Practice · DānaVolume TwoPart III · Vinaya SchoolsPaper 10 of 31

The Emergence of Abhayadāna

中文主題：無畏施的出現

Author: Shi Huijing 釋慧鏡

Date: Spring 2026

Version: 1.0

ID: DANA-P10

Abstract

Western moral traditions classify "not killing" as a prohibition — a negative duty. Early Buddhism's mid-fifth-century Chinese translation window reclassifies the same act as a gift: abhayadāna. This paper argues the reclassification is neither extension nor accident but the product of two structural asymmetries. First, a millennium-long substance–name asymmetry: the substance of abhayadāna is already fully operative in the Nikāya/Āgama strata (the five precepts reframed as pañca mahādānāni in AN 9.20 and its direct Ekottara parallel at T0125 juan 20 Bhadrika the householder) and in the Vinaya institutions (the monastic vihāra idiomatically called "the city where fearlessness is given" thrice in T1442; the rain-retreat origin story grounded in non-harming to small creatures, preserved in four of the five Chinese vinayas as a pre-schismatic common ancestor), yet the name abhayadāna does not crystallize as a taxonomic category until Kumārajīva's T1509 (~405 CE) and Dharmakṣema's T1488 (~425 CE). Second, an axis-switch: the Nikāya dāna taxonomy is ordered by who receives (MN 142's fourteen recipients); the fifth-century triad is ordered by what is given; abhayadāna is the first specimen on the new axis, not an extension of the old. And the third slot is born at the śīla/dāna interface — T1509 places the triad not in the dāna-pāramitā chapter but in the śīla-pāramitā chapter (juan 14, T25.163b), showing that abhayadāna is precept-qua-gift reclassification. The paper closes by handing off to P11: if abhayadāna is the third slot, how does the triad get restructured by śūnyatā under the dāna-pāramitā system?

I. Framing

In a recension of the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya transmitted some twenty-five centuries after its recorded events, a pursuer asks a household where their man has gone. The answer comes back: "He is among the Śākyan recluses." The household replies with a rhetorical question: "Is that place the city where fearlessness is given (abhayapuradāna)? I shall go there and deal with him by law, doing the unprofitable deed."¹ The same rhetorical counter-move recurs three times in the same vinaya — in fascicle 6, as a householder reports to his wife; in fascicle 28, as one man reports to his friend; and in fascicle 38, in an inverted re-use within a prophecy-formula ("the first Tathāgata named Dharma-drum-sound, the second named the Fearlessness-Giving Tathāgata").² The rhetorical structure of the counter-move repays close reading. The pursuer negates the monastic vihāra's status as a sanctuary against pursuit; and the negation must take the form of a rhetorical question precisely because "the city where fearlessness is given" is already a settled idiom in the surrounding lay society. Only a presupposed commonplace can be answered by counter-assertion in the interrogative mood. Before the pursuer's negation supervenes, the monastic vihāra is indeed, in the social imagination, a city in which fearlessness is given.

This idiom is the paper's entry-point. A city does not give. A city receives. What logic, then, makes a particular space into a giver of "fearlessness"? In the early vinaya, the entity named in this way is a body of real property — the cātuddisa saṅgha holdings, the class-beneficiary institutional instrument that P09 established as the DĀNA volume's first structural landing — invested by social imagination with the function of "giving fearlessness." The idiom operates stably in vinaya narrative, in lay speech, even in the prophecy-formula for future Buddhas, and yet it is nowhere in the Nikāya / Āgama or the vinaya proper named as "a class of dāna." The question the paper takes up follows from this: when "giving fearlessness" is already a commonplace social idiom, when the pañca-sīla abstention from killing, the Pārājika 3 rule on homicide, and the vassūpanāyika (rain-retreat) institution are all fully operative in their institutional proto-forms, why does the category name abhayadāna have to wait until the mid-fifth-century Chinese translation window of Kumārajīva and Dharmakṣema before it crystallizes as a formal taxonomic slot?

The obverse of this question is the implicit assumption a contemporary Western reader brings to the early Buddhist corpus. The Western moral tradition — from the Decalogue through to Kantian Pflichtenlehre — treats "not killing" as a prohibition: a negative duty, a bounding edge, an action withheld. Early Buddhism's mid-fifth-century naming act reclassifies the same action — the keeping of the precept of non-killing — as a gift: a positive giving. What the classificatory move changes is not the content of the action but its moral topology — who is the giver, who is the receiver, which direction does the act run, and under what category is it stored in the moral memory. The paper's central thesis is cast from this observation. The reclassification's enabling logic is one face: a millennium-long substance–name asymmetry, in which the Nikāya / Āgama and vinaya layers are substantively complete while the name is absent, and the fifth-century Chinese translation window crystallizes the name. Its other face is: a taxonomic axis-switch, in which the Nikāya dāna taxonomy is ordered by "who receives" (recipient-axis) and the fifth-century triad is ordered by "what is given" (content-axis); the third slot (abhayadāna) is not an extension of the old axis but the first specimen on the new. And the third slot on the new axis does not emerge by internal expansion within the dāna category; it is derived at the śīla/dāna interface — T1509 Dà zhìdù lùn 《大智度論》 places the first systematic appearance of the triad not in its dāna-pāramitā chapters but in its śīla-pāramitā chapter (juan 14)³, and this location is itself the philological proof that abhayadāna is a precept-qua-gift reclassification.

This observation carries forward from P09. There, the paper read the institutionalization of cātuddisa saṅgha property as the first landing of Part III's volume-thesis: how the self-loosening of ahaṃkāra (I-making) in material giving is first inscribed at the legal layer. P10 now turns to the earliest structure of non-material giving — when there is nothing material to transfer and no legal dative to suspend, how does abhayadāna happen as a gift at all? The vinaya's answer lies in the institutional skeleton — Pārājika 3 combined with the pācittiya on taking animal life, the rule on water-with-living-creatures, and the four branches of the rain-retreat. The answer from the Mahāyāna commentarial tradition lies in the crystallization of the three-gift triad. Between the two layers lies a millennium's gap, and that gap is itself the structure of emergence: emergence is not a generation from nothing, but a crossing from latent structure to named surface.

§II lays down five strata of evidence: the Āgama substance-anchor, the Āgama mechanism-anchor, the vinaya institutional-anchor, the naming-absence anchor, and the dual-track crystallization-moment anchor. §III unfolds the core argument in four layers — the closure of the recipient-axis, the three-stratum completeness of the substance, interface-derivation, and the philosophical stakes of the axis-switch. §IV opens a dual-track cross-disciplinary conversation with Kantian universalizability and Wittgensteinian rule-following. §V addresses three misreadings and two cross-disciplinary cautions. §VI restates the essentials, offers the practical implication, and hands off to P11 From Dāna to Dāna-pāramitā.

II. Canonical Sources

This section lays out evidence in five strata corresponding to the four-layer core argument of §III. Following the dual-track discipline of the NIAN-A and DĀNA volumes, every passage that belongs to the Nikāya / Āgama stratum is cited with both the Taishō number (Chinese transmission) and the PTS reference (Pāli); Pāli materials use Bhikkhu Sujato's CC0 rendering and the Mahāsaṅgīti edition; Chinese materials are cited by Taishō volume and fascicle, with blockquoted originals followed by my own English rendering beneath. Italicized Pāli / Sanskrit terms carry a Chinese gloss on first occurrence, then stand alone.

2.1 The Āgama Substance-Anchor

The clearest Pāli precursor to the structural content of abhayadāna is preserved at AN 9.20 Velāmasutta (PTS AN iv 393). The Buddha takes as his starting point his own previous life as the brahmin Velāma and the vast material offering Velāma made (eighty-four thousand golden bowls, and so on); he then lays out an ascending sequence of meritorious acts, each greater than the last. To feed a single stream-enterer is greater than Velāma's total gift; to feed the Buddha at the head of the saṅgha is greater than feeding a stream-enterer; to build a dwelling for the cātuddisa saṅgha is greater than feeding the Buddha at the head of the saṅgha; to go for refuge to the Three Jewels with a heart of pure faith is greater than building a dwelling; and — at the summit — to undertake the five training rules (sikkhāpadāni samādiyati) — to abstain from killing, from taking what is not given, from sexual misconduct, from false speech, and from intoxicants — is greater than going for refuge.⁴

The structural decisiveness of this ranking lies in its verdict: the keeping of the five training rules is placed higher than every form of material giving and every act of refuge-taking. At AN 9.20 the verdict is already fixed. What AN 8.39 Abhisaṇḍasutta adds is only the lexicalizing move — the same act of precept-keeping is re-named pañca mahādānāni (the five great gifts), with explicit gloss: this "great gift" is precisely the giving, to immeasurable beings, of abhayaṃ dadāti (freedom from fear), averaṃ dadāti (freedom from enmity), and abyāpajjaṃ dadāti (freedom from injury). The entire weight of the ranking (five precepts > material gift) is already carried by AN 9.20; AN 8.39 completes only the act of naming.

