the vinaya texts that we have say very little about med-
itation and allow very little room for its practice. They
are equally chary of radical ASCETIC PRACTICES. This
literature—and we have a very great deal of it—is con-
cerned with maintaining and promoting a successful
institution.
The extent of vinaya literature
The vinaya literature that has survived is enormous
and still very little studied. It is commonly said that
the vinayas of six Buddhist orders or schools have
come down to us. Apart, however, from small frag-
ments in Sanskrit from Central Asian manuscript
finds, and the shortest section called the PRATIMOKSA,
the vinayas of four of these orders—the
MAHASAMGHIKA, Sarvastivada, DHARMAGUPTAKA, and
MAHIS ́ASAKA—have survived exclusively in Chinese
translations. The Mulasarvastivada-vinayahas fared
better: Large parts of it are available in a relatively early
Sanskrit manuscript, large parts in a Chinese transla-
tion, and what may be the whole of it in a very literal
Tibetan translation. The vinaya of the THERAVADAor-
der, finally, is preserved entirely in Pali, an Indian lan-
guage, but scholars now agree that it too is a
“translation” from some more original version.
At least two points, however, need to be noted in
regard to all these vinayas. We do not know if any of
these vinayas are complete because we do not actually
know what a complete vinaya is. Until very recently
the Theravada or Pali Vinaya,even though it was
redacted in Sri Lanka, was taken as a model of what a
complete vinaya in India would have looked like. Now,
however, as the other vinayas are becoming better
known, this has become problematic, and it is begin-
ning to appear that the Pali Vinayais missing some
potentially old sections that are found elsewhere under
titles such as Nidana(introductions) or Matrka(ma-
trices). This remains to be worked out, but the other
important thing that needs to be noted is that none of
the vinayas as we have them is early. The four vinayas
preserved only in Chinese were all translated in the
fifth century and consequently can represent only what
these vinayas had become by that time—they do not
necessarily tell us anything about what they looked like
before then. The shape of the Theravada-vinayatoo
cannot be taken back prior to the fifth century—its ac-
tual contents can only be dated from BUDDHAGHOSA’s
roughly fifth-century commentary on it, and even then
both this commentary and the canonical text are
known almost exclusively only on the basis of ex-
tremely late (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century)
manuscripts. The Mulasarvastivada-vinaya was not
translated into Chinese until the eighth century, and
into Tibetan only in the ninth, but it is the only vinaya
for which we have significant amounts of actual man-
uscript material from, perhaps, the fifth, sixth, or sev-
enth centuries. Regardless, then, of how one looks at
it, the material we now have represents vinaya litera-
ture in a uniformly late stage of its development, and
it can tell us very richly what it had become, and very
poorly what it had earlier been.The structure of vinaya literature
Perhaps not surprisingly almost all of these late vinayas
look alike in broad outline. Almost all are, or were,
structured in the same way and have basically the same
component parts or sections. The shortest section, and
the one that most scholars consider to be the oldest, is
called the Pratimoksa,a term that has been interpreted
in a variety of ways. The Pratimoksais a list of graded
offenses that begins with the most serious and contin-
ues with groups of offenses that are of lesser and lesser
severity. The number of offenses for monks differs
somewhat from order to order, the longest list (Sar-
vastivada) contains 263, the shortest (Mahasamghika)
has 218, but all use the same system of classification
into named groups.
The most serious offenses, in the order given, are
unchastity (in a startling variety of ways), theft, inten-
tionally taking human life or instigating the taking of
a life, and claiming to have religious attainments or su-
pernatural powers that one does not have. The last of
these is, of course, the only one that is unique to Bud-
dhist vinaya, and is one that could have been a source
of considerable friction and disruption for the com-
munal life. It involved monks claiming a full under-
standing and perception of truths that they did not
have; claims to stages of meditations and psychic pow-
ers that had not been achieved; and, interestingly,
claims of regular and close relationships with DIVINI-
TIESand a host of local spirits.
These four offenses are called parajikas,a term com-
monly translated as “defeats,” and it is still commonly
asserted that the commission of any one of these by a
bhiksu or bhiksunlresulted in his or her immediate
and definitive expulsion from the order. This, how-
ever, was almost certainly not the case in India. Every
vinaya except the Pali Vinayacontains clear rules and
ritual procedures that allowed a bhiksu (and it seems
a bhiksunl) who had committed a parajikato remain
a member of the community, at a reduced status to be
sure, but still with many of the rights and privileges ofVINAYA