How does monastic practice in Buddhism and Christianity compare? What is similar, and what is different?
What will be an ideal response?
A. Similarities between Buddhist and Christian monastic practice
1. religious vocations grew and helped spread the faiths
2. monastic libraries werediversified into secular learning, imaginativeliterature, and administrative and historical records of life beyond the monastery walls
3. centers of lay life
a. hosting reading clubs for believers
4. had a variety of functions
a. especially in transmitting learning
b. functioned as objects of pilgrimage
c. inns for travelers
d. granaries to store food against hard times
B. Differences between Buddhist and Christian monastic practices
1. Christian monastic practices
a. Church became the great upholder of Roman standards of learning, art, and government
b. monastic movement helped hermits and ascetics
1. concentrated them in houses of work, study, and prayer to benefit society
c. no scholarly consensus on the origins of monasticism
1. possibly from the Buddhists
2. arose independently in various cultures as hermits and holy men banded together for mutual support
3. earliest recorded Christian monastic communities emerged in Egypt in the second century
d. Benedict of Nursia responsible for establishing most of the rules
1. book of rules for monks borrowed freely from others
2. principles are the quest for salvation in common and the subordination of all individual willfulness
3. banned extremes of mortification in favor of steady spiritual progress, manual labor, study, and prayer in private and in common
e. monastic study embraced the learning of ancient Greece and Rome
f. became centers for colonizing wasteland and wilderness
2. Buddhist monastic practices
a. Monasticism was even more important in Buddhism than in Christianity
b. Buddhist clergy were subject to monastic discipline
c. importance of scholarship in Buddhist monasteries
1. retrieving, translating, editing, and purifying the best written evidence of the Buddha's teachings
2. turned the monks responsible for it into giants and heroes of learning
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