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Thus, the written rules for community living are considered perfect and valid for all times and places. However, in common with all traditions which rely on the written word as the sole authority, difficulties in interpretation arise as soon as conditions and environmental customs change. The built-in weakness of written rules is that they can never hope to provide solutions to all situations and yet they have to claim perfection in order to boost their authority. With changed conditions and times, many Buddhists have asked themselves: Should the letter of the law be kept or should the spirit of the founder be preserved when the letter is no longer seen as embodying the spirit? If the spirit is considered the more important thing, how does one know that one has the founder's spirit? Would knowledge gained aside from the rules be mere guessing? These tensions have plagued the sangha throughout its 2,500 years' of history. There are situations where the rules are verbally recited and yet only certain ones are kept, while the others are tacitly ignored. Such has been the practice of the sangha in China. The monks verbally received 250 precepts at their ordination ever since the introduction of Buddhism into China and yet many of these precepts were never kept. The inherent difficulty in adapting the written law to suit the situation of a different time and place so that the true Buddha spirit may be readily lived is the lack of a central Buddhist authority which is strong enough to effect such a change. The result is a schizophrenic verbal adherence to the law with constant deviation in practice. Conscientious monks realize the unsatisfactoriness of such a situation but there is little they could do to alter the situation. Recent discussions of the re-organization of the sangha fall readily into this familiar pattern.
The biggest recent discussion of the re-organization of the sangha was initiated by an agenda of proposals to be discussed at the conference of Chinese monks in 1977. The agenda was presented in the context of an open letter which called for responses to matters concerning the sangha system, dress, ranking of monks, education etc. The initial reaction was collected in volume 209 of the magazine Buddhism in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the media got hold of the report and rightly or wrongly, made a sensational report that monks were contemplating marriage. The scandal, real or imaginary, killed any further
30
Thus, the written rules for community living are considered perfect and valid for all times and places. However, in common with all traditions which rely on the written word as the sole authority, difficulties in interpretation arise as soon as conditions and environmental customs change. The built-in weakness of written rules is that they can never hope to provide solutions to all situations and yet they have to claim perfection in order to boost their authority. With changed conditions and times, many Buddhists have asked themselves: Should the letter of the law be kept or should the spirit of the founder be preserved when the letter is no longer seen as embodying the spirit? If the spirit is considered the more important thing, how does one know that one has the founder's spirit? Would knowledge gained aside from the rules be mere guessing? These tensions have plagued the sangha throughout its 2,500 years' of history. There are situations where the rules are verbally recited and yet only certain ones are kept, while the others are tacitly ignored. Such has been the practice of the sangha in China. The monks verbally received 250 precepts at their ordination ever since the introduction of Buddhism into China and yet many of these precepts were never kept. The inherent difficulty in adapting the written law to suit the situation of a different time and place so that the true Buddha spirit may be readily lived is the lack of a central Buddhist authority which is strong enough to effect such a change. The result is a schizophrenic verbal adherence to the law with constant deviation in practice. Conscientious monks realize the unsatisfac- toriness of such a situation but there is little they could do to alter the situation. Recent discussions of the re-organization of the sangha fall readily into this familiar pattern.
The biggest recent discussion of the re-organization of the sangha was initiated by an agenda of proposals to be discussed at the conference of Chinese monks in 1977. The agenda was presented in the context of an open letter which called for responses to matters concerning the sangha system, dress, ranking of monks, education etc. The initial reaction was collected in volume 209 of the magazine Buddhism in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the media got hold of the report and rightly or wrongly, made a sensational report that monks were contemplating marriage. The scandal, real or imaginary, killed any further
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