The Buddhist CommunityFrom wandering to settled life: forest dwellersand town dwellers
95
1'he ideal that the lifestyle of the Buddhist monk is founded upon
is that of the homeless wanderer who, having renounced all
possessions and gone forth from the household life, dresses in
robes made from discarded rags, begs for his food, and takes as
his dwelling the forest, a mountain cave, or the foot of a tree.
Perhaps one of the most uncompromising descriptions of the re-
nouncer's lifestyle is that found in a poem.near the beginning of
the Suttanipiita. Here the renouncer is advised to wander alone,
free from any ties of family and friendship, 'like the [single]
horn of the Indian rhinoceros'.^28 Although Buddhist tradition
has not seen this account as a general prescription for Buddhist
monastic life, there has been a tendency for modern scholarship
to take the kind of picture it presents at face value. The history
of the Sangha in ancient India can then be read as a series of
compromises that amount to a gradual corruption of the ancient
ideal. On this view, the monks at first wandered completely
homeless in their single-minded intent on the goal of nirval).a.
Increasing numbers of spiritually inexperienced and immature
monks made it necessary for the Buddha to lay down more rules
and regulations. Step.. by step this led to the institutionalization
of the Sangha. Particularly significant in this process was a rule
which is said to have been laid down in response to complaints
that Buddhist monks wandering about during the monsoon
rainy season were causing damage to plants and small creatures;
this rule therefore requires monks to take up residence in one
place for the three months of" the rains. The consequence of this
was the establishment of residential monasteries and the grad-
ual evolution of a more settled way of life.^29
But there are problems with such a model of the evolution of.
the Sangha. To begin with, as the more recent work of Mohan
Wijayaratna and Gregory Schopen has shown, the Vinaya texts
as we have them certainly already assume the development of
a settled way of life and the picture of the typical monk's way