What makes a monastic order monastic is a commitment to a place.
A Benedictine professes stability to a particular abbey. He does not join an order and get posted; he joins that house, and expects to die in it. The abbot is elected by the monks of that house and is answerable to them, not appointed from a headquarters, and a Benedictine congregation is a federation of autonomous monasteries that share a visitation system rather than a chain of command. There is no general who can move a monk from Bavaria to Brazil, because there is no such office.
The consequences are considerable. A community that cannot expel its difficult members and cannot escape them has to develop ways of living with them, and a great deal of the Rule is practical machinery for exactly that. A house that owns its own land and elects its own superior accumulates local wealth, local obligations and a long institutional memory, which is why monasteries became landlords, schools, hospitals, brewers and archives, and why their dissolution transferred so much property so profitably to whoever dissolved them.
Enclosure, silence during defined hours, common ownership rather than individual poverty, and a day divided by the office are the usual practical marks.
Buddhist monasticism looks similar from the outside and rests on a different foundation. A monk is bound by a training rule rather than by a vow to a house. He may move between monasteries, and he may hand the robe back and return to lay life without disgrace or dispensation. Monasteries accordingly depend on continuing lay support and on the personal authority of teachers rather than on incorporation and endowment, though large landholding monastic institutions have existed in Tibet, Sri Lanka and elsewhere and have exercised political power comparable to any European abbey.