46
HOLMES WELCH
getting certificates in several sects. Only the more serious monks had dharma certificates,
The difficulty of finding people willing to serve meant that many an abbot had to go on serving for decades. He had corresponding difficulties in finding officers to work under him. He appointed all the department heads himself, while they might appoint the personnel of their respective departments. But everyone was at liberty to refuse to serve, and many did. They too wanted to devote themselves to religious exercises and not to be bothered with the work of the monastery. So, when the abbot asked someone to be head of a department, he would do so with a deep bow, to show that he was making a plea and not giving a command. I have often heard it said that the right spirit, the true monastic spirit, was to serve when and where needed, because if competent people refused to do so, the monastery would fall apart. I know of a monk, for instance, who was the abbot of one well-known institution and then went elsewhere as a mere tang-chia, or Manager. I have heard of another who was the shou-tsoo Senior Instructor in a big monastery—a most exalted position—and then became its cook. This happened because the monk who had been supervising the kitchen had no talent for it, and the Senior Instructor was the only person competent to bring about a real improvement.
In the course of the years, while a monk was ascending the monastery hierarchy, he probably acquired a small temple, either from his own master or from a fellow disciple. Whereas a big public monastery could not, according to the rules, be handed on to the tonsure disciple of the retiring abbot, the head of a small temple, who usually owned it personally, almost always handed it on to one of his "tonsure disciples," who might by that time be an officer of a big monastery. Thus many monks led two careers in parallel, one in a small temple and one in a big monastery. There were thousands of small temples in China—about 270,000 according to a survey made in 1930. Each had a few monks, sometimes two or three, sometimes as many as ten. Their life was very relaxed. There was no organised meditation, no morning and evening chanting of scriptures.*
The monks who lived there could come and go as they pleased
* Except on the first and the fifteenth of the lunar month and throughout the last lunar month.