This ranking has a direct Chinese parallel. T0125 Zēngyī āhán jīng 《增一阿含經》 juan 20 — the Bhadrika-the-householder chapter 〈跋提長者品〉 — preserves the nearest Ekottara-parallel to AN 8.39 in the episode of Maudgalyāyana guiding the householder Bhadrika:

「如來說二施，法施及財施，今當說法施，專心一意聽。」……目連報言：「長者當知，如來說五事大施，盡形壽當念修行。」……「一者不得殺生，此名為大施，長者！當盡形壽修行之。二者不盜，名為大施，當盡形壽修行。不婬、不妄語、不飲酒，當盡形壽而修行之。是謂，長者！有此五大施，當念修行。」⁵

"The Tathāgata teaches two kinds of giving: the gift of Dharma and the gift of material things. I shall now speak of the gift of Dharma — listen single-mindedly." [...] Maudgalyāyana said: "Householder, know that the Tathāgata teaches five great gifts (五事大施), which you should keep in mind and practice for as long as life endures." [...] "First, not killing — this is called a great gift; householder, practice it for as long as life endures. Second, not taking what is not given — this is called a great gift; practice it for as long as life endures. Not engaging in sexual misconduct, not speaking falsely, not taking intoxicants — these are to be practiced for as long as life endures. These, householder, are the five great gifts; keep them in mind and practice them." (translation mine)

The structural key to this passage is that the "five great gifts" (五事大施 — i.e., pañca mahādānāni) and the "two gifts" (dhammadāna plus āmiṣadāna) are juxtaposed but not integrated. Maudgalyāyana first lays out the two-gift system; he then adds the five great gifts as a reinforcing statement of what "the great gift" actually consists in. The five precepts are identified here as a great gift, but they are not explicitly absorbed into the two-gift system as a third slot. This un-integrated state is the perfect specimen of substance-before-name: the abhayadāna content of the five precepts is fully available at the ethical level (keeping the precepts is giving fearlessness to every being one meets), but the taxonomy has not yet crystallized the name.

2.2 The Āgama Mechanism-Anchor

The internal mechanics of this substantively complete substrate are visible in three passages from the Saṃyuktāgama (T0099, the Sarvāstivāda recension). The Saṃyuktāgama at juan 30 sūtra 845 (SĀ 845, parallel to SN 12.41 Pañcaverabhaya and AN 10.92 Verasutta) is titled "the five quenchings of the enmity-producing fears" and makes the causal link between the five precepts and fear explicit:

「若殺生因緣罪怨對恐怖生，若離殺生者，彼殺生罪怨對因緣生恐怖休息。若偷盜、邪婬、妄語、飲酒罪怨對因緣生恐怖；彼若離偷盜、邪婬、妄語、飲酒罪怨對者，因緣恐怖休息，是名罪怨對因緣生五恐怖休息。」⁶

"If, by the causal condition of killing, the fear of offense-and-enmity arises — then for one who abstains from killing, the fear arising by the causal condition of the offense-and-enmity of killing is quenched. The fears arising by the causal conditions of the offense-and-enmity of stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech, and intoxicants — for one who abstains from these, the fears arising from those causal conditions are quenched. This is called the quenching of the five fears that arise by the causal condition of offense-and-enmity." (translation mine)

SĀ 845 preserves the mechanical side of the five precepts (abstention from killing → the causally-linked fear of enmity is quenched) and records in full the receiving-side structure of abhayadāna — the quenching of the fivefold fear is the condition of the recipient's fearlessness — but it never names this as "dāna."

T0099 juan 37 sūtra 1044 (SĀ 1044, parallel to SN 55.7 Veḷudvāreyyā) provides the ethical-reasoning side: the method of attupanāyika — applying the case to oneself, the reflective analogy that moves from one's own experience to the experience of others:

「我作是念：『若有欲殺我者，我不喜；我若所不喜，他亦如是。云何殺彼？』作是覺已，受不殺生，不樂殺生。」⁷

"I reflect thus: 'If someone were to want to kill me, I would not be pleased. What is unwelcome to me is unwelcome to another. How then should I kill him?' Having understood this, I undertake non-killing, and I do not take pleasure in killing." (translation mine)

The passage re-reads the five precepts as not a "list of rules" but as action-limitations that follow naturally from the reverse analogy of one's own experience: I do not wish to be harmed; neither does he; therefore I do not harm him. This reasoning already contains the directional structure of "giving" in embryo — if the other fears death as I do, my non-killing confers upon him the assurance of freedom from being killed by me. This is the moral-metaphysical precursor of abhayadāna. Yet SĀ 1044 still closes the passage with "these seven are called the noble precepts" (如是七種，名為聖戒)⁸, reaffirming: the conceptual substrate is fully in place, but the step of naming as dāna has not yet been taken.

T0099 juan 43 sūtra 1039 (the Cunda-sūtra) preserves the fullest ahiṃsā pericope in the Chinese definition of the five precepts: "abstains from killing, having laid down the rod and the weapon, with conscience and with a heart of compassion for all living beings" (不殺生，離殺生，捨刀杖，慚愧，悲念一切眾生).⁹ The four-fold unfolding — abstention from killing, laying aside weapon, conscience, compassion for all beings — maps directly onto the Pāli formula nihita-daṇḍa nihita-sattha … sabbapāṇabhūta-hitānukampī. "Compassion for all beings" is precisely the subjective face of the "fearlessness" that abhayadāna transmits (not-to-cause-fear-by-my-very-existence); yet the passage remains a description of precept-conduct, never crowned with the term dāna.

2.3 The Vinaya Institutional-Anchor

The third stratum of evidence moves from the Āgamas into the vinaya corpus, where the pre-schismatic common ancestor has left its hardest trace. The origin-story of the rain-retreat is attested in four of the five Chinese vinayas — T1428 Sìfēn lǜ 《四分律》 juan 37, T1435 Shísòng lǜ 《十誦律》 juan 24, T1421 Wǔfēn lǜ 《五分律》 juan 19, and T1425 Móhē sēngqí lǜ 《摩訶僧祇律》 juan 27 — with phrasing that differs in detail but converges in structure.¹⁰ The origin is grounded neither in climate nor in soteriological retreat-practice but directly in the non-harming of small creatures:

T1428: "Even heterodox practitioners observe a three-month retreat. Yet these Śākyan sons wander among men in spring, summer, and winter alike. The heavy rains have come and the waters are in flood; […] they tread upon living grasses and sever the lives of other beings. Even insects and birds have nests and lairs in which they remain …"¹¹

T1435: "The bhikkhus in the summer months wander through the countries, treading down living grasses and taking the lives of living creatures. […] From now on, they should observe the summer retreat."¹²

T1421: "Constantly we are told to have few desires and to guard all beings with a heart of compassionate care; yet now they trample without any heart of mercy. This is not the conduct of a śramaṇa; this is the breaking of the śramaṇa-Dharma!"¹³

T1425: "Even the ninety-six kinds of wanderers know how to take up a retreat — just as birds take shelter in their nests and remain. Yet the Śākyan sons, who proclaim themselves good and wholesome, do not observe a retreat."¹⁴ (all translations mine)

Among the four, T1421 Wǔfēn lǜ presents the most direct textual line connecting the rain-retreat to compassion as such ("constantly we are told to have few desires and to guard all beings with a heart of compassionate care"). The rhetorical move across all four is uniform: heterodox ascetics and even birds and small creatures know to retreat during the rains so as to protect small lives; the saṅgha, by contrast, has been injuring small creatures by travelling through the rainy season — and so the Buddha institutes the three-month retreat. The Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya (T1442) at this juncture reorganizes its presentation, distributing the compassion-grounded rationale into the neighbouring training-rule on water-with-living-creatures (juan 30)¹⁵; but the underlying narrative motive is unchanged.

The institutional significance of the rain-retreat rule is decisive: the institutional substance of abhayadāna is pre-schismatic. The "small differences in wording, full identity in structure" across the five vinayas meets the standard criterion, in vinaya text-critical practice, for a pre-sectarian common ancestor. Three further abhaya-adjacent rules operate in parallel with the rain-retreat: Pārājika 3 (the rule against taking human life, attested in all five vinayas, its origin-story grounded in the sixty bhikkhus of Vesālī who, after mis-directed foulness-of-the-body meditation, took their own lives or had Migalaṇḍika the mendicant kill them)¹⁶; the pācittiya rule against taking animal life (T1428 juan 16, T1435 juan 16, T1421 juan 8)¹⁷; and the rule against using water with living creatures — paired with the water-strainer allowance — whose origin-narrative is preserved around the same Chanda / Chandaka protagonist across two sectarian recensions (T1435 juan 11 and T1442 juan 30)¹⁸. Taken together, these four rules constitute the daily spatial operationalization of abhayadāna across the monastic routine.

