ABSTRACT
The early hermitages that we shall consider in this chapter were connected with men and women who represented new creative forms of spiritual expression and religious vocation in the 1st millennium BC in Southern and Eastern Asia, particularly within the context of early Buddhism. This chapter is not intended to be an exhaustive or comprehensive review of the Eastern hermit tradition. Rather, it is to provide some background and historical context to the later development of the eremitic tradition within medieval Christian Europe and particularly Britain and Ireland. By exploring a range of precursors, it is the intention to show that the later hermit tradition is by no means a stand alone, preeminently Christian, expression of the solitary ideal. It had an ancestry which, in many cases, did not have direct evolutionary relation, but nonetheless was a formative part of a rich and broader tradition.
