pounding the scriptures and for sermons, if the monastery
has a preacher, but is set apart for the religious exercises of the
monks rather than the devotions of the laity. In very large
monasteries there is a fourth hall for meditation.

Monasteries are of various sizes and the number of monks is not
constant, for the peripatetic habit of early Buddhism is not extinct:
at one time many inmates may be absent on their travels, at
another there may be an influx of strangers. There are also wandering
monks who have ceased to belong to a particular monastery and spend
their time in travelling. A large monastery usually contains from
thirty to fifty monks, but a very large one may have as many as three
hundred. The majority are dedicated by their parents as children, but
some embrace the career from conviction in their maturity and these,
if few, are the more interesting. Children who are brought up to be
monks receive a religious education in the monastery, wear monastic
clothes and have their heads shaved. At the age of about seventeen
they are formally admitted as members of the order and undergo three
ceremonies of ordination, which in their origin represented stages of
the religious life, but are now performed by accumulation in the
course of a few days. One reason for this is that only monasteries
possessing a licence from the Government[872] are allowed to hold
ordinations and that consequently postulants have to go some distance
to be received as full brethren and are anxious to complete the
reception expeditiously. At the first ordination the candidates are
accepted as novices: at the second, which follows a day or two
afterwards and corresponds to the upasampada, they accept the robes
and bowl and promise obedience to the rules of the Pratimoksha. But
these ceremonies are of no importance compared with the third, called
Shou Pu-sa-chieh[873] or acceptance of the Bodhisattva precepts, that
is to say the fifty-eight precepts enunciated in the Fan-wang-ching.
The essential part of this ordination is the burning of the
candidate's head in from three to eighteen places. The operation
involves considerable pain and is performed by lighting pieces of
charcoal set in a paste which is spread over the shaven skull.

Although the Fan-wang-ching does not mention this burning of the head
as part of ordination, yet it emphatically enjoins the practice of
burning the body or limbs, affirming that those who neglect it are not
tru