6.10 — The Sangha: Running a Community

He founded an organisation and it is still running twenty-five centuries later, which makes it one of the oldest continuously existing institutions on earth. How it was designed is worth a chapter on its own.

What it was

The sangha is the community of those who have gone forth — monks, and later nuns (6.11) — living without property, on donated food, wandering for most of the year and settling in one place during the monsoon.

And the lay community around it, which was much larger and which supported it.

The relationship between the two is the design's key feature and it is usually skipped. Monks own nothing and cannot cook, farm or handle money. They must beg daily. Which means the community is structurally dependent on the good opinion of ordinary people, every single day, for food.

A monastic order that could feed itself could ignore the population. This one could not eat if the villagers stopped giving.

That is a governance mechanism, and it is a very good one. The accountability is daily, distributed, and impossible to capture.

No caste

The most radical thing about it, and it was recognised as radical at the time.

Anybody could join. Brahmins, warriors, merchants, labourers, and people below all of those. The barber Upali was ordained before a group of Shakya nobles who came at the same time, and therefore ranked senior to them for the rest of their lives, because seniority in the sangha is by date of ordination and nothing else.

The nobles had to bow to the barber.

The Buddha's own image for it: as the great rivers — the Ganga, the Yamuna, and the rest — on reaching the sea lose their former names and are known simply as the sea, so those of the four castes, on going forth, lose their former identities.

This was an attack on the organising principle of the society, made without any political programme attached, and it is one of the two or three reasons Buddhism spread as it did.

The rules

The vinaya, the monastic code, is enormous — over two hundred rules for monks — and the way it was built is the interesting part.

No rule was made in advance.

Every single one was made in response to a specific incident, and the text records the incident before the rule. Somebody did something, it caused a problem, it was brought to him, and a rule was made covering that case. The texts read like case law, and they are frequently comic — monks behaving badly in extremely specific ways, and a rule arriving afterwards.

Three consequences of building it this way.

Every rule has a reason attached and the reason is recorded. Nobody has to guess what a rule is for. This is the single best feature of the whole system, and almost no institution manages it.

The rules are proportionate, because they were written against real problems rather than imagined ones.

And it produces an enormous, specific, occasionally absurd code, because a rule for every incident is a lot of rules.

The four that cannot be forgiven

Most offences have a remedy — confession, a period of probation, restitution. Four do not, and a monk who commits one is permanently expelled.

Sexual intercourse. Theft. Killing a human being. And falsely claiming spiritual attainment.

The fourth one is the interesting one and it belongs in the same category as the other three for a reason worth understanding.

Claiming an attainment you do not have is placed alongside killing because the whole enterprise runs on the reliability of reports about inner states. If teachers lie about what they have attained, there is no way to check, and the entire tradition becomes unfalsifiable.

The Buddha was protecting the one thing that keeps this kind of tradition honest, and the modern history of spiritual movements is very largely the history of that rule being broken.

How decisions were made

Not by him, which is the surprising part.

Business was conducted by the assembly of monks in a given place, by formal procedure. A motion was put, announced up to three times, and if there was no objection it passed. Objections had to be dealt with. There were procedures for adjudicating disputes, for handling a monk who refused to accept a decision, and for a committee to be appointed when the whole assembly could not resolve something.

This is recognisably parliamentary procedure, in the fifth century BCE, and it is very likely modelled on the assemblies of the clan republics he grew up in (6.1) — which were being destroyed by the kingdoms at exactly that time. He preserved the form of a dying political system inside a religious order, and the form outlived every one of the republics.

And on his deathbed, asked who would lead, he refused to appoint anyone. He said the teaching and the discipline would be the teacher after he was gone (6.13). No successor, no head, no authority above the assembly and the code.

Devadatta

And then the schism, which is the most human episode in the whole of Buddhist history.

Devadatta was the Buddha's cousin, an accomplished monk, and — by the texts' own account — genuinely capable, with real attainments in meditation.

He wanted to lead the sangha. He asked the Buddha, who was getting old, to hand it over. The refusal is recorded and it is blunt: I would not hand over the community even to Sariputta and Moggallana — the two chief disciples — so how much less to you.

Devadatta's response was a campaign. He allied with a prince, Ajatashatru, who was scheming against his own father. There were attempts on the Buddha's life — an ambush, a rock rolled down a hill which injured his foot, and a maddened elephant released into a street he was walking down.

And then the clever move. He proposed five rules to make the discipline stricter: monks should live only in the forest, only beg for food, only wear rags, never accept an invitation to a meal, and never eat meat.

The Buddha refused to make them compulsory, saying that monks could follow them if they wished but that they would not be required.

And Devadatta took a group of monks and left, on the grounds that the Buddha had gone soft.

Why this episode is worth having

Because the attack came from the strict side, not the lax side, and that is almost always where it comes from.

Devadatta's five rules are not wrong. They are all recognised ascetic practices, all voluntarily available, and all praised. His move was to make them compulsory, and to define himself by them.

And it works, because austerity is an unanswerable argument. You cannot argue against someone who says the standard should be higher without appearing to argue for laziness. This is the most effective takeover technique there is and it appears in every institution that has ever existed: political parties, religious communities, workplaces, families and online. The person who wants power in a group with values takes over by demanding more of the values.

The Buddha's answer is the only one that works and it is worth memorising: the practices are permitted and they are not required. He does not argue that the stricter path is bad. He refuses to make it the standard, and by doing so he removes the leverage.

Because the demand was never about the rules. It was about who decides, and the moment the rules become compulsory, the person who proposed them is in charge.

The monks Devadatta took were brought back by Sariputta and Moggallana, who went and taught them, and they returned.

What made it last

Assemble the design features, because together they explain the twenty-five centuries.

Daily dependence on ordinary people, which makes capture impossible.

No hereditary or caste-based entry, which means the talent pool is everybody.

Rules with their reasons recorded, which means they can be examined and applied intelligently.

Decisions by assembly procedure, not by a leader.

No successor, which prevents the succession crises that destroy most founded movements.

And a formal mechanism for the one thing that would make it unfalsifiable — the rule against claiming attainments you do not have.

Very little of this is about doctrine. It is institutional design, and it is unusually good.

What to carry from this page

When a rule is made, record why. Almost no organisation does this, and the result is rules nobody can evaluate because nobody knows what they were for.

Watch for the takeover from the strict side. The person demanding higher standards may be right about the standards and after the position. The defence is: permitted, not required.

Build accountability that is daily, distributed and cannot be captured. Everything else is theatre.

And notice what he did about a successor. He refused to name one, and pointed at the teaching and the code instead, which is the only known way to stop an institution becoming a person.

Next: 6.11 — four cases where the teaching met a real human being: a mass murderer, a mother carrying a dead child, a cousin who tried to kill him, and the woman who raised him.