CHINESE RELIGION AND RURAL COHESION
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and even aided relatives who had previously mocked them for their religious devotions.
There was one other important social advantage of the monastic life. Buddhism entered its formally recruited members into a pseudo-kinship system which linked members in bonds of mutual obligation; it could connect members of the monastic order over a wide area, and connect them also to lay-members who might become formally recruited members although they did not, of course, take all the vows of the cleric. In this system members are grouped according to their relationship to a master (shih-fu) through whom they join the religion (kuei-i: “take refuge"). He is regarded as their spiritual "father" and groups created round him trace descent in written genealogies to "ancestor" masters. Bonds between members are expressed in kinship terms: a master's fellow disciples are "paternal uncles"; disciples of "uncles" are, following Chinese kinship terminology, "brothers", and so on, with women having the same terms of address as men. The system also makes use of generation names as in the actual kinship system and such names are used to distinguish generations of disciples from one another.
Lay and cleric members of such pseudo-kinship groups might live in different kinds of establishments connected by such relationships. A majority of members of the monastic order lived in monasteries and nunneries consisting of "families" of disciples with their master, and known as "sons and grandsons monasteries and nunneries" (tsu-sun ts'ung-lin). Sometimes a few lay disciples lived with them. Numbers of such establishments might then be tied together, each housing a "branch" of a "kin-group". There might be a further tie with another kind of monastery where ordinations took place (shih-fang ts'ung-lin). This kind of monastery was not itself organized by "kinship" principles, but some members of a "sons and grandsons" establishment might stay on after ordination and eventually take administrative office there, and a tie of mutual help might be created between the two monasteries. There might also be ties between "sons and grandsons" establishments and numbers of vegetarian halls (chai-t'ang) which were institutions available for permanent or occasional residence by laymen, or more usually women. Members of the vegetarian halls might have "kinship" connexions with members of such monastic establishments.