ro6 The Buddhist Community
of South-East Asia suggest that the general pattern of monastic
practice and its organization are not entirely dissimilar from the
historical pattern. Indeed, one of the significant conclusions of
Richard Gombrich's important study of traditional Buddhismin the rural highlands of Sri Lanka in the 1960s was that things
appeared to have changed rather little over the previous fifteen
hundred years (although the significance of modernist tenden-cies among the urban middle classes of Colombo and Bangkok
should not be underestimated).^54 It is dangerous to generalize
about the reality of Buddhist monasticism in such diverse set-
tings as Sri Lanka, Cambodia, China, Japan, and Tibet. Thereare, nevertheless, features of the practice of Buddhist monastic-
ism in these different settings that amount to a certain continuity
of tradition, and suggest that the picture that can be drawn on
the basis of the ancient sources is not tp.erely of archaeological
and antiquarian interest. Moreover, the basic pattern is similar.
What we tend to find throughout Buddhist history and through-
out the Buddhist world are a number of grand, important and
wealthy monasteries (especially in capital cities and large urban
centres), many more smaller local village monasteries, togetherwith a small but always significant group of monks following a
more secluded way of life in the forest, in caves, or in more
isolated monasteries. Individual monks may gravitate towardsone kind of lifestyle or another, but the tendency to view Bud~
dhist monastic practice in terms of a stark polarization between
the meditating forest monk and the town-dwelling scholar
monk should be tempered with the reminder that these are ideal
abstractions. In the course of a monastic career in all Buddhist
traditions monks are likely to move between monasteries and
ways of life.^55
. While this pattern remains generally relevant one should
bear in mind that Buddhist monastic practice has developed
characteristic features in various places at various times. Strict
adherence to the letter of the Vinaya have been affected both by
individual temperaments and local circumstances. For example,
everywhere today there is certain laxity with regard to the rule
prohibiting the handling of money, although some Theravadin