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PAVARANA PUJA
Pavāraṇā pūjā – Pavarana day – is a buddhist ‘festival’ held after a 3-month retreat engaged in each year by buddhist monks and nuns. That period is one in which monastic rules prohibit travel except in limited circumstances, and so monks and nuns are confined to a particular monastery as a residence.
The period coincides with the rainy season in tropical Asia, and is known as the rains-residence or rains-retreat. The time a monk or nun has been a monk or nun is measured by the number of rains-residences they have had. The Pāli word for a year, that is also the word for a rainy season, is vassa.
The day of the festival is a full-moon day, months being measured from full moon to full moon in ancient (and some modern) Indian calendars.
A full-moon day is one of a number of days marking the passing of the moon, called uposatha days, which buddhists observe through special ethical and mindful practices. For monks the uposatha days are occasions for collective reciting of the monks’ code of conduct (the Pātimokkha).
For lay people, the uposatha day might (on an optional and voluntary basis) be an occasion for making 8 special commitments to ethical and mindful practice during the course of the day. These commitments, sikkhāpadas, are training rules in behavior to underpin the development of wisdom and meditative practice. They are commonly known as the 8 precepts. They reflect the world-renunciatory commitments of monks and nuns, but in a modest way. They are not religious vows the violation of which would lead to being smitten by a thunderbolt by a god or being rounded up by mutaween.
Of the 12 full-moon days in a year, theravādin buddhists designate 5 as commemorative of events in the life and teaching of the arahant, Gotama (c.480-400 BCE). Pavāraṇā is one of those five.
In ancient north India, itinerant, homeless mendicants (paribbājakas), like Gotama, had no fixed address. The group of mendicants that developed around Gotama was no different in this from mendicants of the orthodox brahmanical religion or of other heterodox sects, like nigaṇṭhas (jains) or ājīvikas, that had emerged before his. However, the mendicants of all sects stayed in one place during the wet season, when travel was extremely difficult and new crops were growing. Buddhist tradition has it that Gotama instructed his followers not to wander during the wet season after lay people had compared his followers less favorably to the nigaṇṭhas.
Initially, buddhist mendicants stayed put in places mostly on their own. But in time they began to group together and stake out the places they stayed at, as monastic colonies (āvāsas). These sites were not monasteries, which did not develop until over 200 years after Gotama’s death. But they were settlements (albeit impermanent) and they came to be collective in nature. In this way, ‘The transition from the eremetical to the cenobitical manner of life was brought about by the institution of Vassa.’ (Sukumar Dutt, Early Buddhist monachism 600 BC – 100 BC, 1924)
We don’t know when wanderers decided to stay in one place on a more-or-less permanent basis, or when the majority of them did; ‘… although it seems virtually certain that this did not occur on any scale until well after Aśoka and probably nearer to the beginning of the Common Era.’ (Gregory Schopen, ‘Cross-dressing with the dead: asceticism, ambivalence, and institutional values in an Indian monastic code’, 2007) In the period between the Moriya empire (ended 185 BCE) and Gupta empire (started 319 CE), buddhist communities ‘came to be fully monasticized, permanently housed, landed, propertied, and—to judge by almost any standard—very wealthy.’
Even before monasticism replaced wandering, the collective life in the early rains-resident colonies allowed the buddhist mendicants to develop buddhism as a religion.
‘The old commentary on the Pātimokkha, the formulation of Buddhist tenets (e.g. Sattatimsa bodhapakkiyā dhammā), the development of the idea of the eternity of Buddha’s religion by connecting it with Brāhmanical mythological materials, the didactic refashioning of current folklore (found often in the Pitakas without the Jātaka setting, to point a moral only), in the light of the world-wide theory of metempsychosis, the invention of anecdotal stories and reshaping of traditions about Buddha for the purpose of using the authority of his name to support new rules or old practices, which led ultimately to the remoulding of the legendary setting of the whole of Buddhist literature, the hymns of the Theras and the Theris, the Dhammapada, Udāna, etc.—all these were the work of the primitive āvāsas.’ (Dutt, Early Buddhist monachism)
They also invented a ceremony to mark the end of the rains-residence, the Pavāraṇā (Sukumar Dutt, Buddhist monks and monasteries of India, 1988).
The word Pavāraṇā means invitation, and refers to the practice in the ceremony of a monk (and nuns) inviting the other monks ‘to call him to account if they had seen or heard or suspected him to be guilty of any transgression during the period of Vassa.’ (Dutt, Early Buddhist monachism)
The purpose of this confessional was to maintain the purity of conduct (parisuddhi) of the monastic community (saṅgha). ‘Once the individual corrective procedures were adopted, the Saṅgha as a whole was considered to be collectively pure with regard to rules. This confirmed the spiritual status of the monks and served as a preliminary event for the Kaṭhina ritual where the laity expressed its admiration for the community by bestowing gifts on it.’ (Rekha Daswani, Buddhist monasteries and monastic life in ancient India, 2006).
The early buddhist mendicants, along with other paribbājakas, had two starting periods for the rains-residence: one starting date was the day after the full moon of Āsālha (mid June), and the other starting date was the next full moon (Sukumar Dutt, Early Buddhist monachism). At present, theravādin monks begin the rains-residence on the full moon in July, or on the second full moon in July if there are two. This timetable is the same in Australia as it is in Asia.
The rains-residence lasts for 3 months. The Pavāraṇā ceremony is held the day after. It is held in the monastery at which the monks and nuns stayed during the rains. Lay people do not attend.
Pavāraṇā is followed shortly after by another ceremony, the kaṭhina ceremony (which emerged in Lanka by the seventh century CE). This involves laity giving new robes and other gifts to the monks. The kaṭhina ceremony is the most important theravādin ceremony expressing the interdependence of world-renouncing monks and merit-seeking laity, but it is not an uposatha occasion.
