Shayne Clarke

Scholarly and popular consensus has painted a picture of Indian Buddhist monasticism in which monks and nuns severed all ties with their families when they left home for the religious life. In this view, monks and nuns remained celibate, and those who faltered in their “vows” of monastic celibacy were immediately and irrevocably expelled from the Buddhist Order. This romanticized image is based largely on the ascetic rhetoric of texts such as the Rhinoceros Horn Sutra. Through a study of Indian Buddhist law codes (vinaya), Shayne Clarke dehorns the rhinoceros, revealing that in their own legal narratives, far from renouncing familial ties, Indian Buddhist writers take for granted the fact that monks and nuns would remain in contact with their families.

The vision of the monastic life that emerges from Clarke's close reading of monastic law codes challenges some of our most basic scholarly notions of what it meant to be a Buddhist monk or nun in India around the turn of the Common Era. Not only do we see thick narratives depicting monks and nuns continuing to interact and associate with their families, but some are described as leaving home for the religious life with their children, and some as married monastic couples. Clarke argues that renunciation with or as a family is tightly woven into the very fabric of Indian Buddhist renunciation and monasticisms.

Surveying the still largely uncharted terrain of Indian Buddhist monastic law codes preserved in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese, Clarke provides a comprehensive, pan-Indian picture of Buddhist monastic attitudes toward family. Whereas scholars have often assumed that monastic Buddhism must be anti-familial, he demonstrates that these assumptions were clearly not shared by the authors/redactors of Indian Buddhist monastic law codes. In challenging us to reconsider some of our most cherished assumptions concerning Indian Buddhist monasticisms, he provides a basis to rethink later forms of Buddhist monasticism such as those found in Central Asia, Kaśmīr, Nepal, and Tibet not in terms of corruption and decline but of continuity and development of a monastic or renunciant ideal that we have yet to understand fully.

(From the UHP Description)

Issued in B4 size, this volume is a full-colour facsimile edition, containing an “Introduction to the Gilgit Vinaya Manuscripts Preserved in the National Archives of India” (pp. 1–4), an “Introduction to the Vinaya Concordance” (pp. 5–15), a “Bibliographical Survey of the Extant Sanskrit Folios” (pp. 16–36), a “Bibliography” (pp. 37–45), and—compiled in collaboration with Drs. Fumi Yao and Masanori Shōno—a “Concordance to the Gilgit Vinaya Manuscripts Preserved in the National Archives of India” detailing (1) folio numbers, (2) image numbers in the previous black-and-white facsimile editions, (3–4) volume, page, and line numbers in modern editions, (5–7) location in Tibetan translation in the sDe dge, Peking, and sTog editions, and (8) location in Yijing’s Chinese translation (pp. 46–79). It also contains full-colour facsimiles of 570 folio sides/fragments, all individually presented together with the above 8 pieces of concordance data (Plates, pp. 1–261) and 78 Select Photographic Enlargements (Plates, pp. 264–277). The volume includes a Preface to the New Series by Prof. Oskar von Hinüber (pp. xi–xiv) and a Postscript by Prof. Noriyuki Kudo (p. 80).

This paper examines a series of six curious narratives that appear in the section dealing with the third pārājika, the rule addressing monastic involvement in various acts of homicide (including abortion), in the Bhikṣu-vibhaṅga of the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya. These tales purport to record the Buddha’s legislative reaction to (1) an offhand remark made to a seriously ill monk by his brother-in-the-dharma in response to which the sick monk foolishly and fatally consumed poison, (2) a monk under whose care a gravely ill monk convinced his co-religionist’s nephews to cut off his head in order to put an end to his suffering, (3–4) two monks who hope to receive the possessions of dying monks, (5) the famous arhat Upasena’s consent to a former doctor’s offer of an abortive preparation for his brother’s wife whom he got pregnant before becoming a monk, and (6) an ill father who decides to trick his female servant into squeezing the very life out of him after his son, a monk, tells him that as a lay Buddhist he will be reborn in a good destiny. What is curious about these stories, all delivered before the formal establishment of the third pārājika, is that at the end of each tale the Buddha is said not to have established a rule-of-training. These tales thus run counter to the general function of narratives that precede the formal promulgation of Prātimokṣa rules in the extant vibhaṅgas. This paper seeks to throw light on the role of these curious stories.

On the basis of an examination of twenty-seven textual witnesses of the section on nuns’ conduct (Bhikṣuṇī-vinayavibhaṅga) in the monastic law code (Vinaya) of the influential north Indian Buddhist school known as the Mūlasarvāstivāda (Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya), I argue that a distinct Bhutanese recension is discernible. Found in six of the twenty-seven witnesses—sTog and Shey Palace manuscripts, and four Bhutanese manuscripts (Chizhi, Dongkarla, Gangteng, and Neyphug)—this recension resolves many of the inconsistencies present in the most commonly consulted editions of the Tibetan translation of the Bhikṣuṇī-vinayavibhaṅga. The discrepancies between these two recensions are of considerable interest and importance given that these recensions differ significantly in terms of the presence and absence of certain rules, frame stories, and legal analysis for nuns.

