How to Become a Zen Buddhist Monk if Married With Family

Married Monks: Japan's Non-Monastic Buddhist Priesthood

The root of all suffering, according to Buddhism, is craving—longing for objects of the senses and wanting things to be one mode and not wanting them to be some other. Freedom from suffering, on the other hand, is to exist institute in the extinction, or "nirvāṇa", of this very craving. Naturally, the path of exercise that leads to this goal has renunciation—letting go of the things we crave and want—at its core.

While the vast majority of Buddhist followers practise their creed in the midst of worldly life, there have e'er been some who aspire to commit more fully to the path of renunciation than what such a lifestyle can afford. It was in lodge to laurels and encourage such aspirations that the Buddha, himself a monk and renunciant, created the Buddhist monastic order, or Sangha, near two and a half millennia ago. In the centuries that followed, the Buddhist movement grew and spread throughout the Indian subcontinent and beyond. As it did so, the Sangha grew and spread along with it. Today the Sangha, if taken as a whole, is the world's largest and oldest monastic order. The monk or nun in monastic garb and with a shaven head is too, besides images of the Buddha, the near recognizable physical representation of Buddhism.

Function of what sets members of the Sangha, or any monastic community for that matter, autonomously from the residue of society, are the various renunciatory rules and precepts governing the lives of its members. Of these, perhaps the about central are those apropos celibacy. According to the Vinaya-piṭaka, the section of the Buddhist catechism concerned with the monastic lawmaking, or Vinaya, the first dominion the Buddha e'er laid down was a prohibition on sexual intercourse. Not only does animalism plant an exceedingly potent and persistent grade of sensual want, acting upon the sexual impulse also leads to strong attachments and entanglements with the world. Sex activity is therefore particularly problematic in the context of a renunciatory spiritual practice and strikes at the very heart of the monastic concept. This helps explicate why sexual intercourse by a monk or nun was accounted one of the heaviest offences against the Vinaya lawmaking, on a par with theft and intentional homicide. Any fully ordained monk or nun committing the offence is expelled for life—automatically and with immediate result.

With the passage of fourth dimension, and as Buddhism became integrated into societies and cultures very dissimilar from that of its original Indian homeland, many of the bottom monastic rules were subtly contradistinct or ignored altogether. As monks and nuns began growing their own nutrient (itself constituting multiple small-scale violations), many communities scrapped the practice of mendicancy, or relying for their sustenance on offerings from the lay customs; the injunction against handling coin became overlooked by almost; and in the colder climates to the north of Republic of india, monks and nuns grew accepted to taking nutrient in the evening, in defiance of the rule against eating after midday. Yet, the basic, fundamental precepts appear to accept been maintained by about. To this 24-hour interval, Buddhist monks and nuns in nigh every traditional Buddhist country are nonetheless expected to adhere to a monastic lifestyle and are enjoined from getting married and starting families.

As far as appearances go, the Buddhist clergy of Japan does not differ essentially from its counterparts elsewhere. Its members alive in temples or monasteries, wear monastic robes, and shave their heads. Appearances, however, can be deceptive, for Japanese male person Buddhist clerics practise non generally notice monastic precepts, nor are they expected to. In fact, the great bulk are married—at a whopping 90 per cent, the share is significantly college than for the population in full general. It is common practise in the Zen tradition for new clerics to spend time in training monasteries, where they temporarily live according to monastic rules and regulations. In some sects, such as those of the Rinzai school, holders of high clerical function are supposedly expected to remain chaste for life. At that place are as well, to exist sure, some clerics who on their own initiative choose to alive according to the monastic precepts. But for most, getting married is not but tolerated, information technology has become almost a requirement. Producing a son who can have over as temple custodian is often the only way for an abbot to ensure continuity from 1 generation to the next.

