LECTURE NOTES 5

BSTC1003 INTRO TO RELIGIOUS STUDIES

SYSTEMS OF PURITY
G.A. Somaratne
Centre of Buddhist Studies
The University of Hong Kong
2022
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We will discuss
• What do purity and impurity mean? What is their connection to sacred and profane?

• Why do religions prescribe purification rites? What are the ways religions deal with
negativity, impurity and profanity? What are the agents of purification taught in
religions?

• What is a system of purity? Why is a system subject to pollution and danger? What
is a taboo system? Is there a connection between purity and caste system? What
does “matter out of place” mean? What is the connection between structure and
impurity? Why are those in a marginal zone not subject to impurity?

• How does the purity concept act as a device of segregation of women from the
mainstream society? How does purity concept relate to religious behavior and
morality?

• How do primal societies define purity and impurity? What is the concept of purity in
major religious traditions?
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Purity = absence of negative elements

• ‘Pure’ = free from mixture; foreign or

spoiling material; contact with that
which weakens, impairs, or pollutes;

• Purity <> impurity.

• Purity = the state of being unmixed.

• The absence of negative or detracting

elements within a system.
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Drawing lines between sacred and profane

• Purity = A form of behavior

• Religions distinguish between two kinds of

behavior:

What is compatible with What is incompatible with

the sacred the sacred
Pure Impure
Sacred Profane
Right Wrong
Good Evil
Holy Sinful
Appropriate Inappropriate
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The Concept of Purity

• It is a structure of religious
experience.

• It can have any content—different

kinds of worlds define different kinds
of impurity.

• It shows certain patterns in the way

negativity is handled.

• Religions deal with negativity in many

ways.
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‘System of Purity’ (a comparative category)

• Different religions deal with the negativity
differently.

• ‘System of purity’ tells us how a religion deal

with the negativity.

• This comparative category incorporates a

subject matter that is traditionally dealt with
under such rubrics as morality, good and evil,
religious law, paths to salvation, and sin.

• It brings together these diverse topics

exhibiting their generic, cross-cultural
patterns.

• It illustrates the nature of world construction.

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System and impurity

• Any system will have its own version of pollution
and danger (Mary Douglas).

• “Where there is dirt, there is system.”

• Wherever there is an order of things there will

be impurity; wherever there is impurity an order
of things is implicit.

• Pollution represents an instance of something

threateningly incongruous with or violative of
one’s world categories.
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The taboo system (Mary Douglas)

• The taboo system is not essentially negative.

• It is a positive effort to organize the social

environment.

• It is a creative endeavour to construct a unity

of experience.

• The taboo system works on two levels, Taboo

experiential and expressive, placing a symbolic A moral or cautionary
restriction placed upon
load on the transgressor (Douglas 1980). certain actions by
authorities (Kings,
priests, shamans, etc)
• The whole mechanism of purity and impurity of a people, which if
ignored will result in
operates through the symbolism of danger specific negative
consequences.
concerning ambiguity and nonconformity.
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The gravity and the power

• This anxiety also operates from a marginal
status like that of an unborn child or from
transitional position like puberty, the
junction of adolescence and adulthood.

• “The whole repertoire of ideas concerning

pollution and purification are used to make
the gravity of the event and the power of
the ritual to remake a man” (Douglas
1980).

• Ritual dying and ritual rebirth are

prescribed at particular junctures of
human life.
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Dirt = out of the place

• Belong <> do not belong

• Out of the place: a thing being in the wrong

place

• Things that transgress/cross boundaries =

powerful & dangerous

• Why medicine men and shamans powerful and

dangerous? = they can walk across
boundaries.

• Puberty rites = to switch categories: from

children box to adult box
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Purity and caste system

• The fundamental logic behind
the organization of Indian
caste system is the purity
norms.

• The conception of caste

hierarchy is mainly a religious
one.

• It has no connection with the

power dynamics of society
(Louis Dumont 1980).
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Concerned with individual

• The notions of purity and impurity
are concerned with individual, not
with groups.