The present article is divided into eight sections. In the first section, I discuss a number of characteristics that make the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya unique among the corpus of extant Buddhist monastic law codes: its linguistic diversity, the sheer volume of canonical texts, the enormous number of commentarial treatises, and the sometimes seemingly insurmountable philological challenges. In the second section, I provide a brief overview of the corpus of canonical Tibetan Buddhist texts devoted to rules for nuns (Bhikṣuṇī-vinayavibhaṅga, Bhikṣuṇī-prātimokṣa, and Ārya-sarvāstivādi-mūla-bhikṣuṇī-prātimokṣa-sūtra-vṛtti). Here too I discuss the unique position of the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya as the only monastic law code preserving frame stories and canonical legal analysis—word-commentaries, casuistries, exception clauses, and discussion of mitigating and aggravating factors—for nuns’ rules which are common to both female and male monastic orders. I also briefly discuss the unique situation of the lack of correspondence between the Tibetan Bhikṣuṇī-vinayavibhaṅga and the Bhikṣuṇī-prātimokṣa, first noted by the Tibetan polymath Bu sTon rin chen grub (1290–1364).

In the third section, I outline the sources used in the present study, and discuss their historical relationships. In the fourth section, I provide an overview of the idiosyncratic numbering system employed in the Tibetan Bhikṣuṇī-vinayavibhaṅga. I also outline one of the key inconsistencies in this text: the fact that the section said to contain 180 pāyantikā rules for nuns contains considerably more than the stated number. In the fifth section, I cite a number of examples of differences between what are ostensibly the same rules in the Tibetan Bhikṣuṇī-vinayavibhaṅga and the Tibetan Bhikṣuṇī-prātimokṣa. In the sixth section, I examine a number of irregularities related to the 72 shared pāyantikā rules for monks and nuns in order to demonstrate the existence of a distinct Bhutanese recension, one which is considerably closer to the normative Mūlasarvāstivādin tradition of the Indian disciplinarian Guṇaprabha (c. 5th–7th cents.) than the text found in other manuscripts and xylographs that are regularly consulted in the study of Indian and Tibetan female monasticism. The conclusion (seventh section) is followed by an Appendix (eighth section) listing details of the twenty-seven witnesses of the Tibetan Bhikṣuṇī-vinayavibhaṅga surveyed herein.

In the study of Buddhism it is commonly accepted that a monk or nun who commits a pārājika offence is permanently and irrevocably expelled from the Buddhist monastic order. This view is based primarily on readings of the Pāli Vinaya. With the exception of the Pāli Vinaya, however, all other extant Buddhist monastic law codes (Dharmaguptaka, Mahāsāṅghika, Mahīśāsaka, Sarvāstivāda and Mūlasarvāstivāda) contain detailed provisions for monks and nuns who commit pārājikas but nevertheless wish to remain within the saṅgha. These monastics are not expelled. Rather, they are granted a special status known as the śikṣādattaka. In this paper I explore the rules concerning pārājika penance and the śikṣādattaka with specific regard to monastic celibacy. Given that five out of six extant law codes recognise this remarkable accommodation to the rule of celibacy, I argue that we must look to Vinayas other than the Pāli Vinaya if we are to arrive at a nuanced and representative view of Indian Buddhist monasticism.

It has been claimed that Indian Buddhism, as opposed to East Asian Chan/Zen traditions, was somehow against humour. In this paper I contend that humour is discernible in canonical Indian Buddhist texts, particularly in Indian Buddhist monastic law codes (Vinaya). I will attempt to establish that what we find in these texts sometimes is not only humorous but that it is intentionally so. I approach this topic by comparing different versions of the same narratives preserved in Indian Buddhist monastic law codes.

Indian Buddhist monks and nuns who commit pārājika offences are generally deemed to be asaṃvāsa (“not in communion”). In this paper I question the simplistic equation of asaṃvāsa with “expulsion.” I discuss the case of a matricide monk who, having been expelled, went down the road and set up a new monastery. I use this example to throw light on local and translocal aspects of Buddhist monastic ordination, suggesting that asaṃvāsa may refer not to a loss of communion from the Saṅgha of the Four Quarters, but from a specific, local monastic community.

Kūkai’s (774–835) curriculum for the education of Shingon monks broke away from Japanese religious orthodoxy by rejecting the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya or Vinaya in Four Parts (四分律) traditionally studied in East Asia in favor of another Indian tradition that had only just been introduced into China a century earlier: the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya. Kūkai’s admonitions, however, appear to have fallen on deaf ears, at least until the Tokugawa period. In the Tokugawa period two Shingon scholar-monks—Myōzui 妙瑞 (1696–1764) and Gakunyo 學如 (1716–1773)—turned their attention back to Kūkai, the founder of their tradition. When Myōzui and Gakunyo realised that their lineage had been ignoring Kūkai’s instructions on monastic discipline for nearly one thousand years, these monks advocated a revival of Kūkai’s monastic curriculum. Revival attempts, however, were to meet with  erce opposition, and a series of monastic debates ensued, debates which continued well into the Meiji period.  e present paper is an attempt to survey the sources for this revival movement, tracing the Mūlasarvāstivāda tradition down through the Tokugawa and Meiji periods and beyond, reaching the somewhat unexpected conclusion that this monastic tradition is still alive in present-day Japan.