The history leading up to the nowadays situation is a complex one. The male clergy of the Jōdo Shinshū, or True Pure Land School, have been openly non-celibate since the time of its founder, viii centuries ago. For the other denominations, however, this only became the case beginning in the late nineteenth century. Under the Tokugawa shogunate government, which ruled the land from 1603 to 1868, precept violations past not-Shinshū monks and nuns were serious criminal offences. Although prosecutions were few, the penalties could be severe: monks caught being besides friendly with the ladies, for instance, might find themselves banished to some far-abroad island or, in some cases, even subjected to public execution. Still, non-celibate monks exterior Jōdo Shinshū may have been far more than prevalent than the limited number of prosecutions would seem to betoken. Accounts of not-celibate clergy get far dorsum in time. From as early as the Nara period in the eighth century, in that location are reports of big numbers of self-ordained monks. These were men who took on the monastic function without going through government-approved procedures. While some were genuine renunciants, many are thought to have been laymen who merely pretended to exist monks in lodge to escape onerous taxes. It is as well well-established that many so-called monseki, aristocratic abbots of the medieval period, had families and passed on their abbacies in father-to-son lineages.

Around the end of the 8th century, Saichō, the founder of the Tendai schoolhouse, one of the main schools of Japanese Buddhism, instituted a reform of the ordination procedures. Perhaps his intention was but to remedy a situation where many monks and nuns had tending with ordination procedures all together; perhaps he wanted to bring the procedures more in line with Mahayana tradition past de-emphasising the Vinaya aspect. Whatever the instance may be, as a issue of his reform the traditional Vinaya-based ordination procedures became gradually replaced with ones based on the Bodhisattva precepts of the Mahayana Brahmajāla Sūtra. These somewhen became the standard method of ordaining new clergy, non only for members of the Tendai school itself but for nigh all monks and nuns in Japan. The rules of the Vinaya are specifically, and exclusively, directed at monks and nuns who have been fully accepted into the Sangha co-ordinate to the Vinaya's own procedures. This means that, at to the lowest degree technically speaking, Japanese monks and nuns were from then on no longer bound by its rules. This is of some significance as the Bodhisattva precepts of the Brahmajāla Sūtra are not specifically monastic. They may equally well be given to committed lay practitioners, as they often were. For while the Vinaya contains injunctions confronting all forms of sexual practice, the Bodhisattva precepts only proscribe "sexual misconduct". In the example of monastics, information technology is truthful, this was usually understood to mandate total sexual abstinence. However, since that is not explicitly spelled out, there always existed a certain amount of wriggle-room absent from the Vinaya'due south blanket prohibition.

An fifty-fifty more than definite and far-reaching departure from the monastic model came 4 centuries later. Shinran, a follower of the Pure Land doctrine, had been a monk from a immature age only was at i indicate defrocked and forced into exile, possibly because of an ambivalent mental attitude to the monastic precepts. This, however, did not finish him from carrying on his religious vocation. A tireless preacher, he was highly revered past his by and large peasant followers. He married a nun and famously pronounced himself to be "neither monk nor layman". Arguing that the monastic form, forth with meditation and other nan-gyō, or "difficult practices", was no longer suitable for the current historic period, he encouraged his followers instead to place all their organized religion in the saving powers of the celestial Buddha Amitābha (Jp.: Amida). This 'populist' approach to the Dharma proved hugely popular, and the school which grew out of Shinran's ministry, the Jōdo Shinshū, eventually became—and continues to be—the largest of all the Japanese Buddhist schools. Unlike the subconscious non-celibacy which may or may not accept been rampant in the other schools, the clergy of Shinshū, who had their own non-monastic ordination procedures, were openly non-celibate. During the menses of the Tokugawa shogunate, they were specifically exempted from the criminalisation of non-celibacy and other axiom violations enacted against the clergy of the other Buddhist schools. A peculiar feature of the menses was the uses to which the Buddhist clergy was put past the government. Entrusted with registering and keeping a tab on the entire populace, they came to role somewhat like de-facto regime agents. To facilitate this, the corking majority lived spread out in small village temples where at that place was little or no opportunity for contact with other clerics. This made information technology more difficult to maintain strict monastic standards; motivation to do and so may accept been low; and they were also more exposed to members of the opposite sexual practice than their predecessors had been in the large monastic complexes of the medieval era. Nether such circumstances, it is non unlikely that some members of the 'monastic' Buddhist schools decided to discreetly emulate their Shinshū colleagues.

