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have restriction on age at the time of novice ordination. It is believed that people who have been married before and the elderly have more bad mannerism or habit, and they might cause the monastery more trouble if they join the Order.33 There are also some monasteries preferring to have new members with higher education.
These restrictions are different from monastery to monastery, but these restrictions are not in the Vinaya. Therefore, it really depends on the considerations of each individual monastery. None of my informants ever heard about someone being rejected from joining the Order.
2.6 Daily Life in the Monastery The Monastery Calender:
The main temple and branch temples of C.F.S. have their own monastery
calendar. The calendar tells you activities that are held in the temple, and the specific time of it. As I mentioned before, the position fa-wu (法務) is responsible for
arranging all activities in the main temple, and it will be discussed by fa-wu and other important supervisors of the temple during the meeting. Although different temple can hold different Buddhist classes for lay people and different Buddhist rituals, there are still some compulsory ceremonies. For instance, the first and the fifteenth day of each lunar month are dates for making offering to the Buddha. On these two days, there will be lunch offering ritual (wu-gong 午供) in the Main Buddha Hall or The Great Hall (da-dian 大殿) in the morning. Lay people will bring food or flower to make their own offering, too. Many Buddhists in Taiwan eat vegetarian meals during these two days, so after they attend the offering ritual, they will stay for vegetarian meals in the temple. In addition, monks and nuns have to recite their precepts twice
33 In here, I am trying to express a Chinese term “xiqi” (習氣). It can be translated into habit without any negative meaning. However, when people talk about someone’s “xiqi”, it tends to be negative.
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a month according to the Vinaya. In C.F.S., monks and nuns only recite their precepts once a month, so the fifteenth of every lunar month is the date for precepts
recitation. Depending on the size of the temple, different rituals and activities will be held. The following example is the monastery calendar of C.F.S.’ main temple of 2010:
Date Lunar Date Activities
02/14-02/18 01/1-01/5 Buddhist Ceremonies for Chinese New Year 02/21(11PM) 01/8 Making Offerings to the Heavenly Gods 02/22 01/09 Lunch Offering Ceremony to Buddha
04/26 03/11 Special Offering Ceremony to Sri Lankan Monks 04/04 02/20 Buddhist Ceremonies on Tomb Sweeping Day
05/2 03/19 Celebration for Mother’s Day
05/16 04/3 Celebration of the 40th Year of C.F.S.
07/27 04/16 One Day Camp for Volunteers 07/24-07/25 06/13-06/14 Conferences on Buddhist Doctrines 07/3-08/1 06/19-21 Summer Camp for the Youth 08/13-08/15 07/4-07/6 Ullambana34 Ceremonies
10/3 08/26 Class on Tantric Practice to the Public
10/31 09/24 Fund Raising Activity
11/6-11/7 10/1-10/2 Eight Precepts Retreat 12/17-12/19 11/12-11/14 Three-Day Meditation Retreat
12/19 11/14 Ceremony of Amitabha
34 Ullambana is translated as yu-lan pen (盂蘭盆) in Chinese. It is also known as Hungry Ghost Festival.
The seventh month of Chinese lunar month is called the month of ghost. It is believed that all ghosts will be released from the hell, and go to the human world for their offerings. During this one month, there will be different kind of rituals held by different beliefs in order to save their suffering ancestors.
Moreover, people will make food offering to them, and it is an act of paying respects so that those ghosts would not cause trouble to them. In Buddhism, Ullambana ceremonies are for saving suffering ancestors from the hell.
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Besides these dharma ceremonies, there are monthly based Buddhist practices of chanting the sutras and Buddhist classes for lay people.
