Tricycle | Awake in the World

It has been said that without monasticism there is no Buddhism. When the first Sangha began to grow around the Buddha there was, of course, no distinctly “Buddhist” form of monastic practice. The history of the Buddhist monastic conventions begins with Shakyamuni’s modifications of the matrix provided by Indian monasticism. The changes he made in the models he received reflected his appreciation of his students’ needs of as well as the realities of his culture and society. This responsiveness to the imperative of time, place, and people is still the defining characteristic of the hard-to-pin-down tradition of Buddhist monasticism.