The alms round remains an ordinary, visible feature of morning life in Theravada Buddhist countries in a way few other monastic practices anywhere still are, with lines of saffron or maroon-robed monastics walking fixed routes through towns and villages across Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Sri Lanka each morning, householders waiting with prepared rice and food to place directly into the offered bowls, and the whole exchange conducted largely in silence within the space of an hour or so before the monastics return to eat before the midday cutoff their code prescribes. Forest tradition monasteries, which keep the monastic discipline with particular strictness, treat the round as inseparable from the deeper renunciation the discipline requires, some forest monks walking considerable distances daily specifically because accepting only what is offered along the way, with no soliciting and no selection, is held to train non-attachment more effectively than a fixed daily food delivery arranged in advance would.
The practice faces real pressure from urbanisation and changing lay habits: monasteries in rapidly growing cities report thinner and less reliable alms routes than in established rural villages with generations of settled lay-monastic relationship, and some urban temples have responded by having monastics travel further, by vehicle in some cases, to reach communities where the tradition of morning almsgiving is still actively kept, a practical accommodation that nonetheless preserves the underlying exchange, the monastic dependent and unsoliciting, the layperson gaining merit by giving, that the practice has always rested on regardless of how far the walk to find it now has to be.