Shap Journal 2001/2002

World Religions in Education

Living Community:The Buddhist Order

Richard Gombrich

For Buddhists, Buddhism consists of three Jewels:
the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The
Buddha is the founder of the religion and the
Dharma is his teaching. That teaching concerns
how one should live in order to minimise, perhaps even
eliminate, the sufferings and frustrations of ordinary
existence in the world - an existence which Buddhists
believe to continue through countless lives until passion,
hatred and delusion can be brought to an end. The
Buddha gave advice on how anyone can live a better life,
regardless of their station; but he believed that normally
men and women were so situated that they could only
lead an ideal life, or something close to it, by leaving
behind family ties and the need to earn a living. For
those who were thus prepared to devote themselves to
trying to live as well as a human being can the Buddha
founded an institution, the Sangha, the Order of monks
and nuns.

The Buddha was not the first person in ancient India to
preach that in order to find a remedy for life's
imperfections it was necessary to leave home. In his day
there were men and women who had abandoned family
and society, usually as disciples of a religious teacher,
and who lived as ascetics or hermits. When the Buddha
founded his Sangha, it was as what he called a "middle
way" between such asceticism and the ordinary life of a
householder, tied to social rules and sensual pleasures.
Sangha in fact means "community", and the Sangha
was devised as a kind of home from home. The Buddha
even forbade extreme forms of asceticism and laid down
rules which ensured that monks and nuns could not live
in isolation as hermits. At the least, they had to meet
once a fortnight, but in practice most of them have
always lived in larger groups in monasteries.

This idea of the Buddha's was singularly successful. The
Buddhist Order is the world's oldest living institution,
and the Buddhist monks and nuns we can meet today
are in a direct lineage from those whom the Buddha
himself ordained. The rules that the Buddha laid down
for preserving this continuity were simple but effective;
they mainly concern ordination and the fortnightly
meetings at which members of a given community are
supposed to meet and rehearse the monastic code
together. Naturally, some minor rules and varieties of
interpretation have been added over time, but in all its
major features Buddhist monasticism does go back to
the Buddha himself.

We cannot prove that Christian monasticism was
formed under direct influence from the Buddhist
example, but when it began the Buddhist Order was
seven or eight centuries old, and news of it, as of many
things Indian, must have been carried into Egypt (and
perhaps the Levant) by traders.

The Buddhist Order has been criticised, both within the
Buddhist tradition and by modern Westerners, as
allegedly promoting selfishness. This criticism seems
short-sighted and misplaced. There are two main kinds
of religious vocation: the priest and the monk or nun.
The priest is a professional who has decided to devote his
life (in most religions all priests must be male) to helping
others by performing rituals and other services.
Typically, he lives among the laity, the people who need
those services. The monk or nun, on the other hand,
has decided that the quest for salvation is so important
that it should override all other concerns and that for
this cause it is worth denying oneself the common
satisfactions of mankind, among which family life comes
first and foremost. While any monk or nun, whether
Buddhist or Christian, wishes to attain salvation as they
understand it, their understanding is that at the same
time they are helping to make the world a better place
by leading lives from which others can draw inspiration.
In the Buddhist case, this motivation for living in the
Sangha is so important that we constantly find the
Buddha reprimanding wrongdoing by saying that it will
lead the laity to lose faith in his teachings, and monks
and nuns must not only behave well but be seen to
behave well and give no cause for scandal or suspicion.

The Order, then, has in the short term a dual purpose,
though in the longer term the two purposes turn out to
be one. Immediately, the Sangha provides the
environment in which an individual man or woman can
best pursue his or her quest for salvation. A major part
of one's life in the Sangha. however, especially in the
early years, is to learn the texts which contain the
Buddhist teachings and to preserve them for posterity by
rehearsing them and preaching them. We must
remember that when the Buddha preached, in the fifth
century BCE, there was no writing in India, so texts
could only be preserved orally. Thus the Buddha's
teachings, in all their richness and complexity, could
only be preserved by memorising them and passing on
what one had memorised. Obviously the preservation of
so many texts could not be left to chance but had to be
thoroughly organised. Only in this way could future
generations be given the chance to profit in their turn
from the Buddha's teachings.

Tradition has it that the Canon, the body of texts
preserving the Buddha's teachings, was first committed
to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. Writing
may have been used somewhat earlier, but for many
centuries it remained a rare accomplishment. So we can
be sure that even when there were written texts it was
the monks and nuns who read them and copied them.
Equally, it was the monks and nuns who taught and
explained the Buddha's teachings to the laity. Only
when the texts came to be printed, a process which in
Theravada Buddhism did not begin until the late
nineteenth century, did the Sangha lose their virtual
monopoly of religious knowledge. In China and Tibet
the texts were printed many centuries earlier, but even
there few of the laity could read.

