Kasaya

The robe is the visible sign of ordination, so the question of who may wear it is the question of who may be ordained, and in contemporary Buddhism that is not settled.

The Buddha ordained women. The bhikkhuni order existed and is described at length in the Vinaya. In the Theravada countries, however, the full ordination lineage for women lapsed, in Sri Lanka around the eleventh century, and it never established itself in Thailand or Burma at all. Because full ordination requires a quorum of already fully ordained bhikkhunis, a lapsed lineage cannot restart itself, and that is the crux.

The East Asian lineage, transmitted to China and thence to Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam, did not lapse. From 1996, ordinations in India and Sri Lanka drew on that lineage to restore the Theravada bhikkhuni order, and Sri Lanka now has a substantial bhikkhuni community.

The Thai and Burmese hierarchies do not accept it. Thailand's Supreme Sangha Council maintains a prohibition dating to 1928 on Thai monks ordaining women; Thai women who wish full ordination are ordained abroad and are not officially recognised on return. In Burma the position is similar. The consequence is visible in the colour of clothing: women practising seriously in those countries wear white as mae chi or pink as thilashin, holding eight or ten precepts rather than the full set, without the legal standing, the alms rights or the institutional support that go with the ochre robe.

Tibetan Buddhism sits in between. The bhikshuni lineage was never transmitted to Tibet, novice ordination for women is available, and the Dalai Lama has stated repeatedly that he supports full ordination and that the decision requires broad monastic agreement rather than his own ruling. Progress has been slow and is contested on procedural rather than doctrinal grounds.

So the robe, which in its origin was pieced together from cloth nobody wanted, is now the object at the centre of the most consequential status dispute in contemporary Buddhism.

The word kasaya means dull, muddied or off colour, and that is the specification. The Vinaya directs that a monastic robe be dyed with one of a small set of permitted substances and expressly not left in any of the pure or attractive colours, so the robe is defined negatively: whatever it is, it must not be a good colour.

The original cloth was pamsukula, dust heap rags, gathered from what had been discarded, including shrouds from charnel grounds, then washed, cut, pieced and dyed. Donated cloth was accepted early on and became the norm, but the pieced construction was retained deliberately, and the reason given in the tradition is that a robe assembled from strips of cut cloth has no resale value and offers nothing to vanity.

The dyes were vegetable and mineral: heartwood, bark and root, with jackfruit heartwood the classic source in South and Southeast Asia, producing the range of ochres, saffrons and browns still associated with Theravada communities.

The resulting palette now maps the schools rather than the rule. Theravada monastics in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Cambodia wear ochre through to a deep saffron, with forest traditions tending darker. Tibetan monastics wear maroon with yellow for formal occasions. Chinese and Korean communities wear grey or brown for daily wear with a formal outer robe over it. Japanese priests wear black, with colours by rank and occasion in some schools.

The kathina ceremony, held at the end of the rains retreat, is the annual occasion on which lay supporters offer cloth to the community, and in its strict form the cloth is cut, sewn and dyed into a robe within a single day by the assembled monastics.