Why Do Buddhists Become Monks? (And for How Long)

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 23 September 2026

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Why do Buddhists become monks? The answer the early discourses give is that household life is “cramped and dirty” and the going-forth is “wide open” — the full spiritual life, they say, is not easy to lead at home. But people also ordain for a season, to make merit for a parent, to get an education, or because they inherited a temple. Which reason dominates depends almost entirely on where you are.

One thing first: outside the Tibet described below, ordaining is a minority path. Melvyn Goldstein notes that in Thailand “only about 1-2 percent of the total number of males were monks and most of these were not life-long permanent monks.”

What the texts actually give as the reason

The oldest answer is a formula, not a personal story, recurring almost word for word whenever anyone goes forth. These are Pali texts; the Tibetan and East Asian traditions inherit the same material through their own recensions, and every scripture quoted on this page is from the Pali. The Sāmaññaphala Sutta (DN 2) has the fullest form:

Notice what this is: a stock passage about a hypothetical householder, not one man’s testimony. It tells us what the compilers of the Pali canon took the normal reason to be — and the reason is spatial. The household is crowded; the homeless life is open. Not wicked, just full.

The monastic code’s first case cuts the same way. Yasa, “the son of a wealthy merchant” in Benares, woke among his sleeping musicians to find, in Bhikkhu Brahmali’s translation, that “it was like a charnel ground before his very eyes.” He had lost nothing — the pattern of the Buddha’s own renunciation.

The four reasons a king expected — and one he didn’t

In the Raṭṭhapāla Sutta (MN 82), King Koravya cannot make sense of why Raṭṭhapāla — young, healthy, wealthy, surrounded by family — has ordained, so he lists the reasons he expects:

Raṭṭhapāla has none of these. That a king assumes people go forth because they are old, ill, ruined or bereaved matters: ordination driven by circumstance is not a modern discovery. The tradition says it first.

His own answer is the other half: four summaries of the teaching. The world is unstable and swept away; it has no shelter and no saviour; it has no owner, since you must leave it all behind; and it is insatiable, “the slave of craving.”

The tradition itself assumed the motives were mixed

The Mahāsāropama Sutta (MN 29) warns that gain, honour and popularity arrive after going forth and corrupt it: “this spiritual life is not lived for the sake of possessions, honor, and popularity.” And the monastic code screens for what a cynic would suspect. Among the thirteen questions put before full ordination:

Those questions come from real cases, and they do not all mean the same thing. A runaway slave and a man fleeing creditors had each gone forth to escape (Kd 1:47, Kd 1:46). The royal question has the opposite origin: Bimbisāra’s best soldiers went forth rather than “do what’s bad and make much demerit” in battle, and the king then asked that his employees be left unordained, so that less sympathetic kings would have no grievance against the Sangha (Kd 1:40). The screen is for entanglement, not only bad faith. For the procedure, see how to become a monk.

Ordaining for a season: three customs, not one

It is often said that in “Theravada Southeast Asia” men ordain temporarily. True only loosely: the three best-documented cases are three different rites.

Thailand: a period as novice or monk

Kakanang Yavaprabhas calls temporary ordination for Thai men “a long-standing tradition in Thai society” — men ordain “to become novices or monks” for a limited period, then disrobe. Its benefits, she writes, include “the traditional rite of passage to adulthood, a means of acquiring education and, importantly, an avenue for ‘repaying the debt’ to one’s parents.” A Thai saying has it that mothers can “cling on to the saffron robes of their sons in order to ascend to heaven.”

She gives no length, and the much-repeated three months belongs in the first place to the rains retreat rather than to the ordination. The monastic code has monks enter the rains residence on one of two days — the day after the full moon of July, or a month later — and then “stay put for the first or the second three-month period” before travelling again (Kd 3:3.2.6, trans. Bhikkhu Brahmali). How long a man wears robes is a separate question, and the answer has moved. Benjamin Theobald, whose fieldwork was in a Thai monastic school, writes that “traditionally men may have ordained for the three months of the rainy season (phansa)”, but that “Thai men now often ordain for as short a time as a few days, or even just a few hours.” So the figure is real: it is the length of the season, and was the traditional term — not a rule about how long anyone stays. See Buddhism in Thailand.

