IB World Religions 2.2.1. Rites of Passage Across the Branches: Initiation, Ordination and Funerals Notes

2.2.1. Rites of Passage Across the Branches: Initiation, Ordination and Funerals

Gaps in the ritual calendar

1. The gaps in the Buddhist ritual calendar are as revealing as the ceremonies. Buddhist rites of passage vary by branch, by doctrine, by local culture and by gender, so any general statement about them needs a country and a tradition attached.
2. What the rites have in common is their source. They are traced to the teachings of the Buddha and, for monastics above all, to the Vinaya, the monastic code that lays down how ordination is actually performed.
3. Theravada Buddhism has no birth ceremony and no marriage ceremony of its own, which surprises students who expect a religion to mark every threshold in a life.
4. Marriage in Theravada countries is treated as a social and legal arrangement. Monks are commonly invited to the house afterwards to chant a blessing, and they do not conduct the marriage itself.
5. Death, by contrast, is ritualised thoroughly, and so is entry into the monastic order. The pattern is not an accident of history.
6. A tradition ritualises what it takes to be religiously decisive. Birth and marriage are worldly business on this account, while death is the hinge on which kamma and rebirth turn, and ordination is the decision to leave worldly business behind.

Ordination in two steps

1. Ordination is the one initiation the canon itself legislates in detail. Entry to the order comes in two steps: pabbajja, the going forth, makes a person a samanera (novice), and upasampada makes a novice a full bhikkhu (Sanskrit bhikshu).
2. The physical acts are simple and old: the head and eyebrows are shaved, ordinary clothes are exchanged for robes, and the candidate receives an alms bowl.
3. The candidate recites the Three Refuges and undertakes the Ten Precepts as a novice, adding to the usual five such items as abstaining from eating after midday and from handling money.
4. Higher ordination is legislated closely by the Vinaya. A quorum of ordained monks must be present, the candidate is formally questioned, and the motion is put to the assembly three times without objection.
5. The minimum age for upasampada is twenty, and the newly ordained monk takes on the full monastic code, which runs to 227 rules for Theravada bhikkhus.
6. Access to ordination is not equal. Full ordination as a bhikkhuni (nun) requires an unbroken line of ordained nuns, and the Theravada line lapsed centuries ago in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.
7. Since the 1990s bhikkhuni ordination has been revived with the help of surviving Mahayana lines in Taiwan and Korea, and some Thai and Burmese authorities still decline to recognise it.

Temporary ordination

1. Temporary ordination turns the monastery into a place every family passes through. In Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia many boys and young men ordain for a fixed period rather than for life.
2. The stay may last a few weeks, or the three months of vassa (the rains retreat), and it has often been treated as a step towards adulthood and marriage.
3. The merit is understood to spread beyond the boy himself. In Myanmar and Thailand the parents, and the mother in particular, are said to receive a great share of the punna generated.
4. Disrobing carries no disgrace where the custom is strong. A man may ordain and return to lay life more than once across a lifetime.
5. The practice puts the monastic ideal within reach of ordinary families rather than reserving it for a permanent professional class.
6. East Asian Mahayana traditions generally do not work this way. Ordination there is normally a lifelong commitment, and initiation ceremonies of various kinds are offered to lay practitioners instead.
7. Tibetan communities historically sent sons into monasteries in large numbers, so that entry into Vajrayana monastic training was a common family event without being a temporary one.

Pirit chanting

1. Pirit (Pali paritta: protection) is the chanting of selected suttas by monks, and it brings the monastery into a house at moments of risk. It is among the most common Theravada rituals a layperson will ever request.
2. It is chanted at moments of exposure: illness, the blessing of a new house or business, the birth of a child, before a journey, and at anniversaries of a death.
3. The texts used are fixed. The Ratana Sutta, the Karaniya Metta Sutta and the Mangala Sutta are among the most frequently recited.
4. In Sri Lanka the ceremony has its own furniture. A thread is held by the chanting monks and passed to the householders, and a pot of water sits within the circle to be sprinkled afterwards.
5. Pirit sits awkwardly beside a doctrine of kamma, since it can look like a request for protection that kamma alone should determine.
6. The tradition answers in its own terms. The words are true words, and Buddhists appeal to saccakiriya, an act of truth, alongside the calm and confidence the chanting itself produces in those who hear it.
7. Pirit also fills the gap left by the missing rites. A Theravada family marks a birth or a new home with chanting rather than with a ceremony of passage.

Funerals across the branches

1. The funeral is where Buddhist doctrine has to do its hardest work. A Theravada funeral centres on monks invited to chant beside the body, and cremation is the usual practice, following the cremation of the Buddha himself.
2. The chanting states the doctrine plainly. Mourners hear anicca vata sankhara, impermanent indeed are conditioned things, and a monk commonly preaches a short sermon on impermanence rather than a eulogy.
3. Nothing in the rite petitions for a soul, since Buddhists hold that no permanent self departs. What the family does instead is make merit and give it away.
4. The transfer is enacted physically in Sri Lanka. Water is poured from one vessel into another until it overflows while the punna of the occasion is dedicated to the dead person.
5. Almsgiving to monks is repeated at set intervals afterwards, commonly on the seventh day, at three months and at each anniversary.
6. Mahayana funerals are generally more elaborate. Chinese and Japanese Buddhist rites run memorial services across forty-nine days and beyond, and Japanese practice gives the dead a kaimyo, a posthumous Buddhist name.
7. Vajrayana rites are the most elaborate of all. A lama may perform phowa to direct the consciousness at the moment of death, and the Bardo Thodol is read to guide the dead through the intermediate state.

Ritual and doctrine aligned

1. What each branch ritualises tracks what each branch believes. The variation across the branches follows the doctrine rather than running loose from it, which is why the rites repay close reading.
2. Theravada practice centres on a monastic order, and its ritual life accordingly centres on ordination and on the rites monks perform for laypeople.
3. Mahayana sangha is drawn to include the laity, and its rites give lay people initiations and long cycles of memorial service of their own.
4. Vajrayana teaching describes an intermediate state after death, and its funeral rites are correspondingly the most detailed, because the doctrine says there is a passage to be guided through.
5. Local culture supplies whatever doctrine leaves open. Many Japanese families hold a Shinto wedding and a Buddhist funeral, and Sri Lankan weddings are civil affairs followed by pirit.
6. Two doctrines set the outer limits everywhere. Anatta rules out a rite that rescues a soul, and kamma means the work a rite can do is done through the intentions and actions of those taking part.