices within modern Theravada Buddhist monastic and modern Jain mendicant circles, using textual and ethnographic sources.
