Community
who belongs, how you join, how it is organized
Three vehicles, three worlds.
Theravada in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, Mahayana across East Asia, Vajrayana through the Himalaya and Mongolia. They share a founder and diverge on almost everything downstream — and most Buddhists belong to whichever one arrived in their country.
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The fourfold sangha.
Monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen — the community the Buddha founded in four parts, each holding the others up: the robes teach, the laity feed.
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The unit is the temple.
Not a congregation with a service time. A monastery you visit, a village temple that handles the funerals, a city center with a Wednesday sit — you attend rather than belong, and nobody keeps a roll.
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Joining: refuge — or robes.
A layperson joins by taking the three refuges; a monastic by ordination. Both doors swing both ways in most of the tradition.
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Who pays for all of this.
Monastics cannot own, earn, or ask. Laypeople cannot practise full-time. Each supplies exactly what the other cannot get, and the whole two-and-a-half-thousand-year institution runs on that arrangement with nothing enforcing it.
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No pope, many lineages.
Authority is carried by ordination lineages and teachers, not a central see; councils settle what they can, geography does the rest.
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The nuns' lineage question.
Full ordination for women requires nuns who are already fully ordained. In Theravada countries that line died out around the eleventh century, and whether it can be restarted using surviving Chinese lineages is the tradition's longest-running procedural fight.
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Teacher to student, and the cost of that.
Authority here is a person who was authorised by a person, back through named names. It transmits what texts cannot — and it concentrates enormous power in individuals, which the last fifty years have made painfully clear.
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The councils.
Assemblies convened to recite the teaching aloud together and settle disputes about what it says — the first within a year of the death, the most recent in 1954. None of them bound anyone who stayed home, which is why there are schools rather than heresies.
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Two Buddhisms in the same city.
A Vietnamese temple and a mindfulness center may sit two streets apart and share almost nothing: different languages, different practices, different reasons for attending. They mostly do not meet.
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