One further passage deserves attention: the single direct enumeration of "abhayadāna" in the main body of the five vinayas, preserved at T1435 juan 44 in the Bhikkhunī-vastu. A past-life Buddha-figure announces: "I have given you food, firewood, lamps, clothing — and fearlessness" (我與汝等飲食、薪草、燈燭、衣服及無畏施).¹⁹ This is the sole instance of abhayadāna as a category-term in the main vinaya body across all five recensions; yet even here, its context is a jātaka-narrative enunciation by a past-life Buddha, the phrase functioning as a conventional coordinate-listing rather than as a rule-formulation term. The location of this lone instance (jātaka narrative, not rule-body) provides its own counter-evidence: the vinaya, at the level of its rules, never names abhayadāna. The institutional substance is in place; the classificatory name is still absent at this layer.

2.4 The Naming-Absence Anchor

The fourth stratum of evidence is naming-absence itself: in the most mature dāna-taxonomies of the Nikāya / Āgama corpus, abhayadāna still does not exist. MN 142 Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅgasutta (PTS MN iii 253) has its Chinese parallel at T0026 Zhōng āhán jīng 《中阿含經》 juan 47, the Gautamī-sūtra 《瞿曇彌經》, which preserves the most structurally complete early dāna-taxonomy in Chinese translation:

「復次，阿難！有七施眾，有十四私施，得大福，得大果，得大功德，得大廣報……有信族姓男、族姓女布施如來，施緣一覺，施阿羅訶，施向阿羅訶……布施畜生。阿難！布施畜生得福百倍，施不精進人得福千倍……復次，阿難！有四種布施，三淨施。」²⁰

"Further, Ānanda, there are seven kinds of giving to the saṅgha and fourteen kinds of giving to individuals; [such gifts] yield great merit, great fruit, great quality, and a great and wide reward. […] There are gifts made by a faithful man or woman of good family: giving to the Tathāgata, giving to a pratyekabuddha, giving to an arhat, giving to one on the path to arhatship, […] giving to an animal. Ānanda, giving to an animal yields merit a hundredfold; giving to an unstriving person yields merit a thousandfold. […] Further, Ānanda, there are four kinds of giving, three kinds of purified giving." (translation mine)

The absence in this passage is decisive: there is no abhayadāna category. The verse-section makes the point sharper still: "to give as one detached from craving, to one detached from craving — this is the foremost gift of material things" — the summit-position is occupied by the highest form of material giving, not by a separate fearlessness-giving along another axis. MN 142 and T0026 juan 47 organize their taxonomy by the recipient (seven categories of saṅgha, fourteen categories of individual, four combinations of purity-and-impurity of giver-and-receiver), not by the content of the gift. The axis itself is closed: there is no operational room for a third (content) axis.

T0152 Liù dù jí jīng 《六度集經》 (translated by Kāng Sēnghuì 康僧會, Wu dynasty, ca. 251 CE) offers the most precise specimen of "substance complete, name absent." This corpus is the earliest Chinese anthology of jātaka-tales (bĕnshēng 本生), collecting dozens of narratives in which kings sacrifice their lives to save others, deer-kings take the place of the condemned, bodhisattvas give away their bodies, and so on. The narrative substance of abhayadāna is here abundant. Yet across all eight fascicles, the character-strings wúwèi-shī 無畏施 and shī-wúwèi 施無畏 never appear: zero hits. All these narratives are classified under the single category bùshī dù wújí zhāng 〈布施度無極章〉 ("The Chapter on the Perfection of Giving without Limit").²¹ This precise misalignment between the fullness of the narrative and the nothingness of the category-name is the most exact philological surface of the paper's thesis.

The broader negative evidence across the Āgama corpus reinforces the point: across the complete four-Āgama collection (T0001 Dīrgha, T0026 Madhyama, T0099 Saṃyukta, T0125 Ekottara, T0100 the second Saṃyukta recension) — more than a hundred and fifty fascicles in total — the classificatory term abhayadāna yields zero hits. The closest single approximation is T0099 juan 40 sūtra 1108 (SĀ 1108), in a passage involving the asura king Vepacitti: "The sages have come here to ask the gift of fearlessness; if you can give them fearlessness, you will grant the munificent teaching of the sage."²² But the phrase shī wúwèi 施無畏 here is a verb-object construction (abhayaṃ dadāti — "gives fearlessness"), situated in a verse-narrative rather than a doctrinal classification; the donor is the asura king (being supplicated) and the recipient is the sages (supplicants) — this is not the nominal taxonomic category abhayadāna, but rather a colloquial reflection of the ancient Indian royal idiom of "the king's granting of abhaya." The singleton location of this instance is itself evidence that lexicalization of the term abhayadāna has not yet been completed at the Āgama stratum.

2.5 The Dual-Track Crystallization Moment

The fifth stratum of evidence is the crystallization moment of the name itself. T1509 Dà zhìdù lùn 《大智度論》 (translated by Kumārajīva, Later Qin, ca. 404–406 CE), in juan 14 "Explanation of the Remainder of the Śīla-pāramitā Section" (釋初品中尸羅波羅蜜義之餘), presents the first systematic appearance of the three-gift taxonomy as the answer to a structured question:

「云何持戒能生於檀？檀有三種：一者、財施，二者、法施，三者、無畏施。持戒自撿，不侵一切眾生財物，是名財施。眾生見者，慕其所行，又為說法，令其開悟……如是種種，名為法施。一切眾生皆畏於死，持戒不害，是則無畏施。」²³

"How can the keeping of the precepts give rise to dāna? — Dāna is of three kinds: first, the gift of material things (cái-shī 財施); second, the gift of Dharma (fǎ-shī 法施); third, the gift of fearlessness (wú-wèi-shī 無畏施, abhayadāna). One who keeps the precepts restrains himself and does not infringe upon the possessions of any being — this is called the gift of material things. Those who see him admire his conduct; and he further teaches them the Dharma, awakening them to understanding. […] All such things are called the gift of Dharma. All beings fear death; to keep the precepts and not to harm — this is the gift of fearlessness." (translation mine)

Three features of this passage carry the paper's thesis. First, the triad of gifts does not first appear in the dāna-pāramitā chapters of the treatise (juan 11–12, which operate throughout on the two-gift schema of material-gift plus Dharma-gift)²⁴, but in the śīla-pāramitā chapter, and there only as the answer to a posed question. The framing of the question itself — "how can precept-keeping give rise to dāna?" — presupposes the direction śīla → dāna. Second, the definition of the fearlessness-gift turns on "all beings fear death" (the receiving-side) and "keeping the precepts, not harming" (the giving-side) in tandem; this doubling inherits the logic of AN 8.39 and the T0125 Bhadrika passage's pañca mahādānāni, but here deploys it as a third slot alongside the gifts of material things and Dharma. Third, the definitional substrate of all three gifts is precept-derivative: the gift of material things is defined as not taking what is not given (the second precept); the gift of Dharma is the combination of exemplary precept-keeping and instruction; the gift of fearlessness is non-harming through precept-keeping (the first precept). The structural ground of the triad is śīla, not material object.

T1488 Yōupósāi jiè jīng 《優婆塞戒經》 (Upāsaka-śīla-sūtra, translated by Dharmakṣema, Northern Liang, ca. 421–433 CE) crystallizes the same combination in parallel, with a different ordering and gloss. Its juan 4, Chapter 19 (雜品), reads: "There are also three kinds of giving: first, the gift of Dharma; second, the gift of fearlessness; third, the gift of material things" (復有三施：一、以法施，二、無畏施，三、財物施).²⁵ The ordering (Dharma → fearlessness → material) differs from T1509's (material → Dharma → fearlessness), and T1488 glosses abhayadāna as the external act of rescuing beings from worldly terrors — from kings, lions, tigers, floods, bandits, and so on — in contrast to T1509's internalizing ethical gloss (non-harming through precept-keeping). This independent difference in both order and gloss is significant: the triad is not derived from a single Sanskrit source via a single Chinese translation window, but crystallizes through two independent tracks in the early-fifth-century Chinese translation corpus. This independence is itself evidence that the triad was already a common commentarial framework in the Indian Mahāyāna treatise tradition by that time.

III. Core Argument

This section consolidates the five strata of §II into four layers of argument: the closure of the recipient-axis (§3.1), the completeness of the substance across three strata (§3.2), interface-derivation (§3.3), and the philosophical stakes of the axis-switch (§3.4). The first three layers are philological–structural; the fourth unfolds the philosophical stakes. Together they support the paper's compound thesis: the emergence of abhayadāna is the joint product of the millennium-long substance–name asymmetry and the taxonomic axis-switch from recipient-axis to content-axis, with the name of the third slot born at the śīla/dāna interface.

