Buddhist Practices and Holy Days

What is at the center of Buddhist practice?

At the center of Buddhist practice are taking refuge and keeping the precepts, the basic rules of conduct. A person becomes a lay follower by going for refuge to the Buddha, his teaching, and the monastic community.¹ In the Pali discourses, a new follower says: I go for refuge to the Buddha, to the teaching, and to the mendicant Saṅgha. (DN 2)² The Sangha is the monastic order of monks and nuns.³

The five precepts are to abstain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and intoxicants. The scholar Daniel Getz writes that they bind all lay Buddhists and are sometimes taken with the refuges in a formal ceremony. He counts ethics as one of three trainings, with concentration and wisdom.³

Much lay practice is merit-making, doing good deeds that bring good results in this life or the next. The scholar George Tanabe writes that the vast majority of Buddhist communities hold that good actions help bring salvation; Jodo Shinshu, the True Pure Land school of Japan, rejects the saving power of such acts. The head temple of its Hongwanji-ha branch teaches instead that followers entrust themselves to the compassion of Amida Buddha and recite his name in gratitude.⁴⁵

How do Buddhists meditate?

Each branch gives meditation its own form. In the Pali discourses of Theravada Buddhism, two qualities play a part in realization: serenity, a calm and settled mind, and discernment, or insight.² The discourse on mindfulness meditation teaches observing the body, feelings, the mind, and the principles of the teaching: Mendicants, the four kinds of mindfulness meditation are the path to convergence. (MN 10)² In Theravada countries, meditation and retreat centers for laypeople have spread since the 1950s.⁶

In Japanese Soto Zen, the central practice is zazen, seated meditation. The Soto school's constitution, quoted by its research center, defines its teaching as realizing shikantaza, or just sitting, together with the teaching that the mind itself is Buddha.⁷ Chan and Zen teachers also use the koan, a puzzling question or story, and intensive meditation to bring about a direct seeing of one's own Buddha-nature.⁸

In tantric Buddhism, the basic meditation ritual is the sadhana, in which the meditator visualizes a buddha or deity, before him or as himself, and recites its mantra.⁹ The Dalai Lama, a teacher of the Gelug school, says he does six different deity yoga practices every day, and in a 2019 teaching he urged listeners to study, reflect, and meditate.¹⁰¹¹¹²

How do Buddhists show devotion?

Buddhist devotion includes offerings, chanting, and pilgrimage.¹¹³ In Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, lay Buddhists visit the temple on holy days, recite praises of the Buddha, the refuges, and the precepts, and make offerings to a Buddha image, a bodhi tree, or a stupa, a monument that holds relics.¹⁴¹

In East Asia, chanting the name of Amitabha Buddha is among the most popular devotions. Japanese Pure Land Buddhists chant Namu Amida Butsu, homage to Amitabha Buddha, in hope of rebirth in his Pure Land; the practice is called nianfo in China and yombul in Korea. In Jodo Shinshu, Tanabe writes, followers chant it as thanks for a salvation already given, not as a means to earn it.¹³ Nichiren Buddhists chant the title of the Lotus Sutra, and in Tibetan Buddhism the mantra Om mani padme hum calls on Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.¹³

Pilgrimage goes back to the early texts. In the Pali account of his last days, the Buddha names four places to visit, where he was born, awoke, first taught, and died: These are the four inspiring places that a faithful gentleman should go to see. (DN 16)²

What is monastic life like?

Monks and nuns leave household life to follow a detailed code of discipline, the Vinaya. Novices take ten precepts. They keep the five, with full celibacy, and add a ban on eating after midday, on entertainment, on jewelry and perfume, on luxurious beds, and on handling gold and silver.³ Full ordination, open from the age of twenty (counted from conception), binds a monk or nun to the full code.¹⁵

The number of rules differs by branch, because each follows a different school's Vinaya, as Getz and the scholar John McRae report:

Tradition	Vinaya followed	Rules for monks	Rules for nuns
Theravada	Pali Vinaya	227	311
East Asian	Dharmaguptaka Vinaya	250	348
Tibetan	Mulasarvastivada Vinaya	258	354

These are the rules in each code; which branches keep an order of fully ordained nuns is described below. In most Japanese schools, McRae adds, bodhisattva vows have replaced the rules.³¹⁵ Twice a month, on the moon days called uposatha, monks and nuns in each community gather to recite the rules and confess any breaches. Each year they also keep a three-month rains retreat, a season of stricter practice with limits on travel.¹⁴³

Women's ordination differs by branch. Getz wrote in 2004 that only East Asian Buddhism still preserved a tradition of fully ordained nuns.³ Bhikkhu Bodhi, a Theravada monk who supports a revival, dates the last evidence of the old Theravada order of nuns to eleventh-century Sri Lanka. After a revival began in India in 1996, he reported that, by the time he wrote, over 500 women had been ordained in Sri Lanka, though without official recognition, and that senior monks in Thailand and Myanmar opposed it.¹⁶¹⁷ In 2016, 20 Tibetan nuns became the first of Himalayan origin to earn the geshema degree, once awarded only to monks.¹⁸

Do Buddhists follow food rules?