• There is no thing as permanent

purity.

• The categories of purity and impurity

are transitional (temporary).

• Therefore, the purification process for

the regaining of the lost status is
crucial. (Patrick Olivelle 1998).
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“matter out of place”

• Pure and impure are directly concerned
with social conformity.

• Impurity results in the case of

transgression of that boundary because
then it becomes “matter out of place‟,
something inappropriate or incongruous.

• Mary Douglas identified two conditions as

the prerequisite for the circulations of
purity norms: (1) a pattern of ordered
relations and (2) contradiction within
tranquility.
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A period of impurity
• In the case of a death of a
member of any community the
structure of that community
gets disturbed.
• It is implied an intermediary
period of reconstruction in order
to regain the former stability.
• This transitional phase of
loosing status and achieving it
again is characterized by a
period of impurity.
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Structure and Marginal Zone

• Impurity occurs within a structure; not
outside it.

• Those in a marginal zone, temporarily or

permanently, are not subject to impurity:

• i.e., in the case of a death, the purity

regulations do not apply to a
brahmacārin (student), a dīkṣita (a
person consecrated for a sacrifice), an
officiating priest, an ascetic and a male
child before Vedic initiation (upanayana)
(Olivelle).
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Segregation of women via purity concept

• The purity concept acts as a device of
segregation of women from the main stream
of a society.
• Sexual maturity and cyclical fertility made
woman a potential pollutant. She was
subjected to injunctions regarding bodily
purity and ritual purity.
• Menstruation carries the double weight of
impurity and inauspiciousness because it is
seen as a marker of collective sin.
• Until the period of this impurity passed, she
is not entitled to participate in any ritual
ceremony. (Leslie 1996).
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The Hindu social structure

• It constitutes four classical orders and
thousands of castes (hereditary occupational
groups), including thousands of “untouchables”.

• The Brahmin priests—the teachers and spiritual

leaders

• The warriors (Kshatriyas)—who wear the sacred

thread and maintain law and good government

• Merchants (Vaishyas)—who are responsible for

trade and commerce, agriculture and industry

• Laborers (Shudras)—who are socially deprived.

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The Hindu social system

• This system entails a system of
relationships reinforced by conceptions of
purity and impurity.
• Particular materials and activities produce
adverse karmic effects.
• Contact with animal and human corpses
and body secretions, including semen,
sweat, spittle, scat, and the mensal
discharge of women are defiling.
• Purification rites can remove negative
effects involved in sweating, defecating,
and menstruating.
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Permanent impurity
• The activities of some are regarded as permanently
polluting.

• The occupations linked to death and decay, such

as castes of hairdressers, launderers, morticians,
slaughterers, sweepers, and tanners belong to this
category.

• Contact with such untouchables is defiling. [A priest

says: “I like the untouchables. I love them. But I
shall not touch them.”]

• Dining and intermarriage across caste lines is

taboo.

• Other forms of social interaction with untouchables

or lower castes, such as exchanging money or
touching something they have touched, are
polluting.
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Hindu Castes and Purity

• The members of a higher class/castes are considered
more vulnerable to pollution comparing to their lower
counterparts.

• The inherent purity of a member of a higher

class/caste is considered essentially greater than the
member of a lower caste who has inherent impurity.

• In the case of a crime, the pollution incurred by the

offender is directly proportioned to the caste position
of the person.

• In the case of a murder, the pollution incurred by the

murderer is proportioned to the caste position of the
victim.
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Privileges cost
• The punishment rules elaborated in the
Manusmrti, a Hindu law book, clearly
show the privileged position of the
Brahmins comparing to that of the
Kshatriyas and the Vaisyas as they are
granted more legal immunities.

• The rules sanction/endorse certain

concessions to the higher castes over
the lower ones but they make the
purification process more rigorous for the
higher castes.
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Religious system and purity-impurity

• Purity concept defines the religious structuring
of worlds.

