# THE BUDDHIST CAREER
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At the top of the hierarchy was the abbot, fang-chang 方丈. He was chosen in such a variety of ways that I shall only mention two. The first was called selecting the worthy, hsüan-hsien 選賢. It meant that at the end of the old abbot's three-year term (there was a limit of three terms) the head monks of the monastery and the elders of the neighbouring monasteries would consult with one another to decide who would make a worthy successor. It was not easy because someone had to be found who was qualified both as an administrator and as a teacher, and the trouble was that, even when found, he might be unwilling to serve. Very few monks wanted the responsibility of running a big monastery. What they wanted was hsiu-hsing, to practise religious exercises. So if they heard that they were about to be named abbot, they would silently depart by night. As a last resort those charged with finding a new abbot might get half a dozen candidates to draw lots in front of Buddha's image. This way Buddha himself made the selection and there was no escape for the reluctant.
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A simpler and far more widespread method than the "selection of the worthy" was for the abbot himself to decide which of his disciples should succeed him and then to train him for his future responsibilities. In some famous monasteries this would always be one of his dharma disciples fa-t'u 法徒, not a "tonsure disciple, t'i-tu ti-tzu 剃度弟子" and, of course, not a Refuges disciple, kuei-i ti-tzu 歸依弟子. A dharma disciple was a younger monk to whom, in theory, the master had handed on his understanding of the dharma in a direct “imprinting of mind on mind, hsin hsin hsiang yin 心心相印.” In testimony thereof the master gave him a dharma certificate fa-chüan 法券 which stated that he, the master of such-and-such a generation, had received the dharma from so-and-so of the previous generation, who received it from so-and-so of the generation before, all the way back through forty or fifty generations to patriarchs like Nagarjuna or Bodhidharma, the founders of the T'ien-t'ai and Zen sects. The dharma certificate was the highest document conferred in the monastic career. It established formally that a monk belonged to a given sect, though there was nothing to prevent him from...
* i.e., not a monk whose head he had shaved and whom he had trained before ordination,