Religious Education

Many Buddhist texts and traditions state that the ideal Buddhist community is composed of an order of monks (bhiksus), an order of nuns (bhiksunis), a segment of laymen (upasakas), and a segment of laywomen (upasikas). As we have already seen from several examples, the renunciant communities have played an important role in Buddhist life. However, as has been suggested in several of the preceding chapters, laymen and laywomen have also been integrally involved. In fact, most Buddhist communities have typically given the lay vocation an essential and respected role. Further, certain exceptional cases in recent Buddhist history in Japan and China notwithstanding, most Buddhist communities have positioned the lay vocation within the context of a symbiotic relation with the monastic vocation. In the next five chapters we will explore certain aspects and dimensions of the lay religious life and how certain aspects of that life relate to the monastic one.

The Bodhisattva Vows formalized the lay resolve to follow the bodhisattva path and to help all living creatures. Taken word for word, they did not appear to add a great deal to the Five Vows already accepted. Most of my informants, however, maintained that they added the obligation to be a vegetarian. The first of the Five Vows, they said, meant simply to avoid killing animals oneself or eating an animal that had been killed on one's account, while the Bodhisattva Vows forbade contributing in any way to the use of animal products.

If the Three Refuges were an initiation, the Five Vows were an ordination. They were usually administered in a monastery as part of an ordination of monks. The ceremony was elaborate and solemn, and at the end of it a lay “ordination certificate” was conferred. Serious obligations resulted. The devotee who took the vow against killing could not, for instance, hunt or fish. So seriously were the vows looked upon, in fact, that not all five were necessarily taken. When one or two were taken, it was called a “minor ordination (shao-fen chieh).” When three or four were taken, it was called a “major ordination (to-fen chieh).” When all five were taken, it was called a “plenary ordination (man-chieh).” In the printing of some lay ordination certificates, a space was left before the word fen, which could be filled in to show which of these three categories the holder belonged to. A businessman, for example, might be reluctant to take the vows against lying and stealing, since this would interfere with the conduct of his business. A person who felt unable to forgo the pleasures of the “flower house” would omit the vow against sexual license. Almost everyone, however, included the first vow: not to take the life of any sentient being. It may be argued with some force that if the Five Vows were a mere form, there would not have been such scrupulousness in taking them.

When the Refuges were administered by a monk to a layman, the effect was to make the layman the monk's disciple, that is, his Refuges disciple (kuei-i ti-tzu) and hence formally a Buddhist (fo-chaio t'u). Taking the Refuges might be compared to baptism and confirmation together. A monk did not become the Refuges disciple of another monk, or a layman of a layman.

 

The layman prostrated himself as he recited the Refuges and received a religious name from the monk exactly as he would if he were entering the sangha. The name included a character, which was the same as the one received by his master's tonsure disciples. The latter, therefore, could be considered his “brothers.” Unlike tonsure, however, the Refuges could be taken over and over again with different masters or with the same master. Like most master-disciple relationships, it was not exclusive.

First of all, we have to decide what a lay Buddhist is. If we were preparing a census questionnaire for use in China, how would we phrase the entry on religion? This is not a hypothetical problem. The director of the 1961 census in Hong Kong was unable to solve it and therefore no entry on religion was included. Suppose we asked: “Do you believe in the Buddha?” In that case most of the rural population of China would answer in the affirmative, because to them fo (buddha) and p'u-sa (bodhisattva) are terms that can be loosely applied to all divinities, Buddhist, Taoist, and even Christian. If we asked: “Do you go to worship at Buddhist temples?” almost all would answer that they did, although they might add that they worshipped at other temples too. It would not help to inquire whether they called in Buddhist monks to perform rites for the dead, since this was done even in strict Confucian families that would normally have no traffic with the sangha. On the other hand, if we said “Are you a Buddhist (fo-chiao t'u)?” we would find that instead of some claiming to be Buddhists who were not, there would be some claiming not to be Buddhists who were. This is partly because the term “Buddhist” has a little stronger connotation in Chinese than it does in English and partly because, as Gamble discovered, “a man will usually claim that [Confucianism] is his religion, even though he believes in others as well.”

Buddhism is, in many important respects, a cosmological religion. Buddhists have considered dharma to be the truth about the structure and dynamics of cosmic reality (including all physical and mental realities). They have also considered dharma to be the truth about how one can attain nirvana—that is, how one can achieve “salvation” by breaking free of the ultimately unsatisfying character of all experiences that occur within cosmic reality. Finally, Buddhists have also considered that the dharma constitutes the cosmological principles that underpin the possibility for a relatively satisfactory and harmonious individual and communal existence. Given these points, it is not surprising that in early Buddhism, and in most subsequent Buddhist traditions, the basic cosmological and soteriological conceptions have been closely integrated with guidelines for proper behavior. In the case of the renunciant components of the community, these guidelines have been worked into a rather comprehensive legal system articulated in the Vinaya Pitaka and later vinaya literature. This legal system, which has developed and been adapted to changing locales and historical circumstances, has persisted for approximately 2,500 years, and is still used in monasteries and nunneries around the world.

 How did notions of reality and illusion, karma and rebirth, radical particularity and nonduality operate in the legal system of Buddhist Tibet? Listen to the following narrative of a case that came before a local headman from the area of Sakya in the 1940s:

There was a headman of a region named Tseten which had a well-known monastery. One of the monks in that monastery, when his teacher died, began to leave the monastery and wander about the countryside. That monk often left during the day, and at night he came back to the monastery to steal food from the private rooms of the other monks. There were many complaints about this monk, and so a case was brought to the headman of the area by the complainants who had been burglarized.

The Tibetan world view is radically particularistic. This means that it focuses on the small component parts as ultimately real rather than the larger entity, the pieces of hemp rather than the snake. Persons are made up of infinitesimal units which are themselves in constant flux, much like the tiny strands of hemp. At its most essential, everything is in constant movement, changing its composition continuously, never stable, combining and recombining into the various accumulations that we mistake for permanent objects and individuals. Rebirth is the total recombination of millions of these units and karmic seeds. One consequence of this view is that no “self” exists in any deep sense in Buddhist philosophy, no ego or actor, no constant or permanent individuality. Tibetans believe that it is one of our common illusions to see human beings as having permanence, when they are merely combinations of tiny elements. In law, however, these notions of radical particularity rarely surfaced as a part of the legal commentary except perhaps in recitations of religious verse.