3.1 The Closure of the Recipient-Axis

The recipient-organized dāna-taxonomy of MN 142 and T0026 juan 47 is not a casual editorial choice. It is a computationally closed system. Its operating rule is: the merit of a gift equals the purity of the giver's cetanā multiplied by the dignity of the recipient (dakkhiṇeyya — the worthy of offering) — two variables, both of them on the recipient side.²⁶ The seven saṅgha-categories are layered by saṅgha-type; the fourteen individual-categories are ranked by attainment (Tathāgata > pratyekabuddha > arhat > one-on-the-path-to-arhatship > … > animal); the four purified-gift categories combine the purity or impurity of giver and recipient into their four possible combinations. Not a single variable pertains to the content of the gift.

This closure is not a lexical gap; it is a structural closure. To introduce "what is given" as a third variable would require re-forging the entire calculus. The system's requirement is: "recipient fixed, gift variable" — and this has no operational space within a taxonomy whose entire equation is recipient × cetanā. AN 8.36 Puññakiriyavatthusutta, with its threefold parallel of dāna (giving), sīla (precept-keeping), and bhāvanā (cultivation)²⁷ — the baseline already treated in P08 — further reinforces the closure: sīla is not a sub-category of dāna; it is a parallel, co-ordinate category. To reclassify the abstention from killing (a sīla item) as one of the pañca mahādānāni (a dāna item) is therefore an intentional transgression of the parallel structure of AN 8.36. The lexicalizing move at AN 8.39 (five precepts = five great gifts) is precisely one step of that transgression: it leaps from the sīla column of the AN 8.36 baseline into the dāna column, and the leap itself makes the point that no absolute boundary separates the two columns in practice — that the recipient-axis's inability to host a third axis is not a practical fact but a limit of the classificatory tool. The Nikāya corpus itself preserves two incompatible taxonomies (the AN 8.36 three-parallel and the AN 8.39 transgressive lexicalization) side by side; this very tension becomes the driving force of later Mahāyāna re-organization.

3.2 Substance-Completeness Across Three Strata

From the closure of the recipient-axis we turn to the completeness of the substance along the content-axis. The substance of abhayadāna — the phenomenon that "the very existence of a precept-keeping person is the giving of fearlessness to all beings" — is fully in place in the early Buddhist Āgama and vinaya corpus along three faces.

The first face, at the level of precept. The five precepts operate with the "quenching of the five enmity-fears" structure articulated in SĀ 845; the very existence of a precept-keeping person causes, along five vectors (of being killed, robbed, violated, deceived, and intoxicated by this person), the quenching of the enmity-arising fears in every being he encounters. The receiving face of this operation is the being's fearlessness; the giving face is the person's action-limitation. SĀ 1044's attupanāyika provides the moral-metaphysical base for the operation: if the other fears death as I do, my non-killing gifts him the assurance of freedom from being killed by me. SĀ 1039's "having laid down the rod and the weapon, with conscience, compassion for all beings" completes the subjective face. Taken together, the three passages show that the complete conceptual substrate of abhayadāna is already in place in the Saṃyuktāgama; only the single step of lexical naming has not yet been taken.

The second face, at the level of institution. The four-vinaya convergence on the rain-retreat's origin-narrative ("even insects and birds have nests in which to shelter") shows that the saṅgha's collective-action boundary is institutionalized on the grounds of non-harming to small creatures. The non-killing of the individual bhikkhu is sīla; the three-month non-movement of the collective saṅgha is institution — the latter is the corporate-level substantialization of abhayadāna. Pārājika 3 raises non-injury of human life to the highest offence-schedule (expulsion from the saṅgha); the pācittiya on taking animal life raises non-injury of animal life to a pāyantika offence; the rule on water-with-living-creatures raises non-injury of microscopic life to an unignorable daily boundary; the rain-retreat raises non-injury-across-a-season to a three-month freeze on collective movement. These four together constitute an institutional network whose base is non-harm to every life-bearing being. Its receiving face (the beings' fearlessness) and its giving face (the saṅgha's action-boundary) are both fully in place; the institutional substance of abhayadāna is wholly operative.

The third face, at the level of social idiom. The thrice-attested "city where fearlessness is given" (abhayapuradāna) idiom of T1442 shows that the monastic vihāra as a law-outside space of non-retaliation was a commonplace of contemporary Indian society — only a presupposed commonplace can be countered in the interrogative mood. This idiom positions the saṅgha's abhayadāna-substance as a known social fact in the lay world.

Taken together, the three faces show the substance of abhayadāna to have been fully operational before the sectarian split — yet at none of the three levels (precept, institution, social idiom) is this substance named as a class of dāna. The T0152 Liù-dù-jí pattern of "narrative present, name absent" is the paper's most precise exhibit: dozens of jātaka-tales packed with "saving beings from terror by the gift of one's own life," all classified under a single undifferentiated category 〈布施度無極章〉²⁸, with zero hits on the term abhayadāna. The juxtaposition of the fullness of the substance and the absence of the name stands here as a single philological fact — and this substance-name gap is itself the structural definition of emergence.

3.3 Interface-Derivation

The third layer of the argument addresses a structural anomaly in the crystallization moment itself: T1509 introduces the three-gift triad not in its dāna-pāramitā chapters (juan 11–12) but in juan 14, the śīla-pāramitā chapter. This location is itself the paper's sharpest philological evidence: the third slot of the triad is not generated by internal expansion within the dāna category; it is derived at the śīla/dāna interface.

T1509's architecture is unambiguous on this point. Juan 11–12, the dāna-pāramitā chapter, operate throughout on the two-gift schema (material-gift + Dharma-gift) and quote the Buddha's saying, "Among the two gifts, the gift of Dharma is superior"²⁹ — a direct inheritance from the Nikāya idiom. It is only in juan 14, the śīla-pāramitā chapter, that the treatise poses the question "how can precept-keeping give rise to dāna?" and generates the triad as the answer. The directionality of "can give rise to" (能生) is the key — the vector is śīla → dāna, not the reverse. And by the time the treatise reaches juan 81 "The Mutual Inclusion of the Six Pāramitās" (〈釋六度相攝品〉), the triad has been retroactively absorbed into the definition of dāna-pāramitā: "the bodhisattva constantly practices the three kinds of giving without ever setting them aside — the gift of material things, the gift of Dharma, the gift of fearlessness; this is called dāna-pāramitā."³⁰ This single treatise's internal developmental arc is itself philological evidence: T1509 does not present the triad as a pre-made formula to be received, but crystallizes it through a cross-chapter line of argument.

The definition of abhayadāna within the triad is wholly precept-derivative: "all beings fear death; to keep the precepts and not to harm — this is the gift of fearlessness" — "keeping the precepts, not harming" functions here as the giving face, perfectly aligned with the śīla-theme of juan 14 as a whole. The definition of the gift of material things is likewise precept-derivative ("not infringing upon the possessions of any being" = the second precept); the definition of the gift of Dharma is a combination of precept-generated exemplarity and instruction. The definitional substrate of the entire triad is śīla — this is the complete structural signature of the precept-qua-gift reclassification.

The exposition in T1488 juan 4, though framed through an externalizing gloss (worldly rescue from terrors, rather than T1509's internalizing "non-harming through precept-keeping"), produces an analogous structural result: its three-gift triad also appears within the broader upāsaka-śīla (layperson's precepts) theme of the chapter — again, the crystallization is not autonomous but neighbours the precept-matter. That two independent tracks derive the third slot from the śīla ground reinforces the interface-derivation thesis: the move is not a single author's editorial preference but a shared conceptual move across the mid-fifth-century Mahāyāna commentarial tradition rendered into Chinese.

A Sarvāstivāda Āgama contrast completes the structural picture. T0099 juan 31 sūtra 874, in its recitational appendix, carries: "As with the five precepts, so also with the five-attribute schemas of faith, precept, giving, hearing, and wisdom — it is taught in the same way" (如五戒，如是信、戒、施、聞、慧經，亦如是說).³¹ This recitational appendix sets "the five precepts" and "faith, precept, giving, hearing, and wisdom" as two parallel schemas — within which "giving" (cāga) stands as a single member, co-ordinate with "precept" (sīla) but not absorbed into it. This is a Sarvāstivāda-Chinese editorial trace of "precept is not a kind of giving" — contrasting with the Theravāda lexicalizing move at AN 8.39 that renames the five precepts as pañca mahādānāni. The two schools handle the same material differently: the Sarvāstivāda preserves the AN 8.36 three-parallel baseline (hence: precept is not a gift), while the Theravāda crosses the tension between AN 8.36 and AN 8.39 and chooses the latter. What T1509, in the early fifth century, accomplishes is a synthesis of the two Āgama inheritances: it preserves the column-separation of AN 8.36 (hence precept is not simply a gift) while, above the separation, it rebuilds a bridge (hence the triad is derived at the interface in the śīla chapter). This is the conceptual move of Kumārajīva-era Chinese commentarial treatises: interface-derivation, not intra-axis expansion.

3.4 The Philosophical Stakes of the Axis-Switch

The first three layers are structural and philological. This final layer unpacks the philosophical stakes. What changes when the taxonomic axis shifts from recipient (Āgama) to content (fifth-century triad)?