Myanmar: a boy, often for about a week

Shinbyu is not adult ordination at all: the anthropologist Laura Hornig calls it a novitiation ceremony, “as opposed to the full ordination that only applies to men over twenty.” Boys are “aged at least eight in most cases, often they are teenagers,” and typically stay “for a while, often for around one week.” Sending a son to the monastery is, Hornig writes, “one of the most important ways to accumulate merit which translates into good Karma, important for future lives, especially those of the child’s mother.”

Because the merit belongs to those who give the boy, the cost falls on the giving side. Hornig records a Pathein family who sold one of their houses to fund a shinbyu for their sons and several neighbourhood children, the boys’ uncle acting as main donor and roughly 3,000 US dollars going on the ceremony. Poorer families rely on community support, and for orphans and very poor boys “wealthier non-kin persons can sponsor such a ceremony” — which, she notes, “enables them to gain merit for themselves.” See Buddhism in Myanmar.

Northern Laos: a village system, not a family one

Souvanxay Phetchanpheng notes that in Laos “novices are young boys, usually between 10 and 20 years old.” Among the Tai Lue of Mueang Sing he found a set phrase — buat thot thaen bun khun pho mae, “to be ordained to render benefits to the parents” — which he calls the first motivation for ordination among the Lue. A boy also seeks “both to live with his friends and to study more easily,” and there they generally “leave the monastic life definitively at the age of 25 years.” The financing inverts the obvious: “Parents do not finance the ordination of their own child but that of another child.”

Ordaining for one’s parents — and what the canon says

This motive is not folk superstition at the edge of a “real” Buddhism. It is the stated first reason among the Tai Lue of Mueang Sing, the organising idea of shinbyu, and measurable in Thailand: around 70 percent of women ordained as novices at Songdhammakalyani Monastery in December 2013 mentioned being ordained for parents, about half of them as their sole motivation. Goldstein recorded a Tibetan nomad monk saying that in his region making a son a monk was reckoned equivalent in merit to building a stupa.

The canonical warrant, though, is indirect. Asked how a child repays a mother and father, the discourses answer differently:

Ordination is not mentioned. Merit directed to someone else does have a canonical form — a gift “well placed in the Saṅgha” and dedicated to departed relatives, who “gratefully express appreciation” for it (Khp 7, “Outside the Walls”) — but that is an offering made for the dead, not a living mother’s share in her son’s robes. And the earliest rule joining parents to ordination comes from a father’s grief, not a promise of merit: after Rāhula was given the going forth, Suddhodana asked that no child be ordained without parental consent, since “affection for a child cuts deep.” The merit motive is genuine and enormously widespread — but a cultural elaboration, not an instruction in the discourses.

Tibet, where the question belonged to the household

Pre-1959 Tibet ran on a different principle — what Goldstein calls “mass monasticism”, “an emphasis on recruiting and sustaining very large numbers of celibate monks for their entire lives.” The figures are politically contested: the Tibetan exile government has estimated some 2,700 monasteries and 115,000 monks in 1951, 10–15 percent of the population; Chinese surveys of the 1950s gave roughly 120,000 monks, about 24 percent of males. Goldstein publishes both and calls them “crude guesstimates”.

At that scale the motive question could not really be put to the monk. Boys were brought to monasteries between about six and twelve by parents or guardians; the rules “officially required that monks enter of their own volition”, but Goldstein found they were “basically made monks without regard to their personality, temperament or inclination”, and runaways were fetched back — while those same monks, interviewed decades later, did not look back on it as abusive. Both halves belong in an honest account of a vanished society. See Tibetan Buddhism and Buddhism in Tibet.

The parents’ reasons were startlingly practical: prestige and lighter labour for the son, exemption from corvée, merit, a vow made during a child’s illness, poverty — and, “extremely common”, keeping family land undivided in the next generation.

East Asia, where “monk” stopped meaning one thing

Japan: inheriting a temple

Japan is the clearest case of monastics who marry, and the history is datable. In 1872 Meiji officials decriminalised meat-eating, marriage and growing the hair for Buddhist clergy — the nikujiki saitai law, whose text we quote on why Buddhists shave their heads. Two corrections to the usual telling. The law permitted, it did not command. And it did not invent clerical marriage: Richard Jaffe notes that “until 1872 by state law marriage was illegal for any Buddhist cleric, apart from those in the Jôdo Shin or Shugendô denominations”, so Jōdo Shin clergy were already exempt.

