VINAYA: from india to china 179
the original disciplinary rules—as one could still nd them in India—had
to be emphasised. He took the Mlasarvstivdavinaya as a basis. By
doing so, Yijing never said that the other vinayas were less valuable. To
Yijing, the only important fact was that one followed one, unspoiled
vinaya.^76 His own preference for the Mlasarvstivdavinaya seems to rely
mainly on two facts. First of all, because of his long stay in Nland,
he had become an expert of the Mlasarvstivdavinaya, and secondly,
this Indian vinaya had not yet been spoiled by any Chinese commentar-
ies and interpretations. Despite the translation of Yijing, however, the
Mlasarvstivdavinaya did not become popular in the Chinese monaster-
ies. Instead, as we will see further, it was the Dharmaguptakavinaya that
with the help of an imperial edict issued by the Emperor Zhongzong
(r. 705–710), conquered the whole of China.^77
3.3. The Origin of the Northern VinayasThe above has shown that in China, there were mainly two centres of
vinaya translation: Chang’an (Xi’an) in the north, and Jiankang (Nanjing)
in the south. As for the origin and the original languages of the Indian
vinayas translated into Chinese, the information is generally rather scarce.
Some scholars have tried to gain some more knowledge by analysing
the phonetic renderings used in the translations of these texts. A serious
dif culty for this kind of study is the cumulative tradition of standard
terms that were passed down from translator to translator and that
therefore do not testify the linguistic situation of the text in which they
(^76) Yijing underlines that each tradition equally leads to nirva, but that the precepts
of the different schools should not be intermingled (T.2125.54.205b28–c6).
(^77) It is not impossible that the Empress Wu Zetian (r. 690–705) had in mind using
the newly arrived vinaya to her advantage (personal communication of the late Professor
Forte, Napoli). Yijing was indeed closely linked to the imperial court of Wu Zetian, and
after his return from India in 695, he resided in the most important dynastic monastery,
the Da Fuxian Si in the capital Luoyang. This monastery had been founded
by Wu Zetian, and was a centre of translation and propaganda for the empress. It
also had an ordination platform (Forte 1983, p. 695). It is thus not impossible that the
empress might have thought to use the Mlasarvstivdavinaya for her own purposes,
converting China into a Buddhist state (see Forte 1976; 1992, pp. 219–231). But time
was not on her side. Although a M lasarvstivda karmavcan (set of procedures) and
a vinayavibhaga (list of rules and their commentary) for monks had been translated by
703, the translation of the Mlasarvstivdavinaya as a whole was nished only after Wu
Zetian’s death in 705 (see Yuyama 1979, pp. 12–33; Matsumura 1996, pp. 171–173).
Nonetheless, the relation between her imperial court and the use of certain vinaya texts,
remains an intriguing subject for further research.