ORDINATION

Ordination, the ceremony by which men and women accept the more than two hundred rules of the Buddhist vinaya and are thus defined as clerics, has been immensely important throughout the entire Buddhist tradition, even as its definitions, functions, and salience have differed over time and space. Ordination ceremonies are roughly the same for men and women, except that those for women often include additional requirements that subordinate nuns to monks. The ordination of women was completely halted in the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries in Southeast Asian Buddhism, and recent efforts to introduce the nun's ordination from China and Taiwan have not yet been widely accepted. In ancient India and medieval Tibet and East Asia, the emergence of meditation and esoteric (tantric) initiation lineages has reduced the salience of ordinations. Japanese Buddhism is well known—even infamous throughout the Buddhist world—as the only national tradition to have rejected celibacy and avoidance of intoxicants, a development that has had some impact on modern Korean and Taiwanese Buddhism as well.

In addition to conventional types of ordination, the ceremony was sometimes applied (or, more often, the five precepts administered) to gods and spirits as Buddhism competed with and amalgamated native religious traditions during its expansion throughout Asia. In Japan from late medieval times on funerals for laypeople often included posthumous ordination, and in modern Southeast Asia the ordination of trees has been used to protect forests from logging. Given the diversity of attitudes and approaches, it is not surprising that modern Western Buddhists have generally interpreted the ordination ritual and the associated vows abstractly, and only a few Western Buddhist have undertaken lifetime maintenance of the full monastic precepts.

Description of the ordination ceremony

Entrance into the sa?gha occurs in two stages, the first being the novice's ordination involving ten precepts, by which the novice becomes a ?rama?era or?rama?erik?. In Southeast Asia this step may be taken as early as age seven; in East Asia one may not formally become a novice until age nineteen, even though one may have lived within the monastic community from a very young age. Short-term novitiates of a few weeks or months are common in Southeast Asia. Short-term higher ordinations are also common; the term is usually a summer rains-retreat period or longer. There is no particular onus on those who do not go on to full ordination. (The ritual described in this section is based on the unpublished translation by Gregory Schopen of the ordination ritual found in the M?lasarv?stivadavinaya.)

The full or higher ordination (upasampad?), by which one becomes a bhik?u or bhik?un?, can occur only at or after age twenty (dated from conception). In the primitive sa?gha there was presumably a generally accepted core of about 150 rules in the monastic code (pr?timok?a), but the diversification of ordination lineages has led to divergences in many of the minor rules. Hence Therav?da monks in Southeast Asia observe 227 rules (Therav?da nuns once observed 311), Tibetan monks observe the 258 rules (the nuns 354) of the M?lasarv?stivada-vinaya, and Chinese and Korean monks observe the 250 rules (the nuns 348) of the Dharmaguptaka-vinaya. East Asian monks also accept the bodhisattva vows derived from the Fanwang jing (Brahma's Net S?tra), a formal part of ordination, and in most Japanese schools these vows have entirely supplanted the pratimoksa rules.

The ordination ceremony must involve all the monks in a given local sa?gha, and no one can enter or leave during the proceedings; usually a separate temporary boundary (s?ma) is established for the duration of the ceremony. There should be an assembly of ten or more fully ordained monks (or, in border regions, five monks) and a vinaya master to serve as preceptor. The ceremony begins with the ordinand paying reverence to the monks, then entreating the preceptor to confer ordination on him. The ordinand then takes possession of his robes, or the cloth for their making, declaring to the preceptor that they are of appropriate material and cut. If the robes have not yet been made, the ordinand declares his intention to wash, cut, dye, and sew them properly from the material provided. The same process occurs for the bowl.

The ordinand then moves out of hearing range but stays within sight so that the officiant can ask the ordinand's private instructor about his appropriateness for ordination. The private instructor then goes over

to the ordinand and, after reminding him not to be embarrassed by the questions, ascertains whether the ordinand is free from any of the impediments to ordination. These include questions about the individual's age, gender, genital completeness, and authorization by his parents (if living), and his identity as other than slave, criminal, eunuch, hermaphrodite, or despoiler of nuns. The questions also confirm that the ordinand has not been a member of another religious group or suffered expulsion from another sa?gha; has not murdered his father, mother, or an arhat; has not caused a split in the sa?gha or wounded the Buddha; is not a magically created phantom or animal; is not in debt (beyond the ability to pay at point of ordination); is not suffering from any illness (giving a long list); and is someone who is now fully entered into the religious life, including the practice of chastity.

