Self and subjectivity: The wandering ascetic and the manifest world

This chapter investigates the concept of yati, the wandering ascetic of the Mānavadharmaśāstra. It highlights the phenomenology of the yati’s experience in relation to the overall architecture of the Manu cosmology. The wandering ascetic, having paid three debts, has his mind set on renunciation. The yati’s aim is to avoid being brought down by the collapse of the body as one nears death, but not to avoid death. Manu notes two spiritual exercises. One of imagined disembodiment: that is, one imagines the collapse and the fall into the alligator’s jaws, being brought down by old age and disease, how the very nature of embodiment is to be in pain. Manu’s second technique of the self aims to engender a sense of disgust in and alienation from the body.