Hainish Monasticism

Monks, people who separate themselves from mundane society to embrace a life of religious devotion, are a common trend across religions and cultures. But what it actually means to embrace a radically sacred life can vary radically. In the Kingdom of Hain, monasticism is a broad spectrum of lifestyles officially sanctified by state religious hierarchies.
Generally speaking, Hainish definitions of monasticism tend to overlap with many North-Stildanian Uvaran definitions - they just put more emphasis on the legitimization of the Autumn Court.

Categories of Monks

Hainish monks are categorized into three legal statuses by the Autumn Court: Local Cult Monks, Grove Monks, and Specialist Monks.
Local cult monks are dedicated to specific brands of local mysticism and divinity; they have a special relationship with the land and the local people. These local cultists often simultaneously devote themselves to a local spirit and a big pan-Uvaran God; by tying keepers of local tradition to big Uvaran concepts of unity, the Autumn Court co-opts and binds local rituals to formalized Uvaran dogma. Examples of this kind of cult include:

• The Cult of Vanoke in Telgen, which placates the God Vanoke as the Primeval Ocean. These God-oriented cultists are the most common type of local monk.
• The Cult of Eternal Spring in Zinduhl, that worships Ustav and Rugon in the ways of the old Delent
• The Cult of Vetka in Ozaren, that practices Alchemy and venerates the First Druid
• The Crowngardeners of Artoril, who weave specialized mutated mosses and mushrooms to preserve ancient kings and forge magic items

Grove Monks are monks that directly serve under the Autumn Court as devoted administrators and servants. Grove monks are basically priests who don't interface with the public; they instead act as archivists, workers, and magicians for the Court itself. Grove monks live by uniform series of codes that demand they have no children and that they live virtuous lives (though not all monks follow these). Some examples:

• The Grove Gardeners of Kemzendral are prototypical Grove Monks near Hodsyarn - they work in communities secluded from the general public, and act as clerks and assistants for the Rosgen of Kemzendral.
• The Collegial Monks of Audrahl, outside Telgen. These monks keep the libraries and operate the university there, teaching law, medicine, astronomy, and magic.
• The Order of the Sacred Chalice, the monks who operate the Questing Chapels, are the largest network of unified Grove Monks. While most Grove monks serve their local Rosgen, these monks communicate with each other to offer knights and heroes the chance to take on Quests and Honors.

Specialist Monks are defined less by their cosmological status than their material contributions to the faith. A specialist monastery is legitimized as sacred by what they produce or what works they make - they are bound by contracts with the Autumn Court to provide their service or craft to maintain their lands and status. Many of these monastic groups also pursue a personal ideal.

• The Slevenkine Order, or Red Monks, are a significant example of this: Dhampires who are bound to protect their communities and restrain other dhampires.
• The Muses of Lontorov outside of Zinduhl, who support artists and train bards, are a local example of this
• Any monastery devoted to the Way of the Open Palm is typically one of these; most provide both martial artists and some specialized craft intended to hone the mind in peacetime.

It may strike the careful reader that these legal categories miss a great deal of in-practice overlap; the Crowngardeners, for example, have a specialized craft, and yet they are classified as Local cult. That is a legal distinction. The Autumn Court values the ritual and theological benefits of the Crowngardeners and Vetkans, and therefore doesn't hold them to particular craft obligations.

Monastic Organization

Most monastic groups are organized under an Abbot or Abbess, who in turn serves the local Rosgen. Each local groups typically has their own hierarchy - but we can get into some of the common trends.
Standard grove monks, for example, are led by their local Abbot, who is chosen by the Rosgen. Within a monastic community, there are:

• Novices, those who have only recently joined and serve as the lowest rank
• Klellans, ("robed ones") who have earned their monastic vestments and are full members of the community
• Anchorites, Klellans who are sworn to hermitage and entirely withdraw from society; they exist mostly outside the hierarchy, but are registered as about Klellan-rank for most purposes
• Rindreins, ("circle wanderers") Klellans who are sworn to wandering hermitage - basically, anchorites who travel from monastery to monastery, seeing the world and reporting back to their peers.
• Yeimlins, ("oath children") who are advanced members of a specific grove. Qualified for officer positions.

Officer positions include:

• Prior, the second-in-command to the Abbot
• Steward, who keeps the books
• Cellarer, who manages food and drink
• Master of Novices, who polices and gives tasks to the lower levels
• Master of Colors, who handles the books, vestments, and songs of the monastery
• Sacrist, who handles the building maintenance
• Roundsman, who handles discipline and rules-keeping
• Infirmerer, who handles health and medicine

This grove-monk hierarchy serves as a model for most others. Local Cults can inherit their own hierarchical structures and models.
As for the codes of virtue that Grove Monks follow:

• Sire no children, and swear off all kinship ties. You belong only to the Gods
• Give charitably to the poor, do not live opulently
• Imbibe intoxicants in sacred aim, not for worldly pleasure
• Over the day, have at least four sessions of intense prayer and worship
• Tattoo your body with bright colors, so that you may never be stripped of your worshipful love
• Give shelter to the helpless
• Keep knowledge of the world in all its vastness

