Religious vows

Common card · No. 438558

Religious vows are the public vows made by the members of religious communities pertaining to their conduct, practices, and views. In the Buddhist tradition, in particular within the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions, many different kinds of religious vows are taken by the lay community as well as by the monastic community, as they progress along the path of their practice. In the monastic tradition of all schools of Buddhism, the Vinaya expounds the vows of the fully ordained Nuns and Monks. In the Christian tradition, such public vows are made by the religious – cenobitic and eremitic – of the Catholic Church, Lutheran Churches, Anglican Communion, and Eastern Orthodox Churches, whereby they confirm their public profession of the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience or Benedictine equivalent. The vows are regarded as the individual's free response to a call by God to follow Jesus Christ more closely under the action of the Holy Spirit in a particular form of religious...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Adolphe Roger, Public domain