Food rules differ by branch, especially on meat. The scholar James Benn writes that the monastic code tells monks and nuns to eat only what is given and no solid food after noon. In southern Asia and Tibet, monks may eat meat given to them unless the animal was killed for them.¹⁹

Some Mahayana sutras speak strongly against eating meat, and with the precepts of the Brahma's Net Sutra they shaped monastic diet in China and Korea, where monks and nuns are strictly vegetarian. In Japan, Benn writes, monks are seldom vegetarian, though a Buddhist vegetarian cuisine survives.¹⁹

How do monks and laypeople support each other?

Laypeople give monks and nuns food, clothing, and shelter, and in return hear the teaching from them. Their rules bar monks and nuns from personal wealth, so they depend on lay support, and they serve as a field of merit in which giving bears fruit.¹ The Pali discourse to Sigala describes the exchange: a householder serves ascetics and brahmins, or priests, with kindness and material needs, and they in return keep him from doing bad, teach him, and explain the path to heaven. (DN 31)²

In Theravada countries, giving food to monks each day is common.¹ On holy days some lay Buddhists take eight precepts instead of five, which add no food after noon and no entertainment or luxury, and give up sex for the day.¹⁴² These eight-precept holders wear white and spend the day at the temple listening to sermons, chanting, and meditating.¹⁴

Many men in these countries also spend time as monks. Helen Hardacre wrote in 2004 that nearly all Burmese men and about half the men in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia had spent at least one rains retreat as monks.¹ In East Asia, the bond often centers on the dead: families make gifts to monks and nuns, who transfer the merit to the family's ancestors.¹

What are the rites of passage?

Buddhist rites of passage include entering the monastic order, for life or for a short stay, and the rites that care for the dead.¹⁵⁴ In Southeast Asia, a boy may become a novice as young as seven, and stays of a few weeks or months are common.¹⁵

Rites for the dead aim to help them toward a good rebirth. Families transfer merit to the dead, often through rituals in which monks, nuns, or priests act on their behalf.⁴ In Theravada countries, laypeople give to the monks at cremations and on death anniversaries.¹¹⁴ In Japan, during the Edo period (1600 to 1868), every family had to belong to a temple, whose priests performed its funerals and ancestral rites; many of those ties remain today.¹

Tibetan and East Asian Buddhists teach that between death and rebirth comes an intermediate state, in Tibet called the bardo. In the standard account, from the Indian scholar Vasubandhu, it lasts up to forty-nine days, and funeral rites in Tibet and East Asia are ideally timed to match it.²⁰²¹ In communities that use the Bardo Thodol, known in English as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a lama or lay ritual specialist recites its instructions to guide the dying and the dead.²²

Tradition credits the text to the Indian master Padmasambhava, who is held to have hidden it as a treasure for later discovery. Bryan Cuevas, who has written its history, dates its revelation by Karma Lingpa to the fourteenth century and traces its ideas to late Indian tantra, to Tibetan Buddhist and non-Buddhist teachings that took shape from about the eleventh century, and above all to the Great Perfection, a system promoted especially by the Nyingma and by the non-Buddhist Bon order. It drew followers first from the Nyingma and Kagyu orders and later spread across Tibet and beyond.²²

What are the main holy days?

The United Nations calls Vesak the most sacred day to millions of Buddhists.²³ In Theravada countries it marks the Buddha's birth, awakening, and death on a single full-moon day, as the scholar Jonathan Walters explains.¹⁴ In 1999 the United Nations General Assembly recognized the Day of Vesak internationally.²³

Holy day	Who keeps it	What it marks
Vesak	Theravada, on the full moon of April or May	The Buddha's birth, awakening, and death14
Beginning and end of the rains retreat	Theravada	The monks' retreat season; at its end, laypeople give new robes in a ceremony called kathina14
Poson	Sri Lanka	The tradition that the monk Mahinda brought Buddhism to the island14
Buddha's birthday	East Asia; in modern times April 8, which in Japan overlaps the flower festival Hanamatsuri	The birth, with the bathing of an image of the infant Buddha14
Days of awakening and of passing (jodo-e and nehan-e in Japanese)	East Asia; December 8, and February or March 15	The awakening and the death14
Ghost Festival, or Obon in Japan	East Asia	Care for ancestors, from the story of a disciple who helped his mother14
Saga Dawa Duchen	Tibetan Buddhists, on the fifteenth day of the fourth Tibetan month	The Buddha's birth, awakening, and death24

How are the dates of holy days set?

Many Buddhist holy days follow lunar calendars, so their dates move against the solar year. In Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, the ancient Indian lunar calendar sets the uposatha days by the four phases of the moon, with the full moon most important. Years there are also counted in a Buddhist Era, from the Buddha's final passing, which the Theravada reckoning places in 544 or 543 BCE.¹⁴²⁵

Tibetan Buddhists follow their own lunar calendar, so Saga Dawa Duchen usually falls on a different day from Vesak in other traditions. This page gives no future dates.²⁴ The Branches page explains the traditions, and the book Christianity vs Buddhism sets Buddhist practice beside Christian worship.