Monastic History

Esoteric groups have existed as long as Stildane has existed, and these mystics have often come in monastically adjacent packaging. These mystic proto-monks were not only very local but very individualized; they are known in modern scholarship as Trolltesks, and each individual Trolltesk had their own belief and approach. Some were said to be mystical beings of living power, while others were close to being wandering charlatans. Local communities patronized Trolltesks they liked and trusted to train others; other communities built their own mystic communities to better protect their members from the predations of wandering mystics. The period from the Birth of Ederstone in the Divine Era to around 400 ME was the Golden Age of Trolltesk activity. The Empire of Andrig championed the idea of state-supported monastic cultism in the 400s ME, and this served as an inspiration for future state monastic projects.
The Empire of Andrig fell in the 500s ME, though, and no state was powerful enough to replace it - Hain was more a federation at the time. The Imperial cults drifted apart. A new order rose to try and replace the old, though: Lunar Cults devoted to the Lunar Pantheon. The Lunar Cults fought against the Kivish together in the 500s and rose to be the primary monastic vehicle in the 600s. But these cults turned on each other in a series of terrible conflicts from 703 to 950 ME, and these endless cycles of pointless violence delegitimized them in the eyes of the people. The last nail in the coffin of Lunar monks was the Mageplague - a magical disease that paladins could not fight. As Lunar monks had at least been able to cure any disease prior to this, they had preserved some legitimacy - but the Mageplague completely undercut them.
The founding of the Uvaran religion in 1200 ME, along with the stabilization of the Hainish state at the same time, set the stage for a new kind of monk. The Starlit Assembly established a monastic code and framework, though there wasn't yet a meaningful enforcement mechanism. These early monks mostly relied on secular patronage, and often had to master some special craft or function to maintain their social position. Monks were largely unimportant accessories to local political structures from 1200 to 1450. But, after Hain survived the Fourth Scouring of the early 1400s, the Autumn Court began to rise - political centralization of religion was starting, and would only intensify in the following centuries. In 1480, the Autumn Court reaffirmed its monastic codes of behavior and actually created enforcement mechanisms. The newly standardized position of Rosgen would serve as the Court's vehicle for projecting power into the countryside and holding monks to a common standard. Focus was mostly placed on heartland monks, while the peripheries of the Kingdom were allowed to operate on custom. While there was an actual system now, it was fairly bare-bones and decentralized. This wasn't about unification, but about keeping monks as a category from becoming hereditary or seen as publicly corrupt.
Monastic centralization as we see it now only started in the 1600s. Two main forces pushed Hain to consolidate its monastic groups: First, there was the cultural and political consolidation of Hain, as the kingdom expanded to directly integrate The Delent and the East. Second, there was the arrival of the Way of the Open Palm from the North, which created a "monastic craze" from about 1610 to 1680. The sudden influx of novices and new monastic groups pushed the Autumn Court to try and legally regulate monks across Hain. Both forces shaped the Autumn Court's unusually ambitious program of legal classification and hierarchy. The resulting system created new Orders that spread across the Kingdom, such as the Questing Chapel monks. The primary problem with this new monastic system was the tension between clerics and landholders; landholders only wanted to give land grants to monasteries if the lords were the primary beneficiaries, not the Autumn Court. 
The Fifth Scouring, from 1680 - 1750, resolved the prior tension by basically reorganizing Hain's lands through massive upheaval and destruction. In the new Hainish political atmosphere, recolonization took priority; there were now plenty of land grants to go around for monasteries, and the Autumn Court was no longer seen as an invasive presence by local lords. Rosgens and lords now cooperated actively to reshape their shared spaces; monks fit in nicely. This post-Scouring period is when the prior century's centralization efforts really kicked in. Big orders, like Quest-Monks or Dhampiric Red Monks, now flourished. Monastic networks served as vehicles for rapid technological movement. In fact, the period of 1750 to 1880 really served as the heyday of the big orders. The collapse of Ustavet - the Hainish puppet kingdom that controlled the rest of Northern Stildane - that began slowly after 1870 really started to undermine some of the big monastic orders that were siphoning land and resources from the North. The total collapse of Ustavet in 1904 led to some orders turning towards decentralization. 
While the big monastic orders may have shrunk in number and centralization, monasticism as a whole is not on the decline. The Tulip Revolution in 1800, which decentralized Hainish politics again and put more power in the hands of feudal lords, created a new enthusiasm for monastic patronage. While clerics of the Autumn Court were seen as tools of the old "absolutist" monarchy, the new Tulip government saw monasteries as a way to ground the religious system in feudal land ownership. Queen Tonma, first Tulip Queen (1800 - 1826) started this trend. King Kasbar (1837 - 1885) was a major monastic patron (despite being a centralizer King Oshlo (1930 - 1965) worked to rival Kasbar in this regard, especially with Way and Dhampire monks. Oshlo and Kasbar both tried to recentralize the monasteries (and even involve the monarchy in their regulation), but these reforms were undone by the last Queen, Frashia Savadan (1965 - 2012).