It is more surprising that Christianity should make monasteries part of its tradition than that monasticism should have developed in Buddhism, for Christianity affirms the positive value of physical human flesh in the incarnation of Christ, while Buddhism has at its centre nothingness and the annihilation of the self. Christianity’s parent religion, Judaism, is actively hostile to celibacy, one of monasticism’s chief institutions, and Jewish groups which practised a form of monasticism are fairly marginal in Jewish history: the Essenes and the shadowy sect of the Therapeutae mentioned by the
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