One Vinaya, Passed Down into Five Houses

3.2 One Vinaya, Passed Down into Five Houses

From the last years of the Eastern Jin to the first years of the Liu-Song—a bare twenty-odd years—Chinese soil saw four broad Vinayas translated, one upon another.

In the Hongshi years of the Later Qin, the Shisonglü—the Sarvāstivāda Vinaya—was translated first, at Chang'an (Puṇyatara, Kumārajīva, and others, beginning in 404); then Buddhayaśas and Zhu Fonian translated the Sifenlü, the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya (410 to 413); on the Eastern Jin side, Buddhabhadra and Faxian translated the Mohesengqilü, the Vinaya of the Mahāsāṅghika (416 to 418)—its Sanskrit text the very one Faxian had carried home from India himself; a few years more, and the Liu-Song's Buddhajīva, Zhu Daosheng, and others translated the Wufenlü, the Mahīśāsaka Vinaya (beginning in 423). Four broad Vinayas, four schools, arriving in China on each other's heels. Add the Vinaya-piṭaka that the southern Theravāda had kept all along in Pāli, and the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya that Yijing would bring back from India and translate three centuries later—and of the one Vinaya the Buddha established, what lay in view were five or six houses of transmission.

Out of this grows a question anyone would ask: which one is the real one?

What this chapter has to say is: that question is asked wrong. The right way to ask is—across these recensions, where do they agree to the letter, and where does each go its own way? Draw up those two lists, and the answer floats up of itself.

The Shared Core, Not Moved by a Thread

First, the part that agrees to the letter.

First, the skeleton. The bhikkhu precepts fall into eight categories, and the order is the same in every house: Pārājika (defeats), Saṅghādisesa (formal-meeting offenses), Aniyata (indefinite cases), Nissaggiya-pācittiya (relinquishment-and-confession), Pācittiya (confession), Pāṭidesanīya (to be confessed), Sekhiya (training observances), Adhikaraṇa-samatha (settling disputes)—from the gravest root offenses, down through everyday deportment, to the procedures for stilling disputes, one line all the way down, and not one house has ever disturbed the sequence. The order in which Mahākassapa asked at the First Council—where did it first arise, who first committed it, category by category—stands in the five houses exactly as it stood.

Second, the breath. "Recited fortnightly, coming into the recitation"—the institution of the fortnightly recitation is common to every house. The format of the recitation, the set form of asking at the close of each category, "In this, are you pure?"—the same, house after house.

Third, the root. The gravest class, the Pārājikas, number four for bhikkhus—unchastity, theft, killing, and the great lie—in all five houses not one more, not one fewer. And the first of them, everywhere, is the one laid down at Vesālī over Sudinna.

Skeleton, breath, root—these three traveled the whole world and never moved by a thread.

Branches and Leaves, Each Growing Its Own

Now the part that differs.

The counts differ. The Sifenlü of the Chinese tradition has two hundred fifty bhikkhu precepts; the Pāli recension has two hundred twenty-seven; the other houses each diverge again. Where does the difference lie? In the light and fine-grained items—the Sekhiya observances of deportment, where one house records a few more and another a few fewer.

The arrangements differ. The Mohesengqilü has, beyond the eight categories, a ninth heading of its own, called "Dharma-conformity" (dharma-anudharma)—no other house has it. Within the single Mūlasarvāstivāda school, the Vinaya texts likewise divide into two manners of writing: part of the corpus arranged article by article, part narrated story by story—one household, two voices.

How should these differences be read? Go back to the last chapter and it becomes plain: the Vinaya was a law grown from cases. When case law travels to different places and meets different events, its records run fuller here and sparer there, and its arrangements follow each compiler's hand—this is, by nature, the proof that it is alive. Had the five houses agreed to the letter, that would be the suspicious thing—it would mean the law had long since died and become a stele no one uses. The shared core unmoved, the branches each growing their own: these are precisely the footprints a living law leaves after walking through five lands.

Thirteen Hundred Years Ago, Someone Already Saw This Clearly

To spread the several Vinayas open and read them against one another, to discern shared core and divergent branches—this did not have to wait for people of our own day. The Vinaya masters of China did it thirteen hundred years ago.

In the Tang, the Vinaya master Daoxuan, commenting on the Sifenlü, never had only one text on his desk: the Mahāsāṅghika; the Dharmaguptaka (the Sifenlü); the Sarvāstivāda (the Shisonglü); the Mahīśāsaka (the Wufenlü)—the authentic recensions of the several schools, he counted them one by one and read them against each other at every point. He relied on the Sifenlü; his eyes held all the schools.

A little later came the Tripiṭaka master Yijing, who went further—he went in person. Yijing lived at Nālandā for more than twenty years, saw with his own eyes how the Saṅghas of India actually practiced the Vinaya, and came home to write the Nanhai jigui neifa zhuan, his record of the Dharma as he had seen it practiced in India and the southern seas. On the Vinaya scholarship of Chinese soil he left one very blunt verdict:

"On Chinese soil the Vinaya-holding schools pull on one another's recensions, and so the houses of exposition and compilation have made their commentaries and excerpts entangled and disorderly."

Chinese Vinaya practice, that is: the articles of the several schools tangling with one another, the annotations growing thicker by the year. What, then, is to be done? His remedy was a single sentence:

"If one verifies by the Vinaya text itself, it is not so; for judgments of light and heavy, a few lines of text suffice."

Go back to the Vinaya text itself and verify. To judge the weight of a matter, a few lines of the original are enough—no need to go in circles inside mountains of commentary. And in passing, Yijing corrected a misunderstanding current in his day: many took the Shisonglü to be the very Vinaya of the Mūlasarvāstivāda; he said no—those are two houses, each with its own transmission.

Daoxuan's reading across the schools, Yijing's verifying by the Vinaya text—together they show one thing: to set the several recensions calmly side by side, discerning their agreements and differences without contending over rank, was the Chinese Vinaya school's own way of seeing, not something anyone taught us. That China came to confer the precepts and conduct its affairs by the Sifenlü is the road history walked; to rely on one house while honoring them all, with all the houses bearing joint witness to one shared core—that is the family manner the Vinaya masters left behind.

What the Shared Core Is

Last, name the shared core outright.

What the five houses have kept unmoved—the skeleton of the eight categories, the breath of the fortnight, the four root precepts—is, in the end, one and the same thing: the ten purposes of the last chapter, above all their final clause, the long-enduring presence of the true Dharma. Articles may be added or subtracted; arrangements may run full or spare; but the heart of it—to embrace the Saṅgha by the precepts, that the true Dharma may long endure—in this the five houses are not two. So the five recensions are not five Vinayas; they are five garments of the same one Vinaya—the garments cut differently, the same body inside.

And yet the divergence of recensions is, in the end, a matter of branches and leaves; however far apart they grew, the parting was amicable. In the Saṅgha's history there were two storms of another order altogether—in one, a man drew five hundred bhikkhus away and set up his own house; in the other, seven hundred elders gathered at Vesālī to judge ten practices. One broke; one deliberated.

The next chapter tells of these two storms—and of what they left behind.