The Buddhist Community 107
forest monks will strictly adhere to it; the practice of not eating
solid food after midday is more strictly followed in Theravada
monasticism than in East Asian and Tibetan;^56 among the Ch'an
monks of China it became the norm for monks to farm and grow
their own food in accordance with the additional code of Pai-
chang and Ta-chih Huai-hai (720-814), laying down that monks
should perform some productive labour every day;^57 the alms
round, which remains common in South-East Asia but rarer in
Sri Lanka, became very rare in China where, however, begging
for money has been more common;^58 Chinese monasticism in-
volves a more definite tradition of physical austerities (such as
the burning of incense cones on one's head at ordination); in the
context of Japanese Pure Land tradition we find the transforma-
tion of the m(?nastic Sangha into what is effectively a married
priesthood, while following the Meiji Restoration of 1868 the
Japanese government decreed that monks should marry;^59 in cer-
tain schools of Tibetan Buddhism a tradition of lay teachers and
practitioners has become more developed and formalized.
So while it is possible to read the history of the Buddhist Sangha
as the process of the gradual compromising of its ascetic ideal,
it is also possible that we should see the compromise as inher-
ent in the characteristically Buddhist vision of the life of the
homeless wanderer. That is, the tendency to leave society is
deliberately balanced in the Vinaya by rules which force the monk
back into a relationship with society. The dynamic of the Buddhist
monastic way of life is then to be seen as rooted in the inter-
action between a _more settled monastic lifestyle and the ideal
of the forest-dwelling wanderer.
The lay community
As I have already indicated, the support of a lay community
is essential to the existence of the Buddhist Sangha and thus
to Buddhism. The Buddhist lay community is traditionally said
to comprise the two 'assemblies' of male (upiisaka) and female