A monastery is a machine for regulating time, and the rule is its specification.
The Rule of Benedict, written in sixth-century Italy, is short, practical and notably unromantic, and it governed most of Western monasticism for a thousand years. It divides the day between the divine office, manual work and reading; sets meal quantities and sleeping arrangements; prescribes how guests are to be received; and devotes considerable attention to the disciplining of difficult members. Its most quoted principle is moderation, and it explicitly rejects the extreme austerities of the Egyptian desert as unsuitable for people living together.
The Vinaya, the Buddhist monastic code, is far longer and is organised as case law: each rule is given alongside the incident that prompted it, which makes it readable as a social history of the early community. It regulates robes, food, medicine, dwellings and the settlement of disputes, and defines the four offences that end monastic life outright. Recitation of the code twice a month is the mechanism that keeps it live rather than archival.
Both systems produced the same by-products, and the convergence is genuine rather than coincidental. Monasteries became landowners, employers, schools, libraries and centres of manuscript production, because a celibate community with a rule and a long time horizon accumulates. Both also produced reform movements at intervals, whenever the accumulated wealth was judged to have defeated the point of the thing. The pattern, austerity, endowment, laxity, reform, endowment again, runs through Christian and Buddhist monastic history with almost mechanical regularity, and it is one of the more reliable generalisations available in comparative religion.