[Buddha-l] Vinaya Texts trans/ed. by Oldenberg

[[DPD CDT] Shen Shi'an]

If laity cannot study the Vinaya, i wonder how they ever decide to be monastics! Committing to what they are uncertain of for life sounds like anti-Kalama spirit :-[

On Jan 21, 2010, at 11:22 PM, Weng-Fai Wong wrote:

> By the way, in Chinese Buddhism (not sure if this is the case in Tibetan
> Buddhism), lay people are NOT to read the Vinaya. I was told that the same
> is true in Theravada Buddhism - till the "red hair devils" came along.

I had an incident in my classroom about this at McGill about fifteen years ago. A Chinese nun was horrified that I had students reading sections of the vinaya. She said this would disqualify students from being ordained as monks or nuns later. I asked some Theravāda monks about this, and they said there is no such prohibition. One Theravāda monk told me that lay people are actually encouraged to study the vinaya. As far as I know, there is nothing in the vinaya itself about this. If there is a taboo against lay people being informed about the vinaya, it may be more a "house rule" than a rule coming down from the Buddha.

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes
rhayes at unm.edu







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