on the ground and not to eat after midday.  Pious laymen keep all these eight precepts, at least on Uposatha days, and often make a vow to observe them for some special period.  The nearer a layman can approximate to the life of a monk the better for his spiritual health, but still the aims and ideals, and consequently the methods, of the lay and religious life are different.  The Bhikkhu is not of this world, he has cut himself loose from its ties, pleasures and passions; he strives not for heaven but for arhatship.  But the layman, though he may profitably think of nirvana and final happiness, may also rightly aspire to be born in some temporary heaven.  The law merely bids him be a kind, temperate, prudent man of the world.  It is only when he speaks to the monks that the Buddha really speaks to his own and gives his own thoughts:  only for them are the high selfless aspirations, the austere counsels of perfection and the promises of bliss and something beyond bliss.  But the lay morality is excellent in its own sphere—­the good respectable life—­and its teaching is most earnest and natural in those departments where the hard unsentimental precepts of the higher code jar on western minds.  Whereas the monk severs all family ties and is fettered by no domestic affection, this is the field which the layman can cultivate with most profit.  It was against his judgment that the Buddha admitted women to his order and in bidding his monks beware of them he said many hard things.  But for women in the household life the Pitakas show an appreciation and respect which is illustrated by the position held by women in Buddhist countries from the devout and capable matron Visakha down to the women of Burma in the present day.  The Buddha even praised the ancients because they married for love and did not buy their wives[546].

The right life of a layman is described in several suttas[547] and in all of them, though almsgiving, religious conversation and hearing the law are commended, the main emphasis is on such social virtues as pleasant speech, kindness, temperance, consideration for others and affection.  The most complete of these discourses, the Sigalovada-sutta[548], relates how the Buddha when starting one morning to beg alms in Rajagaha saw the householder Sigala bowing down with clasped hands and saluting the four quarters, the nadir and the zenith.  The object of the ceremony was to avert any evil which might come from these six points.  The Buddha told him that this was not the right way to protect oneself:  a man should regard his parents as the east, his teachers as the south, his wife and children as the west, his friends as the north, his servants as the nadir and monks and Brahmans as the zenith.  By fulfilling his duty to these six classes a man protects himself from all evil which may come from the six points.  Then he expounded in order the mutual duties of (1) parents and children, (2) pupils and teachers, (3) husband and wife, (4) friends,