• Every religious system makes a distinction

between those actions that conform to its goals
or sub-goals and those that do not.

• Some behavior enhances the status of the

sacred; other behavior diminishes or contradicts
it.

• Every system has its own moral compass. The

lines, points, and polarities of that compass
define the world of every piety.
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tension
• Purity only exists in tension
with its opposite, impurity.

• If the pure is the absence of

the impure, the impure is the
absence of the pure.

• The most feared profanities

are often the inversion of the
most cherished virtues.
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Opposites
• Whatever the religious goal, there will
always be something to obstruct, oppose,
or ruin it.

• To those for whom authority is the

supremely sacred thing, disloyalty and
apostasy (abandonment of a religious
belief) are the ultimate threats.

• To those for whom enlightenment is the

supreme goal, ignorance is the greatest
impurity.

• To those living a monastic life and for

whom chastity is the supreme gift to God,
concupiscence (strong sexual desire, lust)
is the direst seduction and sin.
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Differentiation of pure and impure

• Distinction between pure and
impure applies to all levels of
religious experience.

• It applies to dietary observance;

to ascetic practices and
meditation practices.

• It applies to ritual behavior; to

the mental disciplines.
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Either imposed or freely chosen “right”

conduct
• The separation of right and
wrong conduct can be rigidly and
hierarchically imposed, and
enforced by threat of
supernatural punishment.

• It can also be freely chosen by

individuals seeking the self-
exacting, introspective rigors of
spiritual callings and paths to
perfection.
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Private or public acts

• How to exorcize profanity?

• It may be done through a publicly

performed ritual act,

• or in the privacy of the despondent

nights of individual psyches.

• The horror of pollution, the

annihilation of what offends the gods,
the fascination of the fire of
purification—these are inner as well as
outer affairs, mystical as well as
institutional acts.
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Social order and religious order

• The separation of realms is part of all
social behavior.

• There are observed boundaries between

adults and children, females and males,
insiders and outsiders, superiors and
subordinates, one caste and another.

• In traditional societies such distinctions

are inviolate, reflecting as they do the
sacredness of a mythic world order.

• Social order is often the infrastructure of

religious order.
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Purity as consistency
• Purity is the factor of consistency in every
domain of existence.
• An Eskimo taboo disallows a wife to knit
while her husband is on a harpoon hunt.
• Her crossing and tangling of threads and his
need to keep the harpoon lines untangled
cannot coexist.
• Their behavior needs to be symbolically
consonant, not dissonant, with the goals at
hand—that is, the successful harpoon
throw.
• The symbolic world is here very much the
real world.
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guides for human behavior

• Religious symbol systems include
guides for human behavior.

• Some guides are moral—do not

steal, return evil with good, do
not kill, do not oppress your
neighbor.

• Other observance and avoidance

rules prescribe what is clean and
unclean.
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Clean and unclean

• For many religions, contact with blood,
corpses, unclean animals, feces, skin
diseases, and things separated from a
living being (e.g., saliva, nail parings,
cuttings of hair) is polluting.

• Women are seen as a source of pollution

and danger, especially during menses and
pregnancy.

• Some consider, there is no connection

between morality and pollution. Others
consider, contact with unclean things
affects morality.
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Purity and impurity in primal traditions

• For the Nuer, corpses are polluting. Those who bury
the dead must not drink until they have been
sprinkled with wild rice and water and cleansed by
bathing.

• Until the marriage ritual has been consummated,

women avoid drinking milk from their betrothed’s
cows for fear that they bring harm to them.

• The Yoruba use their right hand for clean activities;

they use their left hand for unclean activities.
Pregnant women are regarded as dangerous. The
Lele consider pregnant women further endanger the
sick.

• The Nyakusa ask women to avoid going near grain

so that their presumably voracious appetites won’t
reduce the supply.
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Primal peoples believe

• Breaches of avoidance and observance rules bring evil
consequences. Human well-being follows from conforming
to the holy. Human disaster follows from failing to do so.

