I remember being asked by classmates and friends during my final year of university whether I’d become a monk after graduation. A year earlier, in 2008, I’d been initiated into the Buddhist community as a lay practitioner. My reply to my friends back then was the same reply I’d give now: the lay Buddhist vocation carries as much importance and weight as that of the monastic, and I’d be unable to serve the Buddhist religion in certain ways as a monastic, while these would be possible with a lay identity.

This might have seemed counterintuitive to my friends. The conventional view is that monastics are better positioned to preach and realize the Dharma. Yet this claim masks the complex reality that confronts lay Buddhists. Notwithstanding the obvious moral violations of arms dealing and peddling intoxicants, here are just a few examples of the capacities closed to monastics, at least according to the Vinaya: any financial profession, professional politics (although this is not reflected in countries where monks sit in parliament), journalism, culture and the visual arts, entertainment, health and fitness, directorships in non-religious organizations (and certainly not in for-profit companies), and practicing law.

In principle, becoming a monastic would be to forsake these interests and capacities to serve the Dharma. Yet the lay practitioner has these avenues open to him, and in recent years there has been growing demand for lay practitioners to engage in the kind of teaching once reserved for monastics, informed by the experience of living in modern society. The first lay devotees in Buddhist hagiography, Trapusa and Bhallika, were merchants. They met the Buddha while he was sitting under the Rajayatana Tree in the seventh week of his Nirvana. As householders they had distinct characteristics: they were professional, relatively cosmopolitan and well travelled (for their time), and had families to care for. These qualities have provided a general, informal imprint for what a householder is: the worldly counterpart to a monastic, different in how they act in the world, yet equally devout.

I see the three “lays”—lay Buddhist, lay devotee, and lay practitioner—to be the most accurate English translations of a Buddhist spiritual identity that had no Western linguistic equivalent until very recently. It is, however, more accurately translated as “householder,” from the ancient Pali and Sanskrit (gahapati/grhapati) and Chinese (ju shi). Both denote the landholding head of a family (historically a man, but the term is now used to denote both men and women).

In much of Asia, the responsibility of a householder has been a dual one, of both spiritual realization and secular duty. This secular duty, apart from family obligations, entails all the worldly exercises of material wealth and social influence that are closed to monastics.