Every bit was the case in post-medieval Europe, criticism of the clergy became commonplace amidst Japanese intellectuals from the belatedly sixteenth century onward. Several texts from the Tokugawa catamenia castigate the clergy for being corrupt and sexually promiscuous. Nikujiki saitai ben, a Shinshū text from the seventeenth century lists numerous temples from the supposedly monastic schools, both contemporary and of the past, where, information technology alleged, monks kept wives and had families. Reliable testify for such claims, nevertheless, is difficult to come up by. Because of the criminal nature of precept violations perpetrators naturally sought to hibernate their infractions, leaving very little in terms of first-manus documentation. A mayhap amend identify to look is the clerical spousal relationship registrations submitted during the period following the overthrow of the shogunate in 1868.

In 1872, five years after seizing ability, the new regime, known every bit the Meiji regime after the Emperor's era name, promulgated a law that put an end to the criminalisation of axiom violations. "From now on", the police force stated, "information technology is upwards to monks [to decide whether they want to] swallow meat, get married, or grow their hair". A similar police for nuns followed soon thereafter. What this meant in practice was that the government would no longer police nor act every bit a guardian for the Buddhist clergy. Critics have as well suggested it might take been a roundabout fashion of undermining and disempowering the Sangha. Whatever the case, the new law was staunchly opposed by clergy leaders but welcomed by many rank-and-file clerics. Before long large numbers opted to get married. The speed at which this happened, as well equally the extent, suggest that many were simply coming out publicly nigh already-existing relationships, now that it was safety to exercise then. By the 1930s, when the first surveys of clerical marriage were undertaken, information technology appears the majority of male clerics in the non-Shinshū denominations were married. Equally the new government policies had in large function been modelled on those of predominantly Protestant Western countries, the organization of non-chaste clergy found in the Protestant denominations had obviously been influential. Simply so had the instance of the Shinshū school, which is thought to have provided the main blueprint for the non-monastic form which had at present come up to prevail.

Today, Nippon still has tens of thousands of Buddhist temples managed by well-nigh threescore k mostly male clerics. Exquisitely beautiful and securely atmospheric, Japanese temples are great monuments to the superb traditions of the country'south artisanship and testimony to an ancient spiritual civilisation. But indications of present-24-hour interval religious fervour they are not. For, whether in that location is a connection or not, faith in Buddhism appears to have lessened in tandem with the disappearance of the monastic tradition. According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, approximately 85 million, or almost seventy per cent of the population, belong to one Buddhist sect or another. However, in recent surveys nearly private faith, only most 27 per cent of respondents considered themselves religious. Thus, the Zen devotee visiting from abroad volition be disappointed to find that the enthusiasm for Zen found in sure Western circles is strikingly lacking in its land of origin. During my own sojourn in Nippon during the 1990s, I had the opportunity to attend lectures on Buddhism at a Zen-affiliated university. There, almost all my beau students were young men from "temple families"; that is, young men whose fathers were temple priests and who were studying in order to take over the "family business concern". Students from "non-temple" backgrounds were few and far between. The aforementioned goes for the clergy itself: it has become a by and large in-firm affair, with very few outsiders seeking to join its ranks.

On a final note, information technology should be mentioned that at that place is one group of Buddhist monastics who have by and large maintained the monastic form to this 24-hour interval—namely the nuns. That, however, would have been more significant if in that location weren't so few of them. Unlike in neighbouring Republic of korea, where nuns make up one-half of the Sangha, and Taiwan, where nuns vastly outnumber monks, the nuns' community in Nippon is but a tiny fraction of the male clergy—a mere one yard individuals to the latter'south sixty thousand. Their number has been rather stable for most of the previous century. At nowadays, nonetheless, it appears to exist decreasing due to a lack of new recruits. The author of one Japanese-linguistic communication weblog post considered the state of affairs so dismal that he or she worried in that location might not be a single nun left within the next couple of decades. It is revealing that this is lamented every bit a cultural loss, not as a spiritual or religious i. But who, in a modern, affluent order, would want to make the sacrifices required past the monastic life for cultural reasons solitary?

mccallguile1956.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/studies/voices-middle-east-asia/voices-from-east-asia/married-monks-japan%E2%80%99s-non-monastic-buddhist-priest.html

Share this post