Buddhist confession: a Foucauldian approach

While some scholarship has considered the significance of confession as a disciplinary measure in the Christian context, there is no appropriate analysis of the disciplinary aspects of confession as regards the rules of Buddhist monks. This article offers a critique of "Buddhist confession" in the light of Foucault's writings on confession. While Foucault did not consider the Vinaya, or for that matter Buddhism in general, his writings may be used to infer how monastics may have been molded by institutional practices and to infer how monastics shaped their own inner life to form their own mode of institutionalized self-discipline.