Christian monasticism, the story goes, began all at once with the hermit St. Anthony in the Egyptian desert in 310 AD, to be precise in a way that seems improbable.  However it started, it spread rapidly.  Within a few years, the phenomenon is widespread, with centers in Syria and Egypt.  Within the lifetime of Anthony’s devotee, St. Macarius, there were 50,000 monks in the Egyptian desert; an apocryphal number, to be sure, but still: many.  Peter Brown in his essential Rise of Western Christendom notes Martin’s Loire Valley monastery with monks wearing Egyptian camel hair robes and Roman Christian women travelling to nunneries in Jerusalem by 380 AD. By the fifth century we have the Rule of St. Benedict and evidence of Christian monasticism in Ireland (and, eventually, California.)  The Irish for monastery is “mainistir” but it was common to name monasteries in Ireland “deserts” (disert, dysert, dysart, disart, desert), since they wanted to emulate the desert fathers of Syria and Egypt even in the wet green fields of Ireland.

Did all this spring from nothing?  It seems that there were, in the first centuries after Christ, wandering bands of celibate renunciants in Syria.  And we know about sadhu-like movements and charismatic preachers throughout the world of late antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean.  Around this time there were also ‘philosophical schools,’ such as the Neopythagoreans, which had many characteristics that later came to be called monastic.  But there are many ‘sadhu-like’ movements and philosophical schools and few monastic ones.

Only Christianity, Buddhism, and Jainism today have monastic traditions.  Islam never did, unless you count sadhu-like sufi orders.  Likewise Hinduism; definitional sadhus, no monasticism.  Neither did Judaism have monks or nuns, although the Essenes are fun to argue about.  Manicheaism did, and that might be a clue, since Mani lived just before Anthony.  But the Manichean elect were a different than the monastic orders of Christianity, Buddhism, and Jainism.

Buddhist (or Jain) connections to Christian monasticism cannot be proven and represent a bit of a third rail in the study of (at least Christian) monasticism.  I’ve always imagined that a place like Edessa, at the end of the Silk Road, or a cosmopolitan trading port like Alexandria would be good places to look for evidence.

A friend suggested the trade routes from India via Axum in Ethiopia and up the Nile but that got us talking, as we drank beer at Hanger 24, that a much simpler connection is via Syrian Christians on the south Indian coast.  The timing is right; Syriac Christians have lived in what is now Kerela since nearly the time of Christ and there has always been trade back and forth.  Syria is one of the two monastic centers from the early period.  And there were Buddhists in south India in the first centuries AD.  That’s no proof of anything, of course, but not a bad thesis to test either.

Lacking textual evidence, I think monastic architecture might be a good place to start; even within the Buddhist world it’s not obvious to me how the ruins of a Gandharan monastery in Pakistan are similar to those of a monastic complex in Japan or Tibet or Burma or Thailand or at other south Asian sites like Nalanda or Ajanta.  If you could develop a pattern language of monastic architecture to describe the Buddhist variety, you might be able to match that against the Christian variety and identify degrees of similarity or difference.