• It is taboo for a Nuer wife’s parents to see her husband

naked. If such a fault occurs and is not ritually expiated,
their children may be born blind.

• Incest (sexual relations between “near of kin”) and murder

are morally wrong and entail spiritual and physical
pollution.

• For the Dinka, incest produces skin disease or barrenness.

Such dangers are averted by the incestuous pair’s public
confession and bathing and the transfer of their sin to a
sacrificial ram.
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Zoroastrianism
• Zoroaster says: “Purity is best for
man from his birth.”

• So for Zoroastrians, the concept of

purity and pollution is important.
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In Early Judaism
• Early Judaism (before the Roman destruction
of the Second Temple in 70 B.C.) focused on
ritual purity and animal sacrifice as well as
moral righteousness.

• High standards of purity were demanded of

priests.

• The priests must be whole and without

blemish. (The Torah)

• The priests must marry virgins and avoid

contact with corpses.
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“Laws of family purity” of the Orthodox Jews

• Women are unclean during their menses. Intercourse is
prohibited during the period.

• Male semen is contaminating. Any garment or persons coming

in contact with it must be washed.

• The Torah distinguishes between clean and unclean birds,

fishes, and mammals.

• The Jews are permitted to eat cud-chewing animals that have

cloven hooves such as oxen, sheep, and goats. But animals
lacking one of those features, such as camels, rabbits, and pigs,
are not to be eaten or touched, “they are unclean to you.”

• Orthodox Jews do not eat crustaceous (having a hard shell)

animals such as crab and shrimp; only sea life with fins and
scales are kosher.
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Kosher food
• To the Hebrew pastoralist, proper ungulate
species were those that both chewed the cud
and had cloven hooves.
• But the pig, rock badger, and hare, each have
just one of these features. Since they lack the
other, they do not conform to purity of type; so
they are unholy.
• In the water, finless creatures with legs also fail
to conform to the natural prototype of the fish (a
swimmer, not a walker).
• Such unclean animals stand for the mixing,
confusing, or contradicting of what God has
made discrete.
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Fire – a natural symbol and agent of purification

• Zoroastrians drew a circle around
their corpses to isolate the contagion
and kindled a fire to burn away the
pollution.

• Hindu cremation is a means of

purification; it is also part of the
process of providing the deceased
with a spiritual body.

• During the new year season, Shinto

priests burn past years’ amulets and
talismans believed to have absorbed
impurity of homes during the year.
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Water – a universal means of purification

• The Hindu priests must bathe daily to remove
impurities; they cannot worship without it.

• Muslims pray five times daily; to do so they must

be purified by ritually washing their hands, mouth,
nostrils, face, arms, head, ears, neck, and feet.

• The Hasidic Jews wash before meals. This is not

only hygienic; it is prescribed.

• A benediction accompanies the washing of hands:

“Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the
Universe, who has sanctified us with His
commandments, and commanded us concerning
the washing of the hands.”
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Other agents of purification

• After long journeys from home, the Torajans
remove malign influences that might have
attached to them by placing their hands on a
dog.

• For the Hindus, cow-dung is a cleansing agent.

The holy men and women smear their bodies
with cow-dung.

• Cow-dung is defiling to a god; but cows are holy,

therefore, their dung is a purifying agent to
humans.

• “Simple types of pollution are removed by water,

greater degrees of pollution are removed by cow-
dung and water.” (Purity and danger, p. 9)
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Purity of mind and body associated with the

sacred
• Sexual abstinence, fasting, and forms of self-denial
serve as a means of propitiating divine favor or
averting divine wrath and expiating or making
amends for wrong-doing.

• Lent and Ramadan are seasons of purification and

regeneration.

• Muslims are not to eat or drink or have sex from

sunrise to sunset during Ramadan.

• Roman Catholics observe two Lenten fast days: Ash

Wednesday (the beginning of Lent) and Good Friday
(the day of Christ’s crucifixion).
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Ways of dealing with impurity

• How does a religious system preserves the
sacred? Three typical patterns:

• (1) avoidance of profanity: A religious system

preserves the sacred by differentiating itself
from all that is incompatible with it.

