As indicated elsewhere, the essential part of the Buddhist Church is the monkhood and it is often hard to say if a Chinese layman is a Buddhist or not.  It will therefore be best to describe briefly the organization and life of a monastery, then the services performed there and to some extent attended by the laity, and thirdly the rites performed by monks on behalf of the laity, especially funeral ceremonies.

The Chinese Tripitaka contains no less than five recensions of the Vinaya, and the later pilgrims who visited India made it their special object to obtain copies of the most correct and approved code.  But though the theoretical value of these codes is still admitted, they have for practical purposes been supplemented by other manuals of which the best known are the Fan-wang-ching or Net of Brahma[856] and the Pai-chang-ts’ung-lin-ch’ing-kuei or Rules of Purity of the Monasteries of Pai Chang.

The former is said to have been translated in A.D. 406 by Kumarajiva and to be one chapter of a larger Sanskrit work.  Some passages of it, particularly the condemnation of legislation which forbids or imposes conditions on the practice of Buddhism,[857] read as if they had been composed in China rather than India, and its whole attitude towards the Hinayanist Vinaya as something inadequate and superseded, can hardly have been usual in India or China even in the time of I-Ching (700 A.D.).  Nothing is known of the Indian original, but it certainly was not the Brahmajalasutta of the Pali Canon.[858] Though the translation is ascribed to so early a date, there is no evidence that the work carried weight as an authority before the eighth century.  Students of the Vinaya, like I-Ching, ignore it.  But when the scholarly endeavour to discover the most authentic edition of the Vinaya began to flag, this manual superseded the older treatises.  Whatever external evidence there may be for attributing it to Kumarajiva, its contents suggest a much later date and there is no guarantee that a popular manual may not have received additions.  The rules are not numbered consecutively but as 1-10 and 1-48, and it may be that the first class is older than the second.  In many respects it expounds a late and even degenerate form of Buddhism for it contemplates not only a temple ritual (including the veneration of images and sacred books), but also burning the head or limbs as a religious practice.  But it makes no allusion to salvation through faith in Amitabha and says little about services to be celebrated for the dead.[859]

Its ethical and disciplinary point of view is dogmatically Mahayanist and similar to that of the Bodhicaryavatara.  The Hinayana is several times denounced[860] and called heretical, but, setting aside a little intolerance and superstition, the teaching of this manual is truly admirable and breathes a spirit of active charity—­a desire not only to do no harm but to help and rescue.