Sangha

Foundation

The sangha is traced to the Buddha's first disciples at Sarnath and grew during his lifetime into a large order of monks and, after some hesitation recorded in the canon, of nuns. Ordination required a formal act of the assembled community, and the order governed itself by procedures set out in the Vinaya rather than by a hierarchy of authority.

The Buddha is reported to have declined to appoint a successor, saying that the teaching and the discipline would be the teacher after him — which placed authority in the texts and in the collective procedures of the community rather than in an office.

Discipline and life

Monastics live under the Vinaya: celibate, dependent on alms, owning almost nothing, gathering fortnightly to recite the rules and confess breaches. The rainy season retreat, during which travel ceases, provided the settled periods in which monasteries developed from temporary shelters into permanent institutions.

The relation with the laity is reciprocal and defining. The laity provide material support; the sangha provides teaching and the opportunity to make merit. Neither is self-sufficient, and the arrangement shaped Buddhist economics wherever the tradition spread.

Divisions

The order divided over discipline and doctrine, beginning with the split between the Sthaviras and Mahasanghikas after the second council, and continuing into the eighteen or so schools of the early period. These were divisions of monastic lineage and ordination as much as of belief.

The order of nuns lapsed in the Theravada world and was maintained in East Asia; its restoration has been among the most contested questions in modern Buddhism, since Theravada Vinaya procedure requires existing nuns to ordain new ones.

Present

The sangha survives across Asia in forms shaped by local history — village monks in Southeast Asia, the great monastic universities of the Tibetan tradition, married clergy in Japan. In India itself the institution was effectively extinguished by the thirteenth century and returned only in modern times.