Upon returning to the assembly the private instructor informs them of the ordinand's absence of any obstacles. The candidate is then brought forward and, after reverence to the Buddha and the elders of the community, the private instructor entreats the assembly three times to confer ordination on him. As a member of the sa?gha in full standing, the officiant then restates this entreaty as a formal resolution to the community. Following this, the same questions placed privately are now posed to the candidate before the entire group, and upon his successful responses the officiant formally moves that the assembly ordain him. The time of this event is measured (using pegs of specified size) on a sundial, so as to determine the new monk's exact seniority.

The ordinand is then made to affirm that he can maintain his asceticism for the rest of his life, including the four supports (ni?raya) of clothing, food, housing, and medicine. He also confirms that he can maintain celibacy in both mind and body, and avoid stealing, killing, and lying. In the text of the M?lasarv?stiv?da ordination, the injunctions against such errors are lengthy and emphatic, with particular attention on the transgression of claiming false knowledge or attainment of spiritual truths, cosmic realities, meditative states or yogic powers, or achievement of arhatship. The ordinand affirms that he will not revile, offend, chastise, or deride others, even when others do so to him.

After all this, the officiant finally declares that the ordinand has now been properly entered into the religious life by a preceptor, two teachers, the agreement of the sa?gha, and a formal action (the ceremony) involving three inviolable motions. The ceremony does not immediately end with this declaration, but continues with injunctions to the new monk to maintain his training, to treat his preceptor as his father just as the preceptor will treat the monk as son, to respect those senior to him, to strive for the direct realization of Buddhist truths, to learn the monastic rules not covered yet in the bimonthly sa?gha meeting, and to maintain attentiveness with all aspects of the dharma.

Historical variations in Buddhist ordination

Ordination was used in the early years of Buddhism to define the membership of the sa?gha and induce members to adhere to a uniform religious lifestyle, both differentiating the Buddhist order from other religious groups and inspiring its members with a shared sense of identity as formally accepted descendents of the Buddha. As the Buddhist movement diversified, there developed multiple ordination lineages, called nik?yas (literally, segment or division), each with slightly different interpretations of the vinaya regulations. Since these nik?yas also predominated in different geographical areas and developed sometimes very different sets of abhidharma philosophical texts, they functioned as separate mainstream Buddhist schools.

There is no evidence for any variant approach to ordination in the early Mah?y?na vocation, but with the emergence of master–student initiation lineages in the Kashmiri meditation tradition (fourth century c.e. and thereafter) and the Indian tradition of tantra (ca. sixth century c.e. and thereafter), the relative significance of ordination declined somewhat. The Tibetan sa?gha maintains the use of ordination as an important threshold of entry into the practice of Buddhism, but greater emphasis is placed on tantric initiation lineages and the identification of tulkus (reincarnated sages). In an analagous fashion, local monastery relationships and both Chan school and esoteric (tantric) initiation lineages changed the religious salience of ordination in East Asia. More drastic changes occurred in modern Japan, where the Buddhist clergy have redefined ordination as a more lofty but less demanding dedication to Mah?y?na ideals not requiring maintenance of the rules of celibacy.

In the early years of Buddhism in each of the cultural realms of East Asia (China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam), there was great emphasis on proper training in Buddhist vinaya (monastic regulations) and the correct ordination of monks and nuns. Dao'an (312–385) devised a set of monastic rules himself, but was happy that it could be displaced by portions of the Sarv?stiv?da-vinaya introduced toward the end of his life. The entire Four Part Vinaya (Sifen lü) of the Dharmaguptaka school, which was to become the most widely used version in China, was translated in 414 by Buddhaya?as and Zhu Fonian; complete vinayas of four other mainstream Buddhist schools were translated during the next decade or so. The insights of the pilgrim and translator Xuanzang (ca. 600–664) on contemporary Indian practices upon his return to China in 649, as well as his suggestion that all Chinese monks needed to be ordained anew, caused substantial uneasiness among his peers. This was one of the motivations behind an ordination platform movement initiated by the great historian and vinaya specialist Daoxuan (596–667), who in the very last year of his life had visions of the Buddha's ordination platform at Jetavana. Although entirely contrary to Indian historical realities, the s?ma boundary of the Indian ordination was reinterpreted as a Chinese-style raised platform. Daoxuan's example inspired other Chinese monks to build platforms and confer ordinations on the surface of what was effectively a caitya or monumental embodiment of the Buddha. A famous account of just such an ordination, or at least the sermons associated with it, is found in the Platform S?tra of the Sixth Patriarch (Liuzu tan jing). After a major rebellion in China in 755, both government and rebels sponsored the ordination of Buddhist monks for fund-raising purposes; each ordinand paid a hefty fee but then received a lifetime exemption from taxation. In the Song dynasty (960–1279) blank ordination certificates were sometimes traded for financial speculation, but the government eventually eradicated all such abuses. It is generally held that government control of ordination negatively influenced the quality and independence of the Chinese sa?gha.

