Renouncers and householders

The rules that were especially applicable to the householder (gahattha) were broken by the samana or the paribbajaka. The samanas or paribbajakas renounced their homes, cutting off all ties with their kinsmen, and lived by collecting alms from the people. Therefore, the gahattha and paribbajakas are entirely different. The samanas had faith in a complete division between the social and asocial worlds and so they advocated lifelong renunciation. The Mahavagga strikingly demonstrates the opposition between the social and asocial world, where the Buddha appears in the image of a destroyer and wrecker of homes in the eyes of the Magadhan people.^[1] This opposition forms a constant and unifying theme of the Buddhist texts in general, and of the Pati-mokkha rules of the Vinaya-Pitaka in particular. The patimokkha was a list of 227 rules of conduct to be observed by the bhikkhu. A section of the Patimokkha called the sekhiya Dhamma^[2] consists of 75 rules of etiquette which were to be observed by bhikkhus, and almost all deal with the bhikkhus’ interaction with the laity. The opposition between the bhikkhu and the gihi is repeatedly stated in this section of the rules and interestingly, the laity themselves expected the separation to be maintained.