Kathina

Kathina is the robe-offering ceremony that closes the three-month rains retreat (vassa), and it is the largest lay merit-making occasion of the Theravada Buddhist year. During the monsoon, monks remain settled in one monastery rather than travelling; at the end of the retreat, in the month that follows (roughly October-November), the lay community presents cloth for robes to the resident community of monks as a whole, rather than to any individual, and the monks themselves decide, according to the discipline, who is to receive and make it up. The offering follows the ancient allowance recorded in the monastic code (Vinaya), where the Buddha is said to have permitted the Kathina robe to monks who had kept the full retreat.

Several features make the occasion weighty. A monastery may hold the ceremony only once a year, and only if a sufficient number of monks kept the full retreat there, so that an invitation to sponsor a Kathina is a matter of some standing in the community; the merit is regarded as especially great. In Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Laos and Cambodia the day is marked by processions, music, and the offering of a great deal besides cloth, robes, alms and support for the monastery, and it is often a whole village or a wider network of donors that mounts it. Where the older discipline is kept strictly, the cloth is cut, sewn and dyed within the same day, a demanding collective labour that itself expresses the devotion of the offering. Kathina thus renews the material support of the Sangha at the turning of the monastic year and binds the lay and monastic communities in a shared act of giving.

Theravada monasteries established in the West, including in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, have adapted the Kathina ceremony into one of their principal annual fundraising occasions, since a Western monastery typically cannot rely on the kind of whole-village network of small in-kind and cash donations that supports a monastery in Thailand or Sri Lanka, and Kathina day has become the point in the year when a temple's lay supporters, often a geographically dispersed and religiously mixed congregation quite unlike a single Buddhist village, gather to fund a significant share of the monastery's needs for the coming year in a single organised event.

The ceremony's core religious form, the presentation of cloth to the assembled community of monks who have completed the rains retreat, the requirement that a monastery may hold it only once and only if enough monks kept the full vassa, is generally preserved carefully even in this adapted Western context, but the practical scale and character of a Western Kathina, often including a large shared meal, an auction or set donation targets, and considerable published fundraising planning in advance, looks noticeably more like an organised charity gala than the village-wide, spontaneous-feeling communal offering the ceremony traditionally involved in South and Southeast Asia.