Cutting Away the World

Cutting or shaving the hair as a sign of religious renunciation is old and widespread, attested in Buddhist monastic ordination from the tradition's earliest period and in Christian practice from at least late antiquity, and in both families of religion the act reads the same way: hair is an ordinary marker of worldly vanity and social status, and its removal visibly enacts a vow to set worldly concerns aside. In Buddhist ordination the head is shaved completely at the time a novice or monk takes vows, a practical as well as symbolic act repeated throughout monastic life rather than a one time rite, since hair that regrows is shaved again as a matter of routine discipline.

Christian monastic tonsure took a more varied historical form, from the small circular patch shaved at the crown associated with Western monasticism and clergy, sometimes called the Petrine tonsure and linked in legend to Saint Peter, to the wholesale shaving practiced in Eastern monasticism, and its use as a mark of clergy generally, not only monastics, lasted in the Western church until the Second Vatican Council formally abolished clerical tonsure as a distinct rite in 1972, after which it survives chiefly within religious orders as part of monastic profession rather than as a mark of ordination.