Not Very Far from the Madding Crowd

The Buddhist “monastery” in early India is still commonly represented as a quiet place of calm retreat and withdrawal cut off from the commotion of ordinary life, from economic and social interactions. The archeology of these places, however, indicates, for example, that there must have been almost constant and continuous construction activity going on at the sites we know, with all the noise and disruption that the presence of large numbers of workmen would have involved. Monastic codes or vinayas also do not support the typical view. They suggest that there would have been a constant traffic in and out of these places, both day and night. These codes have yet to be thoroughly studied from this point of view, but one of the fullest of them will be the focus here, and this focus will in particular be on what is presented as the daily round of activities, and who and why all sorts of people are said to come and go at what appear to have been very busy places.