A Third Month Fair and the Ordination a Boy Is Expected to Complete

Two of Yunnan's religious communities mark their year around a public gathering rooted in older religious practice. Among the Bai of the Dali region, the Third Month Fair, San Yue Jie, held each spring at the foot of the Cangshan mountains, traces its origin in local tradition to a Buddhist assembly and today combines Benzhu worship, trade and folk performance in a single week long gathering that remains one of Yunnan's largest annual religious and cultural events, held within sight of the older Buddhist grottoes the Bai carved into the nearby hills of Shibaoshan.

Among the Dai of Xishuangbanna, Theravada Buddhist practice follows a different but equally structured expectation, most Dai boys enter a temple for a period of ordination as a novice monk, learning to read Dai script through Buddhist texts before returning, in most cases, to lay life, a temporary ordination pattern shared with the Buddhist societies of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand across the border rather than with the Mahayana Buddhism practiced elsewhere in China. The practice ties Yunnan's southern Buddhist communities to a religious world organized around the mainland Southeast Asian rains retreat calendar, distinct from the ritual calendar followed by Han Buddhist temples elsewhere in the same province.