First change: a shift in the centre of the giver's agency. In the Āgama dāna-taxonomy, the giver's agency is centred on choice of field — selecting a recipient along the ranked hierarchy of worthiness (Tathāgata > pratyekabuddha > arhat > … > animal) in order to maximize return. The agency demanded of the giver is ritual discernment; its ethical centre is the recipient's identity. After the fifth-century axis-switch, the giver's agency re-centres on choice of content — deciding whether the giving is of material, of Dharma, or of fearlessness. The agency demanded of the giver is ethical discernment; its ethical centre is the quality of what is given. The first agency requires the presence of a concrete recipient (without recipient, no field to select); the second is exercisable at every moment of precept-keeping (with no concrete recipient present, precept-keeping in itself is the landing of abhayadāna). The practical consequence of this shift in the centre of agency is decisive: the practice of giving is no longer confined to the moment of an act of donation, but extends to the continuing existence of every precept-keeper.

Second change: the emergence of a type of gift that does not require a concrete recipient. As the third slot of the triad, abhayadāna has a distinctive structural feature: the recipient need not be concretely individuated. When one keeps the five precepts, "immeasurable beings" (AN 8.39's formula) receive the gift simultaneously, and no concrete worthy-of-offering need be singled out. Its structural difference from the gift of material things (requires a concrete recipient to receive the object) and the gift of Dharma (requires a concrete listener to hear the teaching) is: the reception of abhayadāna is passive and class-extensive — any being who would be spared being killed, robbed, violated, deceived, or intoxicated by this precept-keeper, is a recipient. This is a mirror, at the level of individual precept-keeping, of the class-beneficiary structure that P09 established at the level of the cātuddisa saṅgha: in P09, the legally-constituted class-beneficiary is the "arrived-and-not-yet-arrived" saṅgha; in P10, the ethically-constituted class-beneficiary is "every being whose fear this person's non-harming would render absent." The two layers are isomorphic; both exhibit the structural asymmetry between "the concrete recipient the giver perceives at this moment" and "the class-recipient the taxonomy constitutes."

Third change: the opening of an operational space for śūnyatā. This is the deepest layer of the philosophical stakes, and the philological basis for §VI's handoff to P11. Trimaṇḍala-pariśuddhi — the three-wheel purity, the emptying of giver, gift, and recipient — requires an axis on which the three "wheels" can actually be turned. This emptying operation can only be performed on the content-axis. Why? Because the śūnyatā operation requires the substance of the gift itself to be deconstructible — material things may be empty, Dharma may be empty, fearlessness may be empty; but the recipient's identity (the tiered worthy-of-offering hierarchy), if made the classificatory axis, cannot survive its own emptying: if recipients are empty, the seven-saṅgha / fourteen-individual rankings lose the ground that anchored their calculus. The Āgama dāna-taxonomy's recipient-axis is therefore structurally closed to śūnyatā deconstruction; the fifth-century triad's content-axis is structurally open to it. What P11 (From Dāna to Dāna-pāramitā) will take up — the śūnyatā recasting of the triad under the pāramitā system — has its philological ground already laid here at P10: the pāramitā-level emptying is not a novel Mahāyāna move, but the necessary extension of a taxonomic axis-shift that has already, in the fifth-century Chinese translation window, moved from recipient to content. The opening of the content-axis already reserves the operational space that śūnyatā will need.

IV. Cross-Disciplinary Engagement

This section supplements §III's axis-switch argument and the §3.2 substance–name asymmetry with a dual-track conversation: Kantian universalizability and Wittgensteinian rule-following. The frame is structural homology — not reduction, not theoretical equivalence; where the homology holds, it is named as homology, and where it diverges, the divergence is marked.

4.1 Kantian Universalization and Attupanāyika

SĀ 1044's attupanāyika — "what is unwelcome to me is unwelcome to another" — shares a structural homology with the first formulation of the categorical imperative (kategorischer Imperativ) in Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten: "Handle so, daß die Maxime deines Willens jederzeit zugleich als Prinzip einer allgemeinen Gesetzgebung gelten könne" ("Act so that the maxim of your will might at the same time serve as the principle of a universal legislation"). Both test the legitimacy of an action by a reverse universalization from self to other.

The directionality, however, is opposite. Kant's universalization takes a priori rationality as its starting point: practical reason is itself the legislator, rational testability precedes experience; "I do not wish to be killed," when universalized as a law, must self-contradict (if all men kill, the killer is himself among the killed; universal willing cannot will itself), and so non-killing is a necessity of reason. Attupanāyika, by contrast, starts from embodied experience of fear: "I reflect thus: if someone were to want to kill me, I would not be pleased" — this "not pleased" is not a logical impossibility of a priori reason but a bodily, affective experience; the extension "as he likewise" is an analogy, not a logical necessity. Kant's universalization terminates in the autonomous rational subject legislating to itself; attupanāyika terminates in the natural extension of embodied empathy.

The philosophical stakes of this directional opposition: early Buddhist ethical reasoning does not posit an autonomous rational subject. In attupanāyika, the agent starts not from a priori reason but from the bodily apprehension of fear-of-death — a shared empirical fact for every sentient being (sabbasatta), not a postulate of inference. Kant's universalization's failure-cases (where the agent has no concrete will at a moment, the universalizing test has nothing to attach to) do not occur for attupanāyika — the embodied perception of "not wishing to be killed" is always available in the body of a sentient being. This difference will be returned to in §V as a cross-disciplinary caution: structural homology does not entail reduction; Buddhist ethics stands on its own moral-metaphysical ground.

4.2 Wittgensteinian Rule-Following and the Emergence Structure

Wittgenstein's treatment of rule-following in the Philosophische Untersuchungen — that the content of a rule does not exist complete prior to its application, but is articulated in the continuing practice — shares a second structural homology with the substance–name asymmetry of abhayadāna. The precept of non-killing as a rule has been operative in early Buddhism for centuries; its articulation as "the gift of fearlessness" is completed only at the fifth-century Chinese translation window. The rule's content was already fixed in the practice — the very existence of a precept-keeper is the quenching of enmity-fears among beings — but its articulation as a category of dāna is a late move. This structure is homologous to Wittgenstein's insight: practice precedes articulation, and articulation is the crystallization after practice, not its precondition.

The homology needs careful handling. Wittgenstein's rule-following has been intensely contested within analytic philosophy — Kripke's sceptical reading against Baker-Hacker's commonsensical reading is a live dispute³²; this paper does not enter that dispute, and takes up only the generic structural analogy of practice-preceding-articulation without committing to either party's specific interpretation. The value of the structural analogy is: to offer Western readers a familiar linguistic frame — the logic of a rule whose content is not complete prior to its application but is named in the course of continuing practice. Under this frame, the millennium-long substance–name asymmetry of abhayadāna is not a philological accident but a necessary rhythm of conceptual articulation.

The convergence-point of the two tracks is this: both axis-switch (§3.4) and articulation (§4.2) point to the logic of emergence — emergence is not generation but naming. The fifth-century Chinese translation window did not create the substance of abhayadāna; the substance was already operative at all three layers (precept, institution, social idiom). What that window accomplished was to articulate, in the form of a taxonomic name, a content already complete in practice. And the same naming-act simultaneously accomplished both structural moves — the axis-switch (from recipient to content) and the interface-derivation (the third slot born at the śīla/dāna interface). One naming act, two layers of structuration. This is the precise structure of emergence as the paper claims it: the substance long complete, the naming suddenly crystallized, the classificatory axis simultaneously shifted, the interface-derivation precisely located — four faces of one and the same act.

V. Middle-Way Corrections

This section addresses three common misreadings and two cross-disciplinary cautions.

❌ Misreading 1: Abhayadāna is a Mahāyāna novelty.

This reading treats the three-gift triad as a Mahāyāna expansion on early Buddhism and takes abhayadāna to be a distinctively Mahāyāna ethical product. This misreading ignores the five-stratum evidence laid out in §II — the substance of abhayadāna is fully operative in the Āgama + vinaya corpus (the five great gifts as ethical identification of the five precepts, the rain-retreat institution's collective life-protection, the "city where fearlessness is given" social idiom), and what the Mahāyāna Chinese translation window accomplished was naming, not creation. The precise formulation is: abhayadāna as substance belongs to the pre-schismatic common ancestor; as name it crystallizes in the fifth-century Chinese translation window. This substance-name distinction prevents reading Mahāyāna ethics as a discontinuous expansion of early Buddhism.

❌ Misreading 2: The five precepts simply are abhayadāna.

This reading identifies the two, taking the complete set of five precepts as a synonymous restatement of abhayadāna. The misreading conflates the operational layer and the classificatory layer. The five precepts are the operational substrate — five specific action-boundaries (non-killing, non-stealing, non-misconduct, non-false-speech, non-intoxication), functioning within the śīla category of early Buddhism. Abhayadāna is the classificatory layer — a re-description, under a different taxonomic axis, of that same operation as a kind of giving. Their relation is "the same operation, re-described under a different classificatory axis" — not synonymy. Precisely stated: the five precepts are the operational substrate of abhayadāna; abhayadāna is one classificatory reading of the five precepts; to collapse the two into identity is to lose the axis-switch structure the paper has just established.