Christian monks and nuns take vows of poverty, chastity
and obedience. Their Buddhist counterparts are
supposed to live in poverty and chastity, but take no vow
of obedience, even though it is understood that entering
the Buddhist Order constitutes a vow to try to keep its
rules. To take a vow of obedience would go against the
Buddhist principle that everyone is responsible for
themselves and should follow their own conscience. In
practice, however, this may exaggerate the difference
between the Christian and the Buddhist ideals. As a
home from home, the Buddhist Order has some features
of the family. All monks and nuns consider themselves
sons and daughters of the Buddha. Everyone entering
the Order is assigned a teacher, whom he or she would
normally obey as one is expected to obey one's father.
However, in the early texts the teacher is not called a
father but a "good friend", and it is noteworthy that the
pupil is specifically told to help the teacher by pointing
out his faults. Whether this piece of ancient Indian
liberalism survived when Buddhism moved to China or
Tibet is however very dubious.

In some countries, the tradition has grown up that
individual monks and nuns are supposed to specialise
either in learning and preaching the texts or in devoting
themselves to meditation in a direct assault on the
citadel of Enlightenment. One might perhaps expect that
monks and nuns would be encouraged to be active as
textual scholars and preachers when they were young
and then to devote themselves to meditation when they
were older, and indeed in some countries, such as Korea,
individuals do have the freedom to carve out that kind
of career for themselves. In most Buddhist traditions,
however - and this is especially true of the Zen
monasteries of the Far East - Buddhist meditation is so
rigorous, being practised under the strict supervision of
a master for several hours a day, that it is best suited to
those who are still in excellent physical condition.

I have drawn a distinction between the priest and the
monk. The Buddha declared that all ritual was useless,
severely criticised the priests (Brahmins) in the society
around him, and never envisaged that a Buddhist could
take a priestly role. For all that, it seems that all over the
world people want rituals, and often want priests to
perform them. So it has come about that in all Buddhist
societies monks do to a greater or lesser extent perform
ritual functions for the laity. (Since priests are usually
men, nuns very rarely seem to function as priests.) In
the country which has been Buddhist for longest, Sri
Lanka, almost the only rituals which monks perform are
those concerned with death, which is a most
appropriate occasion for preaching the Buddha's
message of the transience of worldly things. At the other
extreme before the twentieth century Buddhist monks
and nuns were nowhere concerned with the celebration
of marriages; marriage after all represents the other side
of life, that which the monk or nun has chosen to leave
behind.

Under the influence of the Christianity brought to Asia
by the colonial powers in the nineteenth century, many
Buddhist societies began to question the traditional role
of the monk and nun. They would repeat the Christian
accusation that monks and nuns were idle and self-
centred and should work for the good of society. This
criticism had particular resonance in Japan, where it
resonated  with  the  amazingly  rapid  forced
modernisation of the society carried out under the Meiji
restoration. At about the same time educated Buddhists
in Sri Lanka were confronted by Protestant missionaries
who accused Buddhist monks (the Order of nuns had
long ago died out) of being parasites on society. This
view was taken to a gruesome extreme by Mao; in the
1930s there were about half a million Buddhist monks
(and many nuns) in China, but twenty years later he
had killed or defrocked them all.

On this originally Western view, all adherents of a
religion have a duty to promote the interests of that
religion, and Protestants further hold that one may live
a godly life in the world just as well as by withdrawing
from it. This devaluation of the monastic role led in
Japan to the idea that their form of Buddhism, the
Mahayana, began as a lay movement in reaction to
monasticism. This view has been influential but we now
know that historically it is false. The idea that to devote
oneself to Buddhism must involve public duties, and the
invention of such roles as Buddhist army chaplain, are
entirely modern and are not in harmony with the
traditional ideal.

Truly to understand the Order, it is this traditional ideal
that we have to understand. Here Buddhism contrasts
with Christianity in a way that many people still fail to
grasp. For a Christian, whatever the quality of one's life,
salvation comes only at death. But what the Buddhist is
aiming at is something that can only be attained in life:
to get rid of all greed, hatred and delusion. Though
salvation, which brings an end to the round of rebirth,
consists in achieving this one hundred per cent, to come
close is still incomparably better than making no
progress. Thus, whatever one's theory about just what it
is like to achieve nirvana, what really matters is the kind
of life one leads. The ideal is a life of self-control,
intelligent awareness, calm and kindliness. The Order
exists to make such lives possible.