Child ordination among South Asian Svetambara Jain and Buddhist communities

Abstract

My paper uses textual and ethnographic sources to explore life-management practices among
child renunciants within pre-modern and contemporary South Asian Theravada Buddhist
monastic circles and contemporary South Asian Svetambara Jain mendicant circles. I explore
how modern Svetambara Jain child initiations provide Jain laity with opportunities for
accumulating merit through appreciation of what the child is able to achieve and how
Theravada Buddhist child monastic ordinations offer similar opportunities for merit-creation.
These practices illuminate the ways in which child ascetics enrich the world of production and
reproduction even as they adopt disciplinary practices premised on problematizing the goals of
wealth-creation and biological lineage-maintenance.