❌ Misreading 3: The "seven kinds of giving" are a sub-class of abhayadāna.

A modern popular reading in Chinese-Buddhist devotional circles tends to treat the seven kinds of giving — eye-gift, gentle-face gift, kind-word gift, body-gift, heart-gift, seat-gift, lodging-gift — preserved at Zá bǎozàng jīng 《雜寶藏經》 T0203 juan 6 as a sub-category of abhayadāna.³³ The reading is a category error. The organizing principle of the seven gifts is non-expenditure of material resources (giving without outlay of goods), not conferral of freedom from fear; the two taxonomies are orthogonal, not inclusion-related, on the classificatory axis. The correct position of the seven gifts is as a further axis of non-material giving, coordinate with (not subordinate to) abhayadāna — their differences lie not in set-relation but in classificatory principle. Folding the two into one is a rhetorical conflation of later-Chinese-Buddhist popular exposition, not a fact of the canonical taxonomies.

⚠️ Cross-disciplinary caution 1: Kantian universalizability and attupanāyika are structurally homologous but directionally opposite.

§4.1 has developed this conversation; the caution here reaffirms the limits of the analogy. Structural homology (both use reverse universalization as the core move of ethical reasoning) is not theoretical equivalence (Kant's a priori rational subject and attupanāyika's empirical empathetic subject stand on radically different moral-metaphysical grounds). The analogy's function is heuristic bridge — a linguistic entry-point for readers familiar with Kant to approach attupanāyika — not theoretical reduction. It cannot be used to claim that Buddhist ethics is an Indian version of Kantianism; nor, in reverse, that Kantian ethics can be explicated by attupanāyika.

⚠️ Cross-disciplinary caution 2: Fàngshēng (the later Chinese Buddhist practice of ritual animal release) is not the vinaya-era abhayadāna.

Fàngshēng 放生, as a Chinese Buddhist custom, developed primarily from the Tang dynasty onward in sinophone regions, drawing scriptural warrant from Fànwǎng púsà jiè jīng 《梵網菩薩戒經》, the "Liúshuǐ the Merchant's Son" chapter of the Suvarṇaprabhāsa-sūtra 《金光明經》, and similar texts; its broad institutional practice dates from the Song dynasty and later. The abhayadāna the present paper addresses is the classificatory name crystallized at the fifth-century Chinese translation window, whose substantive substrate lies in the Āgama-level five precepts and the vinaya-level rain-retreat institution — temporally five to seven centuries earlier than the fàngshēng tradition. Identifying the two is an anachronism. The paper offers no valuative judgment on fàngshēng (the modern practice has its own ecological-ethical contestations, which are not this paper's concern); it flags only the caution that abhayadāna as an early Buddhist institutional concept and fàngshēng as a later Chinese ritual practice differ markedly along the axes of time, sectarian lineage, and doctrinal rationale, and ought not to be read as continuous.

VI. Conclusion

Essentials

The emergence of abhayadāna is the joint product of two structures: the millennium-long substance–name asymmetry, and the taxonomic axis-switch. The substance is fully operative across three strata before the sectarian split — in the Āgama (the five great gifts as ethical identification of the five precepts; attupanāyika as moral-metaphysical ground), in the vinaya (Pārājika 3 + the pācittiya against animal-killing + the water-with-living-creatures rule + the four-fold rain-retreat, convergent across four of the five Chinese vinayas as a pre-schismatic common ancestor), and in the social idiom (the "city where fearlessness is given" as a commonplace). The name, however, must wait until the early-fifth-century Chinese translation window, where Kumārajīva's T1509 juan 14 and Dharmakṣema's T1488 juan 4 crystallize the triad on two independent tracks. This naming-act simultaneously accomplishes two structurations: the axis-switch from the Āgama recipient-axis to the fifth-century content-axis, and the interface-derivation of the third slot at the śīla/dāna interface — "abhayadāna" as the reclassification of precept-qua-gift, with its very location in T1509's śīla-pāramitā chapter (not its dāna-pāramitā chapter) being the philological proof.

Practical implication

The most immediate implication of this doctrine for the contemporary reader is: the landing of abhayadāna does not require a concrete recipient's presence. Every moment of precept-keeping is a live occurrence of abhayadāna; when the practitioner chooses, at this moment, not to harm any sentient being, every being who would have been spared harm-by-this-person at this moment becomes, simultaneously, the recipient of this gift. This mode of landing requires no material resource, no specific audience for Dharma-transmission, no particular moment of ritual donation — it is open at the very existence of every precept-keeper. The doctrine is particularly meaningful in the age of commodified mindfulness (McMindfulness): when mindfulness is therapized, commodified, and de-religionized, the face of precept-keeping as the giving of fearlessness to every being opens a different entry-point — precept is not self-restraint upon the individual self, but a gift to every other being. This is one door through which a Western reader may re-enter early Buddhist ethics via abhayadāna.

Open question → handoff to P11

If abhayadāna is the third slot of the triad, how is the triad restructured by śūnyatā under the dāna-pāramitā system? The trimaṇḍala-pariśuddhi requirement of emptying all three wheels — giver, gift, recipient — can operate only on the content-axis (§3.4). P11 From Dāna to Dāna-pāramitā will take up the structure of that śūnyatā restructuring: when abhayadāna enters the pāramitā system, how are its three wheels — the giving face (precept-keeping non-harming), the receiving face (beings' fearlessness), and the content (the "fearlessness" given) — recast under the three-wheel-emptying operation? P10 has laid the philological groundwork in its axis-switch thesis; P11 will build the second Mahāyāna move on that ground. If P10 is the crystallization of the naming, P11 is its deconstruction.

Bibliography

I. Primary Buddhist Sources

Pāli Canon (Mahāsaṅgīti edition via SuttaCentral; Bhikkhu Sujato's CC0 English)

Aṅguttara Nikāya 8.36 Puññakiriyavatthusutta, PTS AN iv 241. Aṅguttara Nikāya 8.39 Abhisaṇḍasutta, PTS AN iv 245. Aṅguttara Nikāya 9.20 Velāmasutta, PTS AN iv 393. Aṅguttara Nikāya 10.92 Verasutta. Majjhima Nikāya 142 Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅgasutta, PTS MN iii 253. Saṃyutta Nikāya 12.41 Pañcaverabhayasutta. Saṃyutta Nikāya 55.7 Veḷudvāreyyāsutta.

Chinese Tripiṭaka (Taishō; CBETA critical edition)

Dīrgha-āgama 《長阿含經》， translated by Buddhayaśas and Zhu Fonian, Eastern Jin, ca. 413 CE, Taishō vol. 1, no. 1. Madhyama-āgama 《中阿含經》， translated by Gautama Saṅghadeva, Eastern Jin, ca. 398 CE, Taishō vol. 1, no. 26. Saṃyukta-āgama 《雜阿含經》， translated by Guṇabhadra, Liu-Song, ca. 435–443 CE, Taishō vol. 2, no. 99. Saṃyukta-āgama (alternate recension) 《別譯雜阿含經》， translator unknown (Qin-dynasty register), Taishō vol. 2, no. 100. Ekottara-āgama 《增一阿含經》， translated by Gautama Saṅghadeva, Eastern Jin, ca. 398 CE, Taishō vol. 2, no. 125. Liù dù jí jīng 《六度集經》， translated by Kāng Sēnghuì, Wu, ca. 251 CE, Taishō vol. 3, no. 152. Zá bǎozàng jīng 《雜寶藏經》， translated by Jíjiāyè and Tányào, Yuan-Wei, ca. 472 CE, Taishō vol. 4, no. 203. Mahīśāsaka-vinaya 《彌沙塞部和醯五分律》， translated by Buddhajīva and Daosheng, Liu-Song, ca. 423 CE, Taishō vol. 22, no. 1421. Mahāsāṃghika-vinaya 《摩訶僧祇律》， translated by Buddhabhadra and Faxian, Eastern Jin, ca. 418 CE, Taishō vol. 22, no. 1425. Dharmaguptaka-vinaya 《四分律》， translated by Buddhayaśas and Zhu Fonian, Later Qin, ca. 410–412 CE, Taishō vol. 22, no. 1428. Sarvāstivāda-vinaya 《十誦律》, translated by Puṇyatrāta, Kumārajīva, and Dharmaruci, Later Qin, ca. 404–409 CE, Taishō vol. 23, no. 1435. Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya 《根本說一切有部毘奈耶》, translated by Yijing, Tang, ca. 703 CE (transmitted source belonging to the pre-schismatic common-ancestor stratum), Taishō vol. 23, no. 1442. Upāsaka-śīla-sūtra 《優婆塞戒經》， translated by Dharmakṣema, Northern Liang, ca. 421–433 CE, Taishō vol. 24, no. 1488. Dà zhìdù lùn 《大智度論》， composed by Nāgārjuna, translated by Kumārajīva, Later Qin, ca. 404–406 CE, Taishō vol. 25, no. 1509.