Schedule:
Activities held by the monastery on the above monastery calendar are for both sangha members and lay Buddhists. The monastery has its own private daily
schedule that every member follows. The routine schedule of the main temple is different from their branch temples. For example, the morning chanting in the main temple starts at 4:20 am, but in the branch temples, it starts at 5 am. There is not much difference of what a monk or a nun would do in daily life between the main temple and the branch temples expect for the times of routine activities. The following is the daily time schedule of C.F.S.’ main temple:
4:20 am Morning Chanting 6:20 am Breakfast
7:00 am Recitation of Vinaya (on 1st and 15th of every lunar month) 8:00 am Meditation or Buddhist Lectures
10:30 am Lunch Offering to the Buddha (on 15th of every lunar month) 11:20 am Lunch
12:00am-2pm Afternoon Break 4:50 pm Evening Chanting 6:00 pm Dinner
7:00 pm Monthly Meeting (everyone must attend)
8:00 pm Repentance (every Sunday night); Buddhist Lecture (if scheduled
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by the monastery)
9:30 Rest
The above is the schedule that everyone follows, but each member still has his or her own work that they have to do every day. Therefore, they have to use free times between each routine activity to finish it. If the temple is not busy with big ceremony, then the members can have their own time after dinner.
Practices required:
There is no specific requirement set by the old Chan master for his disciples on the Buddhist practices that they do. He would not ask his disciples, for instance, to chant certain sutra or to recite a Buddha’s name every day. There are reasons for that. First, the monastery is always very busy with scheduled activities. In addition, there are a lot of lay Buddhists request for private Buddhist ritual services. In a branch temple, there are on average two to five people only, and each rite requires at least four members to
participate. Therefore, most of them are actually very busy with that, and they might not even have free time before going to bed. Private Buddhist ritual services are the most important source income of the monastery, so it is hard to refuse doing it. Second, Buddhist practice is more a personal matter except for group practices. The old Chan master also teaches Tantric practices to his disciples, and it is more a private personal practices. Furthermore, the old Chan master is open–minded with personal choice of Buddhist practices. Thus, he never sets strict rules on this matter, but there are few practices mentioned by the master in C.F.S. Special Issues of Thirty Years that his sangha disciples should do:
a. Five Basic Buddhist Practices (wu-tan gong-ke 五堂功課): morning chanting, lunch offering to the Buddha, chanting sutra, dedicating the merits of chanting
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sutra to all sentient beings, evening chanting, and two periods of meditation.
b. Uposatha (bu-sa 布薩): According to the Vinaya, the monastic community should recite their precepts twice a month. In Chinese Buddhism, it is on the 1st and 15th of every lunar month.
c. Monastic conference: The conference will be held once a month and everyone must attend it. During the conference, every member can bring up his or her problems or concerns for discussion. If there is any fault doing of a member that has been found, then the whole community can discuss about how to solve it.
d. Repentance: In C.F.S., every member has to repent by their own in the main Buddha hall at 8pm every Sunday.
e. Group Buddhist Practice (gon-xiou 共修): Sometimes the monastery will schedule group Buddhist practices that everyone must attend. For example, Buddhist lecture in the morning or evening is a kind of group Buddhist practice.
Not every single practice has always been done by members of C.F.S. As I pointed out, members are busy with monastic activities and ritual services. Fang Tsung and Welch also noticed that.35 What average people would think is that all monks and nuns should be doing their Buddhist practices all the time, but this is not really the case.
Unlike Theravada Buddhism, monks and nuns of Mahayana tradition need to do more chores. In addition, for many large expanding monasteries, monks and nuns are extremely busy with monastic activities. Besides the above five types of basic
Buddhist practices, there are ascetic practices such as meditation retreat or
famishing retreat.36 Some monks and nuns of C.F.S. participated in different kinds of
35 Shiu-Kuen Fan-Tsung: Moms, Nuns and Hookers: Extrafamilial Alternatives for Village Women in Taiwan, 1986.
36 Famishing retreat can last for seven days, seventeen days or one hundred days. In the beginning, the person who participates in this kind of ascetic retreat will gradually decrease the amount of food
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ascetic practices before.
2.7 Cares for the Sangha