• (2) purification of profanity: It purges impurity

that has not been kept apart but has somehow
become part of one’s system.

• (3) transcending the opposition of

profanity/purity: It overcomes or integrates
oppositions from a “higher” point of view.
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Patterns that govern the religious life

• We keep the enemy at bay,
demolish it, or cease to treat it as
an enemy at all, depending on
pivoting contexts.

• We avoid guilt; we are guilty; we

are accepted or forgiven.

• These are patterns that one way

or other govern the daily religious
life of most people.
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Avoidance
• Profanity is something to be avoided. Much
religious behavior is defensive or preventive.

• The sacred thing is the circumscribed,

safeguarded, inviolable thing.

• Religions keep trouble out by declaring

specific actions to be out of bounds, by
carefully delineating proper and improper
conduct.

• Religious laws often tell adherents what not

to do. E.g., the Ten Commandments
(Christianity), The Ten Unwholesome Acts
(Buddhism).
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Purification (removing sin or pollution)

• Keeping away profanity is one
thing, but dealing with it after it is
present is quite another.

• Impurity that has already

contaminated sacred order is
intolerable.

• It must be ridded by some means

appropriate to the nature of the
violation.
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Removal of sins

• Purification is a common feature of

religious behavior.

• Every sin or defilement is a violation of

the holy or a sin against divinity.

• When sins are committed or taboos

breached, the process of purification
may be undertaken.

• The purification process includes both

the removal of sin and the reconciliation
and regeneration of sinners.
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Two extremities
• Some offenses to the cosmos are utter evil;
they must be expunged absolutely.

• They require public tortures and

executions, demonstrating that the horror
and absoluteness of the crime. E.g., an act
of sacrilege that challenges the foundations
of the world.

• Other breaches require only an apology.

E.g., the gentle practice of the Tenri Kyo
religion of Japan: Impure “dust” is “swept”
away in rhythmic, ritual gestures of the
hands and arms.
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Kinds of pollution and kinds of purification

• Depending on the seriousness and kind of the
pollution, communities purify profanation in
different ways:

• punishment, banishment, shunning, use of

scapegoats, exorcism, ritual combat,
excommunication, required penance,
imprisonment, pronounced forgiveness or
pardon, rehabilitation.

• Profanity is destroyed, expunged, condemned,

chastened, relinquished, abandoned, locked up.

• These are inflicted on the guilty person by the

system.
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Ways of purification
• From the point of view of the
individual as agent of self-purification,
we find acts of repentance,
atonement, expiation, discipline,
confession, isolation, fasting, apology,
and prayer.

• Sometimes purification is effected

with material means, such as water,
fire, smoke, urine, emetics, cow dung,
sun, rain, steam baths, ice baths,
ashes, mud, noise, oil, green
branches, or blood.
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External bathing and Internal bathing

• A common purification rite practiced in
Hinduism is washing away evil by bathing in
holy waters, in rivers considered holy.

• Bathing in a holy river is considered as a

means to attain liberation, obtain merit, work
away evil.

• Contrary to external purification of the body

with water, the Buddha taught the “waterless
bath” (anodaka) “without wetting the limbs”
(anallīna-gatta), the internal purification or the
purification of the mind.
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Transcending the purity/profanity

opposition
• Another possible way of relating to
profanity is to overcome the ordinary
dichotomy of purity and profanity.

• Pure and impure are ultimately man-

made.

• There is a higher perspective on the

world—a higher purity, as it were—that
involves the acceptance of opposites.
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To the pure all things are pure

• The real world—for example, the world of
God—is seen as a unity.

• St. Paul preached Christian life as a “new

creation” that transcended the distinctions
of Greek or Jew, circumcised or
uncircumcised, slave or free, male or
female, and that transcended any outer
requirements of works or ritual observance.

• “There is nothing unclean itself,” St. Paul

advised.

• “To the pure all things are pure.”