II. Modern Scholarship

Anālayo, Bhikkhu. Comparative Studies in the Ekottarika-āgama. Taipei: Dharma Drum Publishing Corporation, 2016.

Anālayo, Bhikkhu. A Comparative Study of the Majjhima-nikāya. 2 vols. Taipei: Dharma Drum Publishing Corporation, 2011.

Baker, G. P. and P. M. S. Hacker. Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar, and Necessity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.

Kant, Immanuel. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. 1785; critical edition in Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4. Berlin: Akademie-Ausgabe, 1911.

Kripke, Saul. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Lamotte, Étienne. Le Traité de la Grande Vertu de Sagesse de Nāgārjuna (Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra). 5 vols. Louvain: Institut Orientaliste, 1944–1980.

Nattier, Jan. A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to The Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā). Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003.

Purser, Ronald. McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. London: Repeater Books, 2019.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.

III. Sūtra and Śāstra Index

Abbrev.	Full title	Taishō	Author / Translator
Dīrghāgama	Cháng āhán jīng 《長阿含經》	T01, no. 1	Buddhayaśas and Zhu Fonian
Madhyamāgama / Gautamī-sūtra	Zhōng āhán jīng 《中阿含經》, juan 47	T01, no. 26	Gautama Saṅghadeva
Saṃyuktāgama / SĀ 845, 874, 1039, 1044, 1108	Zá āhán jīng 《雜阿含經》	T02, no. 99	Guṇabhadra
Alt. Saṃyuktāgama	Biéyì zá āhán jīng 《別譯雜阿含經》	T02, no. 100	unknown
Ekottarāgama / Bhadrika chapter	Zēngyī āhán jīng 《增一阿含經》, juan 20	T02, no. 125	Gautama Saṅghadeva
Liù dù jí	Liù dù jí jīng 《六度集經》	T03, no. 152	Kāng Sēnghuì
Zá bǎozàng	Zá bǎozàng jīng 《雜寶藏經》	T04, no. 203	Jíjiāyè and Tányào
Mahīśāsaka-vinaya	Wǔfēn lǜ 《彌沙塞部和醯五分律》	T22, no. 1421	Buddhajīva and Daosheng
Mahāsāṃghika-vinaya	Sēngqí lǜ 《摩訶僧祇律》	T22, no. 1425	Buddhabhadra and Faxian
Dharmaguptaka-vinaya	Sìfēn lǜ 《四分律》	T22, no. 1428	Buddhayaśas and Zhu Fonian
Sarvāstivāda-vinaya	Shísòng lǜ 《十誦律》	T23, no. 1435	Puṇyatrāta, Kumārajīva, Dharmaruci
Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya	《根本說一切有部毘奈耶》	T23, no. 1442	Yijing
Upāsaka-śīla-sūtra	《優婆塞戒經》	T24, no. 1488	Dharmakṣema
Dà zhìdù lùn	《大智度論》	T25, no. 1509	Nāgārjuna / Kumārajīva

Cross-Reference Index Across the Paper Series

Backward pointers (completed Parts I–III):

DANA-P01 The Three Senses of Dāna: the semantic field of dāna assumed in §I is fixed in P01; not re-exposited here.
DANA-P02 Cāga as a Stream-Entry Factor: P10's mechanism anchors in §2.2 do not follow P02's moral-psychological path via cāga; P02 holds the home-court on cāga as a factor of stream-entry.
DANA-P03 Recollection of Giving among the Six Recollections: P10 does not engage the analysis of cāgānussati and its objects.
DANA-P04 The Eight Bases of Giving: P10 §III does not re-exposit the motive-axis of the eight-base taxonomy.
DANA-P05 The Ladder of the Velāmasutta: P10 §2.1 cites AN 9.20 only as an ascending-series anchor; the home-court of the ascending-series structure is P05.
DANA-P06 The Present-Life Fruit of the Sīhasutta: P10 does not engage the sandiṭṭhika (directly visible in the present life) four-plus-one temporal axis.
DANA-P07 The Fourteen Recipients of the Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅgasutta: P10 §3.1 cites MN 142 / T0026 juan 47 only to establish the closure of the recipient-axis; the home-court of the fourteen-field re-ranking is P07.
DANA-P08 Three Bases of Meritorious Activity: P10 §3.1 cites AN 8.36 only as the baseline three-parallel (dāna / sīla / bhāvanā); P08 holds the home-court as the closing container of Part II. P08 and P10 collaborate at this juncture: P08 establishes the parallel-separation, P10 reads AN 8.39's transgressive lexicalizing move.
DANA-P09 The Saṅgha as a Field of Merit: P10 §I carries forward from P09's institutionalization of cātuddisa saṅgha property; P09 establishes cātuddisa saṅgha as the class-beneficiary for material giving, and P10 inherits the "city where fearlessness is given" idiom as the social-idiom face of this institutional material-gift field, pivoting to non-material giving.

Forward pointers (Part IV onward):

DANA-P11 From Dāna to Dāna-pāramitā: P10's §3.4 and §VI open-question constitute the philological groundwork for P11 — the three-wheel-emptying calculus can operate only on the content-axis; P11 will address the śūnyatā restructuring of the triad within the pāramitā system.
DANA-P12–P13 Nāgārjuna on Dāna: P10 §2.5 and §3.3 cite T1509 strictly within juan 14's first-appearance of the triad and juan 81's "mutual inclusion" chapter; the full exposition of dāna-pāramitā is deferred to P12–P13.
DANA-P14 The Dāna Chapter of the Bodhisattva-bhūmi: P10 does not expound the ninefold giving; the Yogācārabhūmi's elaborate dāna-taxonomy is the home-court of P14.
DANA-P15 Non-Abiding Giving in the Diamond Sūtra: P10 does not expound "giving without abiding anywhere"; the integration of dāna and emptiness in the Vajracchedikā is the home-court of P15.
DANA-P20–P22 Body-Giving in the Lotus Sūtra: P10 does not engage body-life giving; the body-offering narratives across the Lotus's chapters are the home-court of P20–P22.
DANA-P24–P25 Samantabhadra's Vast Offerings: P10's "city where fearlessness is given" idiom does not extend into the Avataṃsaka's Dharmadhātu-scale offering; the third of Samantabhadra's ten great vows ("vast-offering cultivation") is the home-court of P24–P25.

IV. Sutra & Śāstra Index

Abbrev.	Full Name	Author/Translator	Taisho
雜阿含經	雜阿含經	unknown	T0100
雜寶藏經	雜寶藏經	unknown	T0203
四分律	四分律	unknown	T1425
優婆塞戒	優婆塞戒經	unknown	T1509

Paper: DANA-P10 · The Emergence of Abhayadāna · DĀNA · Part III · Vinaya and Early Schools Author: 釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing) · Project: 指月 / Pointing-at-the-Moon · Series: The Six Practice Gates （六行門） License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 CBETA collation: Citations from the four Vinaya collections verified against CBETA Electronic Tripiṭaka 2024 edition. Repository: https://github.com/pointing-at-the-moon/six-practice-gates

