Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c24.s8.7

c24.s8.7

One must not, of course, exaggerate the laxity of the system; in many regards the monastic ideal of the Mahāyāna was strict, stricter than the Hīnayāna in its insistence on refraining from the use of meat, and the permission given to the Bodhisattva to sin in the cause of compassion¹ than an invitation to violate the moral law. But the risk of laxity was present, and the danger was made essentially real by the relaxation of the monastic system under whose aegis the Hīnayāna had developed the teaching of the Buddha. The old difficulty regarding the possibility of the layman becoming an Arhant has totally disappeared; the married man is peculiarly suited for the task of a Bodhisattva, for Çākyamuni lived in the world and is his prototype; only he who has a wife is capable of the supreme act of generosity recorded of saints, the gift of wife and children to others, and only a wife can take the typical vow of marital faith, to live with her husband from existence to existence.² In lieu, then, of the rigours of monasticism as the sole path to salvation, we find the attainment of Buddhahood available to the man in family life; religion penetrates into the family life; each family of believers is one of Buddhas to be, with its relics and images, a domestic ritual, and rules laid down by sages for the conduct of domestic life.³