Question about ordination and monastery matters

Hello! I guess this is more of a question for our local bhikkhus/bhikkunis, but I’ve been wondering-

A while back on an accesstoinsight article on vinaya (not thanissaros BMC, an older generalized list I think of basic rules regarding monastic life.) I noticed interestingly in the article it listed that if there was no monastery in the land, the bhikku could lodge with lay people (provided they were suitable in ethics. )

I was curious as to where the basis for this would be in the vinaya?? Furthermore, I know the vinaya has a way of dealing with people attempting their way into a monastery without proper ordination…but does the vinaya have anything in regards to what to do if there is no more viharas or preceptors around to ordain?

I guess on that point a further thought experiment;

Lets say there’s some sort of apocalypse, and for whatever reason most if not all viharas and preceptors are gone. Texts still exist in the way they exist now. What would the vinaya say on dealing with this? Would there even be anything to be done? If they could start again, how would the new vihara look?

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Eventually Buddhism would die out. One of the eventual points of it dying out is that the Sangha would no longer wear full robes, but only reduced to a ribbon or something like that as marking them as monks.

If all the monks in the world of all traditions die out at the same time, then no more new sangha members then. At most some people may still become 8 preceptors on their own and try to live like the monks.

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I don’t remember the exact rules, but there are situations where it is allowable to do things slightly differently in certain situation. For example, if there are less than…5 (?) bhikkhus, then the patimokkha doesn’t need to be recited. There are also rules for what conditions need to be present for a monk to stay in a layperson’s house and it not be an offense. So monks (and presumable nuns) are allowed to stay in the homes of lay people, but only under certain conditions. This is what Western monks and nuns who live in Asia do when they go home to visit their family, for example.

There are a lot of rules about how ordination is done and what conditions need to exist to make an ordination valid. If there aren’t any bhikkuhs or bhikkhunis, then it’s impossible to make any more bhikkhus or bhikkhunis. There are also many rules and regulations about how a monastery is established, and what even constitutes a monastery. This is all spoken of at length in the Vinaya, but I forget which section it’s in.

3 nights with lay male. Not even lying down for a moment together with any female under the same roof.

One way I recently asked is to set up a tent in the backyard or front yard, so it’s not in the same roof. Or the family build a special small kuti there just for those occations. If the kuti remains the property of the lay person, there’s no vinaya complications with the sangadisesa rules on monk’s owning personal kuti.

Most likely you mean sima hall instead of monastery. It’s in the Kandhakas. Or Buddhist monastic code book 2 by A. Thanissaro.

Thank you, venerable!

Isn’t the sima boundary required to exist for the holding of certain monastic events? I thought it was quite important.

Yes, it is important. However, not all monasteries have sima hall, the sima boundaries can be so big as to cover multiple nearby monasteries. So that’s one distinction between sima boundaries and monasteries. However, it’s the custom nowadays that most sima boundaries are not that big (at least in malaysia).

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