Thinking with Foucault about Outcaste Buddhism Asceticisms as a Challenge to Panoptic/Carceral Brahmanisms

In his 1985 _Raritan_ essay, “Pedagogy and Pederasty,” Leo Bersani suggested that Foucault’s oeuvre could be split into two distinct conceptions of power. The first was a conception of panoptic power most clearly articulated in Foucault’s poststructuralist masterpiece, _Birth of the Prison_. On this model, the individual body has no freedom—the body is merely an instrument of the governmental structure which exercises absolute domination. The second was the conception of power found in Foucault’s histories of asceticism (_History of Sexuality_, vols. 2–4). Bersani was extraordinarily critical of these volumes on ancient asceticism, accusing Foucault of abandoning the theoretical rigor of _Birth of the Prison_ and instead buying into the fantasy that one might be made more free through the ascetic process of intensification of one’s relationship to one’s desires. In this paper, I intend to explore how Foucault’s two seemingly irreconcilable models (explaining how the self negotiates power) help us to articulate a history of “untouchable” Buddhist asceticism.

This paper will focus on some of the earliest records in South Asia (early centuries CE) of so-called outcaste, or “untouchable”—what we would term today Dalit—communities. The legal category of the “untouchable” (_aspṛśya_) emerges during an historical moment when caste was becoming the currency of power throughout South Asia. Johannes Bronkhorst labels this historical transformation “Brahmanization,” a process which changed institutions throughout South Asia, including the Buddhist monastery. Brahmanization refers to the process by which Brahmin communities of the late ancient period functioned not only as stewards of a new literary and ritual hegemonic order—a role for which they are well-known—but also as managers within an emergent caste-based socio-economic framework. We find references to the community of outcastes (Skt. Caṇḍālas) in the Brahmanical legal codes of the _Dharmaśāstras_ (late centuries BCE/early centuries CE), but these accounts are specifically restrictive legal frameworks produced by Brahmins for upper-caste consumption. Brahmanical jurists seeking to assert their role as managers of nascent Indian state structures produced a legal template for a ritual and economic mapping of subject bodies onto a social space that I call a _panoptic cartography_.

This concept of panoptic cartography is drawn from the work of Michel Foucault and one of the thinkers who has best captured his impulse to theorize domination, Achille Mbembe. Both Foucault and Mbembe argue that the concept of sovereignty, often associated with the modern state, entails a terrifying epistemic and spatial apparatus seeking total control over subaltern bodies. The Caṇḍāla in the Brahmanical law codes is taxonomized according to panoptic cartography, thus slotting the body of the subaltern into a discourse of spatial confinement for the purpose of economic exploitation. This included the deeply impure labor of the South Asian death economy: preparing corpses for cremation, conducting executions of criminals, and scavenging on the cremation ground. In contrast to the early _Dharmaśāstra_ traditions, I will argue that the Buddhist legal codes, known as the _Vinaya_, contain textual traditions that actually represent the voices of subalternized outcaste communities. Whereas the panoptic cartography of the _Dharmaśāstra_ presumes the absolute power of elites over subaltern bodies, certain textual communities represented within the _Vinaya_ corpus have left us records within the Buddhist monastic context of a paradigm for re-conceiving the role of the untouchable in the increasingly Brahmanizing world of first millennium South Asia. In this paper, I will argue that there are two ways in which Caṇḍāla Buddhist communities drew upon their outcaste status to challenge Brahmanical panoptic cartography and thus change Indian Buddhism.

First, I will argue that early Indian Buddhists of outcaste origin carved out an autonomous subaltern governmentality that challenged Brahmanical panoptic cartography. Whereas the _Dharmaśāstra_ presents a panoptic Foucauldian vision (theorized in _Birth of the Prison_) of the Caṇḍāla as a subject deprived entirely of agency by the coercive carceral regimes of the Brahmins, I will claim that the Brahmanizing juridical voices within the _Vinaya_ are compelled to permit the Caṇḍālas of these ascetic communities a degree of freedom to define for themselves what it means to be a Buddhist monastic. If the Caṇḍāla depicted in the _Dharmaśāstra_ is an inert body, confined by the carceral regimes of caste, the community of outcaste cremation ground ascetics in the _Vinaya_ is constituted by highly mobile, entrepreneurial, and even transgressive bodies—ascetic bodies who mobilize their inherited socio-economic status as cremation ground laborers in a manner that imbues this identity with real cultural power—as proto-Tantric lords over the potent and socially dangerous spirit world of the cremation ground.

If in my first conclusion I articulate the limits of the Foucauldian conception of power in _Birth of the Prison_ for the study of outcaste Buddhism, the second draws upon his _Histories of Sexuality_ as an invaluable theoretical resource for reconceiving of asceticism as a mode of negotiating desire that permits the subaltern practitioner to resist the conception of selfhood assigned by the hulking structures of Brahmanical governmental domination. I will argue that these outcaste laborers developed a set of “ascetic” practices that would become mainstream among Buddhist monastics, and in doing so, effectively argued that occupying a positionality of caste-based social abjection rendered one powerful and not weak. The humanities has generated many theories for thinking the body in relation to power, but asceticism is particularly apropos to the outcaste because the subaltern—on account of their abjected political status—already possesses an organic skepticism about the existence of a fully sovereign subject. Classic Buddhist ascetic soteriology begins from the premise that the self is not a stable entity, but merely a composite of competing desires. By importing cultural techniques of the abject from their socio-economic lifestyle on the cremation ground, subaltern Buddhist monastics infused Buddhist monasteries with a critique of self-hood far more potent on account of its implicitly politicized critique of a stable individual identity. In other words, the outcaste monastic was a better teacher of the Buddhist truth of impermanence because of their abjected subject position as a subaltern within the emergent Brahmanical caste order.