IB World Religions 2.2.5. Society and Ritual: Home, Temple and Pilgrimage Notes

2.2.5. Society and Ritual: Home, Temple and Pilgrimage

The home shrine

1. Buddhist ritual life is divided between two settings. Practice at home is individual or family sized, practice at the temple is collective, and most Buddhists move between the two rather than choosing one.
2. The household shrine is the base of the domestic side. It is usually a shelf or a small table holding a rupa (an image of the Buddha), with room for flowers, a lamp and incense in front of it.
3. Its placement follows rules of respect. The image sits above head height where people are seated, it is never put on the floor, and in South and Southeast Asia the feet are kept turned away from it.
4. What happens there is short and regular. Family members bow, light the lamp, recite the refuges and precepts and sit for a period of meditation, most often in the early morning or before sleeping.
5. Local form varies considerably. Japanese homes keep a butsudan, a cabinet holding the family's ancestral tablets alongside the image, and Tibetan altars are set with seven bowls of water refilled each morning.
6. The two settings meet at festivals. Buddhists perform puja at the home shrine and then go to the temple for the collective part of the day, so the same ritual acts are done twice in different company.

The temple and its buildings

1. A Theravada temple is a walled compound rather than a single building. The Sri Lankan term is vihara and the Thai term wat, and both name a complex where monks live and lay people come to practise.
2. A stupa stands at the centre of most compounds, called a dagoba in Sri Lanka, a chedi in Thailand and a pagoda in Myanmar. It is a solid dome built to hold a relic, and Buddhists walk clockwise around it rather than entering it.
3. The image hall houses the main rupa and is where lay people make offerings. Alongside it stands the ordination hall, marked out by buried boundary stones called sima that define where formal monastic acts are valid.
4. A descendant of the bodhi tree is planted in many compounds, grown from cuttings traced to the tree at Bodh Gaya. Lay Buddhists water it, tie flags to it and pour milk at its roots.
5. Mahayana temples are laid out differently. A Chinese temple opens through a hall of guardian figures into a main hall holding several Buddhas, with side halls for bodhisattvas and a separate hall for ancestral tablets.
6. A Tibetan gompa adds its own equipment. Prayer wheels are set in banks along the outer wall for pilgrims to turn as they circle the building, and printed flags carry mantras on the wind.

Monastery and laity

1. The relationship between monks and lay people is the tradition's basic social structure. Each side supplies what the other cannot provide for itself, and ritual is where the exchange is carried out.
2. The pindapata or alms round makes this visible daily. Monks walk a fixed route soon after dawn carrying bowls, lay people place cooked food in them, and the monks move on without stopping to talk.
3. The silence has a reason. Monks do not thank the giver, because Buddhists hold the giver is the one receiving the benefit, so a spoken thanks would misdescribe what has happened.
4. The Vinaya builds the dependence in deliberately. Monks may not grow, cook or store food and may not eat after noon, which keeps them in daily contact with the households around them.
5. Lay people receive teaching, chanting and merit in return. Dana (generosity) is held to generate punna (Sanskrit punya: merit) that bears on a future rebirth, so support for the monastery is treated as an investment rather than a donation.
6. The exchange is not identical everywhere. Chinese and Korean monasteries have long grown their own food and Japanese temple priests may marry and hold jobs, so the alms round is characteristic of Theravada practice rather than of Buddhism generally.

The four pilgrimage sites

1. Pilgrimage has textual authority behind it. The Mahaparinibbana Sutta has the dying Buddha name four places that a devoted follower should visit, and those four have anchored Buddhist pilgrimage ever since.
2. Lumbini in Nepal marks the birth. The site holds the Maya Devi temple and a pillar raised by the emperor Ashoka in the third century before the common era, whose inscription identifies the place.
3. Bodh Gaya in Bihar marks the enlightenment and is the most visited of the four. The Mahabodhi temple stands beside a bodhi tree descended from the one the Buddha sat under, and the complex became a World Heritage site in 2002.
4. Sarnath marks the first sermon, preached in the deer park at Isipatana. Kusinara, now Kushinagar, marks the parinibbana, and its main shrine holds a large reclining figure of the dying Buddha.
5. Later tradition extended the list to eight great sites. Rajgir, Sravasti, Sankasya and Vaishali were added for events during the teaching career, though the original four remain the core circuit.
6. Control of the sites has its own history. The Mahabodhi temple was under Hindu management for centuries, and the Sri Lankan reformer Anagarika Dharmapala campaigned from 1891 for its return to Buddhist hands, a dispute settled only by legislation in 1949.

Pilgrimage beyond India

1. Every Buddhist country developed sites of its own. Distance from India made local pilgrimage necessary, and relics or footprints supplied the connection to the Buddha that geography did not.
2. Sri Pada in Sri Lanka, also called Adam's Peak, is climbed overnight in the season running from December to May. Buddhists identify the mark at the summit as the Buddha's footprint, while Hindus, Muslims and Christians on the same path identify it differently.
3. Kandy draws pilgrims to a relic rather than a place of events. The Temple of the Tooth holds what Sri Lankan Buddhists hold to be the Buddha's tooth, and possession of it was historically tied to the right to rule the island.
4. Japan developed circuit pilgrimages. The Shikoku route links eighty eight temples across some twelve hundred kilometres, associated with Kukai, and its pilgrims are called henro and wear white with a staff and conical hat.
5. Tibetan pilgrimage centres on circumambulation. Pilgrims walk the Barkhor circuit around the Jokhang in Lhasa, and some circle Mount Kailash by measuring the route in full body prostrations.
6. Air travel changed the pattern. International pilgrims now reach Bodh Gaya in numbers from Thailand, Myanmar, Japan and the West, and Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana groups have each built temples around the site.

The temple as institution

1. The temple has usually been more than a ritual venue. In Sri Lanka, Thailand and Myanmar the local wat or vihara long served as the village school, meeting hall and dispensary as well as its shrine.
2. That role gave monks a public position. Village monks advised on disputes, kept records and taught literacy, so monastic authority reached well past the strictly religious sphere.
3. The arrangement is uneven across the tradition. Japanese temples became closely tied to household registration and funerary duty, which is why the phrase temple Buddhism is used there with a critical edge.
4. Urban life has reshaped attendance. City Buddhists in Bangkok or Colombo may visit a temple weekly or only at festivals, while keeping the home shrine as their steady practice.
5. Migration created a further type. Temples founded by Sri Lankan, Thai, Vietnamese and Tibetan communities in Britain, Australia and North America double as language schools and cultural centres for a second generation.
6. The division of ritual labour has held through all of it. Buddhists still meditate individually at home and gather at the temple for what needs a community, and the calendar keeps bringing the two together.