Jaffe reports Kanaoka Shūyū’s rough estimate, published in 1990, that around 90 percent of Japanese clergy are married, and a 1987 survey of the Sōtō Zen school in which more than 80 percent of clerics had inherited their temple from a family member. In Japan, one of the commonest routes into robes is being a priest’s son: a reason with no Theravada parallel.

Korea: two orders, two answers

Korea shows the split institutionally. Writing in Tricycle, Tommy Tran records that the Japanese colonial Order 7 of 1910 “mandated temple reforms such as legalized marriage and meat consumption for monks”; that on 20 May 1954 President Syngman Rhee had all married monks expelled from temples; and that in 1970 married clergy and allied celibate monks established the Taego Order, whose most distinguishing characteristic “is that many monks are married householders” — a status, Tran writes, its clergy consider “in light of the enlightened lay householder Vimalakirti”. The larger Jogye Order remains celibate, as do Chinese and Taiwanese monastics. So the flat claim that East Asian monks may marry is false: Japanese clergy usually do, one Korean order does, the rest do not.

Whether such clergy are monastics at all is disputed: the Theravada, Tibetan and Chinese ordination lineages treat celibacy as what defines a monastic, and Japanese usage often means something nearer priest. See the life of a Buddhist monk and the Sangha.

Ordaining today, outside a Buddhist country

Nothing above describes someone asking this from Manchester or Minneapolis. Two routes appear on the communities’ own sites, read in September 2026, and they ask opposite things. Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village welcomes “those with a sincere aspiration to cultivate understanding and compassion as their only career”, and in 2010 opened “this new Dharma door … especially for young people in the West”: five years of training for applicants “from 17 – 35 years old”, after which “you will then be free to choose whether to remain on the monastic path or to go back to lay life.”

Wat Pah Nanachat, the international forest monastery of Ajahn Chah’s lineage in northeast Thailand, wants “genuine interest in long-term training”: a month or more as an eight-precept layperson, novice ordination “after about six months”, full ordination “after at least one year as a novice”, and five years “under dependence of a teacher”. Fixed-term ordaining is not only a Southeast Asian custom, nor the long haul only an Asian one.

What differs for women

The question is not symmetrical, because access is not. In 1928 the sisters Sara and Chongdi Bhasit sought novice ordination in Thailand, and four years later “received bhikkhunī ordination from progressive monks in the bhikkhu Saṅgha.” The Thai Sangha held it invalid, and Lisa Battaglia records that they “were imprisoned and forcibly disrobed” in 1932. The proclamation that answered them — what came to be known as the Sangha Act of 1928 — forbids Thai monks from ordaining women as novices, probationers or bhikkhunīs, and no bhikkhunī order was recognised in Thailand when Battaglia wrote in 2015. Most Thai renunciant women are therefore mae chi, in Battaglia’s words “not officially nuns in the same sense as bhikkhunīs”.

That makes motive itself contested. Battaglia found many mae chis with no interest in a bhikkhunī Sangha, and quotes one who thinks the equality motive improper: “The only reason is because the Buddha said it is a very good way to attain enlightenment.” The bhikkhunī ordination movement reads the same facts as institutional exclusion. Neither view speaks for Thai Buddhist women as a whole.

In Taiwan the picture inverts. Wei-yi Cheng cites an estimate published in 2000 that “between 70 and 75 percent of the Buddhist monastic members are nuns”, and reports research finding most join “mainly for religious reason”. There the door is open and women have gone through it in greater numbers than men — see the life of a Buddhist nun.

Are fewer people ordaining?

In some places, demonstrably. A projection reported by the South China Morning Post in November 2015 held that “27,000 of the country’s 77,000 temples are expected to close” in Japan over 25 years, though it does not say who made it. Phetchanpheng writes that “there are fewer and fewer young Laotians entering monasteries”, while adding that most Tai Lue boys still ordain. Beyond that we will not guess.

So why do Buddhists become monks?

Because the texts call household life crowded and the homeless life open. Because a king in the canon expected old age, sickness, ruin and bereavement to do the work. Because a son’s week in robes may open a door for his mother. Because a family in old Tibet needed its land undivided, and a temple in Japan needs an heir. Because a community in the West opened a five-year door in 2010. All are reasons real Buddhists give; the dishonest answer is the one offering only the first.