This work offers an original insight into the profound relationship between architecture and asceticism. It convincingly traces the influences from early Indian asceticism to Zen Buddhism to the Japanese teahouse. The protagonist of the narrative is the hermit's hut. The author provides a complex narrative that stems from this simple structure, showing how the significance of the hut resonates widely and how the question of dwelling is central to ascetic imagination.

When their usual travel plans fall though, Lee Su Lin and her little brother, Su Yang, reluctantly spend their school holidays on Pulau Ubin instead. Along with their new friends, the sensible and smart Zizi, and the perpetually hungry Bus, they form the Sengkang Snoopers and discover a mysterious hut at the top of a quarry hill, where a hermit is rumoured to live. When they hear strange sounds coming from the hut, they just can't keep away, but what will they find there?

In 1925, Henry Stuart leaves his home and grown sons in Idaho to move to the woods on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, Alabama, where he builds a round house and lives for more than two decades on the property he names after Leo Tolstoy.

When Ellie and six of her friends return home from a camping trip deep in the bush, they find things hideously wrong -- their families gone, houses empty and abandoned, pets and stock dead. Gradually they begin to comprehend that their country has been invaded and everyone in the town has been taken prisoner. As the horrible reality of the situation becomes evident they have to make a life-and-death decision: to run back into the bush and hide, to give themselves up to be with their families, or to stay and try to fight. This reveting, tautly-drawn novel seems at times to be only a step away from today's headlines.

In One Hundred Days of Solitude: Losing My Self and Finding Grace on a Zen Retreat, American teacher of Korean Zen Jane Dobisz (Zen Master Bon Yeon), recalls her first solitary meditation stint in the woods. Luckily, this is not just a recounting of a winter's worth of cabin fever. Instead, Dobisz takes us into her cabin, and into her mind, as she tries--at least temporarily--to live a Walden-like existence. All the bowing and meditating and wood-chopping that is part and parcel of her retreat is hardly first nature, but the good-humored and tenacious Dobisz is able to adapt, and to relate her hundred days with moving insight and humanity. Her Solitude in fact offers us all a chance to commune with her and to look inside and rediscover our own grace.

The Hermit’s Hut offers an original insight into the profound relationship between architecture and asceticism. Although architecture continually responds to ascetic compulsions, as in its frequent encounter with the question of excess and less, it is typically considered separate from asceticism. In contrast, this innovative book explores the rich and mutual ways in which asceticism and architecture are played out in each other’s practices. The question of asceticism is also considered—as neither a religious discourse nor a specific cultural tradition but as a perennial issue in the practice of culture. The work convincingly traces the influences from early Indian asceticism to Zen Buddhism to the Japanese teahouse—the latter opening the door to modern minimalism. As the book’s title suggests, the protagonist of the narrative is the nondescript hermit’s hut. Relying primarily on Buddhist materials, the author provides a complex narrative that stems from this simple structure, showing how the significance of the hut resonates widely and how the question of dwelling is central to ascetic imagination. In exploring the conjunctions of architecture and asceticism, he breaks new ground by presenting ascetic practice as fundamentally an architectural project, namely the fabrication of a “last” hut. Through the conception of the last hut, he looks at the ascetic challenge of arriving at the edge of civilization and its echoes in the architectural quest for minimalism. The most vivid example comes from a well-known Buddhist text where the Buddha describes the ultimate ascetic moment, or nirvana, in cataclysmic terms using architectural metaphors: “The roof-rafters will be shattered,” the Buddha declares, and the architect will “no longer build the house again.” As the book compellingly shows, the physiological and spiritual transformation of the body is deeply intertwined with the art of building. The Hermit’s Hut weaves together the fields of architecture, anthropology, religion, and philosophy to offer multidisciplinary and historical insights. Written in an engaging and accessible manner, it will appeal to readers with diverse interests and in a variety of disciplines—whether one is interested in the history of ascetic architecture in India, the concept of “home” in ancient India, or the theme of the body as building.

A history of hermits and eremitism from antiquity to the present: Greco-Roman influences, early Christianity, hermits in medieval Europe and East Asia, decline in Western modernity, the rise of solitude, and rehabilitation of hermits.

Tracing its distant origins to the villa of the Roman emperor Hadrian in the second century AD, the eccentric phenomenon of the ornamental hermit enjoyed its heyday in the England of the eighteenth century It was at this time that it became highly fashionable for owners of country estates to commission architectural follies for their landscape gardens. These follies often included hermitages, many of which still survive, often in a ruined state. Landowners peopled their hermitages either with imaginary hermits or with real hermits - in some cases the landowner even became his own hermit. Those who took employment as garden hermits were typically required to refrain from cutting their hair or washing, and some were dressed as druids. Unlike the hermits of the Middle Ages, these were wholly secular hermits, products of the eighteenth century fondness for 'pleasing melancholy'. Although the fashion for them had fizzled out by the end of the eighteenth century, they had left their indelible mark on both the literature as well as the gardens of the period. And, as Gordon Campbell shows, they live on in the art, literature, and drama of our own day - as well as in the figure of the modern-day garden gnome. This engaging and generously illustrated book takes the reader on a journey that is at once illuminating and whimsical, both through the history of the ornamental hermit and also around the sites of many of the surviving hermitages themselves, which remain scattered throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. And for the real enthusiast, there is even a comprehensive checklist, enabling avid hermitage-hunters to locate their prey.