Footnotes

Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya (Gēnběn shuō yíqiè yǒubù pí-nài-yē 《根本說一切有部毘奈耶》), juan 6, translated by Yijing (義淨), Tang dynasty, Taishō vol. 23, no. 1442, p. 656a–b. The scene in which a householder reports to his wife; the pursuer negates, in the interrogative mood, the vihāra's social-idiomatic status as a sanctuary from pursuit. ↩
Same vinaya, juan 28 (p. 775a–b, "one man reports to his friend") and juan 38 (p. 835b, within the prophecy-of-future-Buddhas formula invoking "the Fearlessness-Giving Tathāgata"). The three occurrences share the same rhetorical structure. ↩
Dà zhìdù lùn 《大智度論》, juan 14, "Explanation of the Remainder of the Śīla-pāramitā Section" (釋初品中尸羅波羅蜜義之餘), composed by Nāgārjuna, translated by Kumārajīva, Later Qin, Taishō vol. 25, no. 1509, p. 163b04–14. ↩
AN 9.20 Velāmasutta, PTS AN iv 393; Bhikkhu Sujato's English translation, CC0, at SuttaCentral an9.20. The ascending-series passage contains the explicit ranking sikkhāpadāni samādiyati higher than saraṇagamana. ↩
Zēngyī āhán jīng 《增一阿含經》, juan 20, the Bhadrika section of the Śrāvaka chapter 〈聲聞品〉〈跋提長者〉, translated by Gautama Saṅghadeva, Eastern Jin, Taishō vol. 2, no. 125, p. 648a06–19. The nearest Chinese parallel to AN 8.39 Abhisaṇḍasutta, PTS AN iv 245. ↩
Zá āhán jīng 《雜阿含經》, juan 30, sūtra 845, translated by Guṇabhadra, Liu-Song, Taishō vol. 2, no. 99, p. 215c; dual-track parallel with SN 12.41 Pañcaverabhaya and AN 10.92 Verasutta. ↩
Zá āhán jīng 《雜阿含經》, juan 37, sūtra 1044, Taishō vol. 2, no. 99, p. 273b; Chinese parallel to SN 55.7 Veḷudvāreyyā, PTS SN v 352. The attupanāyika dhamma-pariyāya (method of applying the case to oneself) is unfolded here as a first-person reflexive formula spanning seven precepts. ↩
The closing formula "these seven are called the noble precepts" (如是七種，名為聖戒) demonstrates explicitly that the Sarvāstivāda recension classifies these as precepts, not as gifts. This closing phrase is textual evidence that the Sarvāstivāda Chinese stratum does not perform the "precept-as-gift" lexicalizing move. ↩
Zá āhán jīng 《雜阿含經》, juan 43, sūtra 1039, the Cunda-sūtra (Chúntuó xiūduōluō 《淳陀修多羅》), Taishō vol. 2, no. 99, p. 271c; corresponds to the standard Pāli five-precept pericope nihita-daṇḍa nihita-sattha … sabbapāṇabhūta-hitānukampī (fourfold non-harming and compassionate unfolding), attested in hundreds of places across the AN and DN. ↩
For the structural comparison of the rain-retreat origin-narratives across the four Chinese vinayas, see Bhikkhu Anālayo, Comparative Studies in the Ekottarika-āgama (2016) on comparative vinaya research. The four-vinaya pattern of "minor wording variants, full structural identity" meets the standard criterion for a pre-schismatic common ancestor. ↩
Sìfēn lǜ 《四分律》, juan 37, Vassūpanāyikakkhandhaka (〈安居揵度〉), translated by Buddhayaśas and Zhu Fonian, Later Qin, Taishō vol. 22, no. 1428, p. 830a–b. ↩
Shísòng lǜ 《十誦律》， juan 24, 〈七法中安居法〉， translated by Puṇyatrāta, Kumārajīva, and Dharmaruci, Later Qin, Taishō vol. 23, no. 1435, p. 173c–174a. ↩
Mísāsèbù hé xī wǔfēn lǜ 《彌沙塞部和醯五分律》, juan 19, 〈安居法〉, translated by Buddhajīva and Daosheng, Liu-Song, Taishō vol. 22, no. 1421, p. 129a. The most direct of the four Chinese vinayas in connecting the rain-retreat to compassion. ↩
Móhē sēngqí lǜ 《摩訶僧祇律》, juan 27, translated by Buddhabhadra and Faxian, Eastern Jin, Taishō vol. 22, no. 1425, p. 450c. The "ninety-six kinds of wanderers" line provides the most concentrated of the four vinayas' animal-heterodox analogies. ↩
Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya, juan 30, "The Training Rule on Water-with-Living-Creatures" 〈用蟲水學處〉 rule 19, Taishō vol. 23, no. 1442, p. 784a–b. In this vinaya's internal organization, the compassion-rationale of the rain-retreat has been redistributed into the neighbouring "water-with-living-creatures" training rule — an editorial reorganization rather than a deletion. ↩
Sìfēn lǜ 《四分律》, juan 2, Pārājika 3, Taishō vol. 22, no. 1428, p. 575c–576a; the five Chinese vinayas converge on this rule, with the Vesālī episode of sixty bhikkhus' mis-directed foulness-meditation included. T1425 juan 4 preserves the fullest narrative of "Migalaṇḍika the mendicant and Māra's instigation" (p. 255b–256a). ↩
Sìfēn lǜ, juan 16, pācittiya 61, the rule against taking animal life, Taishō vol. 22, no. 1428, p. 677a–b; Shísòng lǜ, juan 16, the Kāḷudāyī-shoots-birds origin, Taishō vol. 23, no. 1435, p. 115a–c. ↩
Shísòng lǜ, juan 11, Taishō vol. 23, no. 1435, p. 77a–b (the Chanda passage); Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya, juan 30, Taishō vol. 23, no. 1442, p. 784a–b (the Chandaka passage). The preservation of the same jātaka-protagonist in two sectarian vinaya transmissions is a rare piece of cross-school philological evidence. ↩
Shísòng lǜ, juan 44, Bhikkhunī-vastu, Taishō vol. 23, no. 1435, p. 316b; the sole passage in the main body of any of the five Chinese vinayas that directly enumerates wúwèi-shī 無畏施 as a category-term, in the context of jātaka-narrative conventional coordinate-listing, not as a rule-body term. ↩
Zhōng āhán jīng 《中阿含經》, juan 47, Gautamī-sūtra (MĀ 180), translated by Gautama Saṅghadeva, Eastern Jin, Taishō vol. 1, no. 26, p. 721c–722b; Chinese parallel to MN 142 Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅgasutta, PTS MN iii 253. ↩
Liù dù jí jīng 《六度集經》, translated by Kāng Sēnghuì, Wu, Taishō vol. 3, no. 152. Across all eight fascicles, the strings wúwèi-shī 無畏施 and shī-wúwèi 施無畏 yield zero hits; all the giving-narratives are categorized under the single chapter 〈布施度無極章〉. This "substance-full, name-absent" misalignment is the paper's most precise philological surface. ↩
Zá āhán jīng 《雜阿含經》, juan 40, sūtra 1108, Taishō vol. 2, no. 99, p. 291c; corresponds to SN 11.9 Isayo Araññakā. The alternate recension T0100 juan 3 also preserves the same verse (Taishō vol. 2, no. 100, p. 382c). ↩
Dà zhìdù lùn, juan 14, Taishō vol. 25, no. 1509, p. 163b04–14. The first systematic appearance of the three-gift triad in the Chinese commentarial tradition; its placement in the śīla-pāramitā chapter rather than the dāna-pāramitā chapter is the core philological anchor for §3.3. ↩
Dà zhìdù lùn, juan 11 〈釋初品中檀波羅蜜〉 and juan 12 continuing, Taishō vol. 25, no. 1509, p. 141c–142a; the body of the dāna-pāramitā chapter operates on the two-gift schema (material + Dharma), with the Nikāya inheritance "among the two gifts, the gift of Dharma is superior." ↩
Yōupósāi jiè jīng 《優婆塞戒經》, juan 4, Chapter 19 〈雜品〉, translated by Dharmakṣema, Northern Liang, Taishō vol. 24, no. 1488, p. 1054b28–c14. The ordering is Dharma → fearlessness → material, differing from T1509's material → Dharma → fearlessness; its gloss of abhayadāna externalizes (worldly rescue from terrors) rather than internalizes (precept-derived non-harming, T1509's gloss). This independent difference indicates dual-track crystallization, not single-source translation. ↩
The computational logic of MN 142 / T0026 juan 47: the tier of the fruit of the gift equals the purity of the giver's cetanā multiplied by the dignity of the recipient; both variables are recipient-side, and the content of the gift is not a variable. This structure is the core argumentative anchor for §3.1. ↩
AN 8.36 Puññakiriyavatthusutta, PTS AN iv 241; Sujato's English translation, CC0. Treated in P08, Three Bases of Meritorious Activity; this paper cites it only as baseline reference, without re-exposition. ↩
〈布施度無極章〉 is the first chapter of the entire eight-fascicle Liù dù jí jīng corpus; all giving-narratives (including gifts of life, gifts of rescue from danger, gifts of wife and children, etc.) are gathered into this one chapter, without sub-classification. ↩
Dà zhìdù lùn, juan 11, Taishō vol. 25, no. 1509, p. 141c05–142a12. The Buddha-saying here cited is the Nikāya register preserved in AN 9.20 Velāmasutta's ascending-series passage. ↩
Dà zhìdù lùn, juan 81, "Mutual Inclusion of the Six Pāramitās" 〈釋六度相攝品〉, Taishō vol. 25, no. 1509, p. 632c06–08. The triad here is retroactively absorbed into the definition of dāna-pāramitā; this marks the end-point of T1509's own internal developmental arc. ↩
Zá āhán jīng, juan 31, sūtra 874, Taishō vol. 2, no. 99, p. 219c; the recitational appendix here sets "the five precepts" and "faith, precept, giving, hearing, and wisdom" as two parallel schemas — a Sarvāstivāda-Chinese editorial trace of "precept is not a kind of giving." ↩
Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); the opposing reading is G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar, and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). The paper does not enter this dispute and takes up only the generic structural analogy of "practice preceding articulation." ↩
Zá bǎozàng jīng 《雜寶藏經》, juan 6, "The Causal Conditions of the Seven Kinds of Giving" 〈七種施因緣〉, translated by Jíjiāyè 吉迦夜 and Tányào 曇曜, Yuan-Wei, Taishō vol. 4, no. 203, p. 479a–b. The seven gifts' organizing principle is non-expenditure of material resources; they stand orthogonal to abhayadāna on the classificatory axis. ↩

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