BUDDHIST MONASTICISM

John Kieschnick

Introduction

Six hundred years after the first appearance of Buddhism in China, at the beginning of the 7th century and the dawn of the high middle ages, Buddhism had already made a number of enduring contributions to Chinese civilization, most prominently the doctrine of karma and rebirth, the practice of venerating icons, scriptures, and relics, and a vastly expanded pantheon. Just as striking was the Buddhist introduc- tion to China of monasticism. Before the entry of Buddhism, there was nothing in China approaching monasticism—same-sex, communal living by men or women devoted to religious pursuits.1 For subsequent Chinese history, up to the present day, monks and nuns have played a major role in Chinese religious life, from the rarified realm of doctrinal debate to the village funeral. Monks and nuns earned a place in the arts and literature as well. Poets with a penchant for the exotic cultivated friendships with eminent monks, while novelists delighted in lampoon- ing the vices of decadent clerics. Within the monasteries, monks and nuns have continuously striven to maintain a distinctive way of life, the ideals of which, at least on the surface, fly in the face of the family values on which Chinese society is based. Even the outward appearance of monks and nuns was, from the beginning, markedly different from other types of people. Outside of monastics, only the destitute would walk about in patched robes; and besides monks and nuns, the only men and women to be seen with shaven heads were convicts. The reasons monasticism succeeded in China are not at all clear, and present questions I will return to at the end of this chapter. What

1 Technically, “cenobitism” is a more precise term for monks living together in a monastery. Jerome, writing in the 4th century, divided monastic life into the three groups: hermits, cenobites (those who lived in communal monasteries) and renmuoth, or men who lived together in twos or threes, living for the most part in cities. See Marilyn Dunn, The emergence of monasticism: from the desert fathers to the early middle ages (Oxford, 2000), which provides an overview of Christian monasticism for roughly the same time period treated in this chapter. 546 john kieschnick is clear is that, first of all, many of the basic characteristics of Buddhist monasticism as it was to develop in China were utterly new to Chinese culture, and secondly, that most of the elements of the monastic way of life were firmly in place by the closing of the early middle ages at the beginning of the 7th century. Below, I attempt to outline what the basic characteristics of Chinese Buddhist monasticism were, how they evolved from the 1st to the 7th centuries, how they related to pre- Buddhist Chinese beliefs and practices and how they gradually took root in Chinese society. While much of the research on Chinese Buddhism has touched in some way on monasticism—even the most abstruse Buddhist doctrines were, for the most part, formulated and discussed chiefly by monks— relatively little research has focused on monasticism itself, whether it be the monastic regulations, monastic architecture, or daily life in the monasteries.2 The relative dearth of scholarship on the subject is not the result of a lack of sources for the history of monasticism, which are plentiful. And comparison with the wealth of scholarship on Christian monasticism in the West suggests just how much remains to be done.3 The most provocative research on Buddhist monasticism in recent years explores the gap between the monastic ideal as generally understood, and the way monks and nuns actually lived. Examination of Chan works from the Song dynasty and later has demonstrated that, despite the ideal of a distinctive Chan monastery heavily dependent on the manual labor of monks for economic self-sufficiency, in fact in the day-to-day func- tioning of the monastery, monasteries in which Chan monks lived were much like any other type of Buddhist monastery. And in fact manual labor by monks on monastic fields seems to have been very limited and to have played no significant role in the monastic economy.4 Most provocative of all, research on documents and archaeological remains at Dunhuang has shown that in the 10th century, monks at Dunhuang

2 The standard work on Buddhist monasticism in medieval China remains Jacques Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese society: an economic history from the fifth to the tenth centuries (New York, 1995), an English translation, by Franciscus Verellen, of a work originally published in French in 1956. For a more recent overview of the elements of the Buddhist monastery, focusing on late-imperial China, see Isabelle Charleux and Vincent Goossaert, “The physical Buddhist monastery in China,” in P. Pichard and F. Lagirarde, eds, The Buddhist monastery: a cross-cultural survey (Paris, 2003), pp. 305–50. 3 For a recent survey of the scholarship, see Dunn, The emergence of monasticism. 4 T. Griffith Foulk, “Myth, ritual and monastic practice in Sung Ch’an Buddhism,” in Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Peter N. Gregory, eds, Religion and society in T’ang and Sung China (Honolulu, 1993), pp. 147–208.