Laypeople come to the temple in the morning offering food and monetary donations to the monks and temple.
Daoxin eventually settled at East Mountain Temple on Shuangfeng ("Twin Peaks") where he taught Chan Buddhism for thirty years and attracted large numbers of practitioners, some records say five hundred laypeople and monks.
The High Middle Ages saw a flourishing of mystical practice and theorization corresponding to the flourishing of new monastic orders, with such figures as Guigo II, Hildegard of Bingen, Bernard of Clairvaux, the Victorines, all coming from different orders, as well as the first real flowering of popular piety among the laypeople.
The procession of laypeople begins at Wat Si Muang in the city center and proceeds to Pha That Luang to make offerings to the monks in order to accumulate merit for rebirth into a better life.
Congregations were created from Roman Catholic priests and laypeople who refused to accept the dogmas of the infallibility and universal ordinary jurisdiction of the Pope, as defined by the First Vatican Council in 1870.
Yamada was appointed the leader of the Sanbo Kyodan in 1967, 1970 or 1973 and continued to differentiate the lineage from other Japanese Zen traditions by deemphasizing the separation between laypeople and the ordained—just as his teacher Yasutani had done.