Several developments contributed to a change in the status and function of ordination in Chinese Buddhism. Based on the voluminous vinaya writings of Daoxuan, the Chinese tradition consolidated on the use of the Dharmaguptaka school's Four Part Vinaya. It was only during the Song dynasty, though, that the Chinese vinaya tradition really became formalized as an independent "school," and even here this word denotes a social reality very different from the nik?yas of Indian Buddhism. That is, a handful of major "public monasteries" in China were designated as vinaya centers, meaning that they were the ones where most but not all sophisticated study of the vinaya tradition occurred, and where all Chinese monks and nuns were ordained. The official ordination process became a large-scale affair involving not only the ceremony of vow-taking and induction itself, but a lengthy period of preliminary training in liturgy (recitation of scriptures, use of bells, drums, and other ritual implements, etc.) and deportment (wearing of robes, monastic etiquette, etc.). All Chinese monks and nuns were, and still are, united by their experience of this rite of passage, but the scale and formality of the event came to mean a reduced significance in contrast with other monastic relationships. That is, monks and nuns are far more likely to identify with the "disciple lineages" based on the local monasteries and teachers where they initially trained in Buddhism, to which they often returned after the weeks-long ordination ritual. In addition, elite segments of the monastic population also identify more profoundly with Chan and Mijiao (Esoteric) school initiation lineages. The use of moxa or incense to burn marks on the heads of Chinese ordinands seems to have begun around the sixteenth century.

There are various accounts, if only from later sources, describing the efforts taken by fourth- to fifth-century Korean Buddhists to establish proper vinaya practices there. Missionaries from Kogury? (northern Korea) and Paekche (southwestern Korea) were the earliest ordained monks in Japan. The earliest ordained Japanese Buddhists were women sent to Paekche in the late sixth century, the choice of women perhaps deriving from their function as priestesses or shamanesses (miko) in ancient Japanese society. The quest for orthodox vinaya regulations and qualified ordination masters preoccupied early Japanese Buddhists as much as it had their Chinese and Korean counterparts in earlier centuries, although here the source of canonical praxis was China rather than India. A great advance occurred with the arrival of the vinaya specialist Jianzhen (Japanese, Ganjin; 688–763) in Japan in 753. He had been frustrated many times in his efforts to reach Japan, becoming blind in the process. Although the Japanese government installed him in a magnificent monastery (T?sh?daiji, still one of the most beautiful sites in Nara) and had him lead a spectacular ordination ceremony at a platform on the grounds of T?daiji, the "Great Eastern Monastery" that housed the Daibutsu or Great Buddha, Ganjin was frustrated by the Japanese refusal to consider ordination as much more than an elaborate ritual.

This tendency to disregard the 250 regulations of the Four Part Vinaya was carried even further by Saich? (767–822), who argued that the government should allow his newly founded Tendai school to ordain monks without reference to the vinaya, which Saicho rejected as being "h?nay?na." Saich?'s goal was to maintain control over the training of his own students, who frequently did not return from their ordinations in Nara; his wishes were granted just after his death, and the subsequent growth of Mount Hiei and the Tendai school as a whole meant that fewer and fewer Japanese clergy took vows based on the vinaya. In the early thirteenth century the Pure Land priest Shinran (1173–1262), who like many important Kamakura-period figures had trained for a period at Mount Hiei, declared himself to be "neither priest nor layperson" and publicly married. Although there was a short-lived movement to revitalize Buddhism through strict maintenance of the precepts at about the same time, marriage eventually became the norm for priests in Shinran's True Pure Land school (J?do shinsh?). Although many Japanese priests in other schools maintained widely recognized but technically illicit marriage relationships throughout the late medieval period, it was only with the government's disestablishment of Buddhism in 1872 that a broad spectrum of the Japanese clergy renounced celibacy.

See also:Mah?y?na Precepts in Japan; Monasticism

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John R. McRae