Chapter 10 Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia 405rich foods, beds, and upholstered chairs. He must not spend more than two or
three days in the company of a layperson. He must not eat food between noon
and the next morning, though he may and should accept his morning meal
(usually a ball of rice wrapped in banana leaves) from laypeople. He must never
ask for more food or for rich food.
Another set of rules guard the monk against sexual impropriety. He must
not have any form of physical contact with a woman, or make any salacious
comments, or be alone with a woman, or sleep under the same roof even if in
another room, or accept a robe from a woman or even from a nun (see the fol-
lowing section on the difference between a nun and a female monk). When a
woman offers a gift to a monk, they will avoid eye contact, and they will avoid
hand contact by placing the gift on a cloth.
Life in the monastery can be intense and as filled with potential for dissen-
sion as any other close domestic relationship. The monk must avoid any act
that would lead to discord in the monastic community. He must not gossip,
eavesdrop, make false accusations against another monk, resist admonish-
ment, threaten or provoke another monk, or disparage any of the teachings of
the Buddha.
Only a small minority of Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia are lifelong
monks, whereas a majority of men spend some time as a member of a monastic
community. This tradition developed when literacy and learning were available
only in wat schools run by monks; boys were sent to the wat to learn to read
and write, and then proceeded to become novices, usually around age eight.
Nowadays with universal education in state-sponsored schools, this function of
the wat is dying out, but young men still enter the monastery as a kind of rite of
passage into adulthood and marriage. It can also be done as a form of filial
piety to pass merit to a deceased father or mother or grandparent to help their
soul on its journey. They may take ordination at the beginning of the rainy sea-
son, and stay only until the end three months later, or they may stay for a year
(“the first year for the mother”) or two (“the second year for the father”).
Like all important life transitions, the passage from layman to monk does
not go ritually unmarked. It takes a two-day rite of ordination to turn a Bud-
dhist layman into a monk, during which his family provides for the new, but
simple, needs of the monk-to-be and passes him over to the monastery. These
include an ochre robe, an umbrella, a begging bowl, slippers, a razor, a lamp,
and a spittoon. His head is shaved as the sign of his renunciation and then he is
dressed in the white robe of a novice.
On an overcast day in July 1987, two men—one a young man about to be
married, and another middle-aged man—arrived at Wat Po in Bangkok on the
day of Khaw Phansa (the “into” retreat), the only day of the year when monks
are ordained. Monks and novices were busy cleaning up after the candle cere-
mony the night before with their main energy going into cleaning the many
Buddha images in preparation for the coming rainy season retreat. The two men
arrived with their families at about 8:30 in the morning, accompanied by an