Pāli RootsThe Precept in the ĀgamasThree Vinaya LineagesThe Mahāyāna TurnThe Precept-SubstanceBhaiṣajyaguru's Twelve VowsPrajñā's Sign-less PreceptThe Complete PreceptThe Modern Diagnosis
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Part 1 · Pāli Roots
Discipline · 4 papers
This book is going to walk a long road—from the plainest of questions asked at the Buddha's feet, "What is the meaning of keeping the precepts?", all the way to the sign-less prece[ from the book's part intro ]
論Study the papersfootnotes · abstracts
01Three Axes of SīlaContemporary Western readers translate sīla almost reflexively as "morality," "ethics," or "moral discipline" — three English options each carrying its own theological or philosophical sediment, and each, on closer reading, missing the word. This paper argues that the slippage is not a problem of word-choice alone. Early Pāli texts deploy a three-term technical field for what English typically collapses into a single category — sīla (character as a trained faculty), saṃvara (active sealing of the sense-doors as a padhāna operation), and vinaya (the case-based textual system of monastic regulation). Drawing on AN 4.14 Saṁvarasutta, AN 5.140 Sotārasutta, AN 11.1 Kimatthiyasutta, sample sections of the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya (T1428) and Bhikṣu Prātimokṣa (T1429), the Chinese parallels in Dīrgha Āgama (T0001) fascicles 13, 14, and 17, the Madhyama Āgama (T0026) Sūtra of Purposes (fascicle 10, sūtra 42), and Buddhaghosa's Sīla-niddesa in Visuddhimagga I (paraphrased only, per the volume's licensing discipline), this paper shows how the three terms divide their work: sīla names what is trained at the level of character; saṃvara names what happens, moment by moment, at the sense-doors; vinaya names the living textual-and-judicial system through which a community of practitioners has, over centuries, accumulated case law. The Chinese tradition, far from compressing the three terms, mapped them onto three distinct words — jiè (戒), lǜ (律), and lǜyí (律儀) — and read jiè itself as a deliberately many-faceted term, as the Lohicca-parallel of T0001 fascicle 17 already shows. The classical sīla → avippaṭisāra → … → vimuttiñāṇadassana chain of AN 11.1, whose Chinese parallel closes with the phrase this sīla approaches the highest (cǐ jiè qù zhì dì yī 此戒趣至第一), is offered here as the anchor citation for the rest of the volume. Recognizing the three-axis structure is the entry ticket for reading the twenty-eight chapters that follow, from the five qualities of stream-enterer's sīla, through Nāgārjuna on śīla-pāramitā, through the threefold purity of the Diamond Sūtra, to the Śūraṅgama's four pure precepts as the gateway to samādhi. Sīla in the Buddhist analysis was never the question of "what to obey." It was the question of how character, sense-restraint, and institutional case-law together constitute the first segment of the path to awakening.02Ariyakanta-sīla as the Fourth SotāpattiyaṅgaThis paper argues that the fourth factor of stream-entry (sotāpattiyaṅga) — accomplishment in the ethical conduct loved by the noble ones (ariyakanta-sīla) — plays a different grammatical role from the first three within the canonical four-limb formulas, and that this asymmetry is the canon's own way of marking what sort of stream-entry-mark the noble ones' ethical conduct is. The argument enters through Saṃyukta-āgama sūtra 935 (T0099 fascicle 33, Guṇabhadra trans., Liu-Song dynasty), where two Sakyan disciples — Sāḷha holding a three-factor view, Mahānāma a four-factor view — bring an unresolved doctrinal dispute to the Buddha. The Buddha rules: four. The rejected alternative is the textual antithesis of "ethical conduct is a factor of stream-entry"; for the Buddha to set it down by name is evidence heavier than any catechistic refrain. This adjudication anchors a verb-pairing observation across SN 55.22, AN 5.32, and the SĀ 935 cluster: the first three limbs take aveccappasāda or pasanna (confidence in an object), while the fourth takes samannāgato or paripūrakārī (the practitioner is endowed with, or fulfills, an attribute). Section III places the eight-virtue Pāli formula of ariyakanta-sīla alongside Guṇabhadra's eight-virtue Chinese rendering, with the explicit caveat that the mid-list 1-to-1 mapping is not transparent. Section VI closes with the heedless-dweller chain at SN 55.40, where the seventh of the eight virtues — aparāmaṭṭha, "not grasped at" — does the gating work that allows the forward chain of AN 11.1 (no-regret → joy → rapture) to start at all.03SīlānussatiThe preceding paper (SILA-P02) argued that the eight Pāli virtues led by akhaṇḍa function in the four-limb stream-entry formula as accomplishment-attributes of the stream-enterer — the canonical content of the fourth sotāpattiyaṅga. The present paper takes the same eight virtues and reads them in a second doctrinal use: as the content the practitioner reflexively brings into recollection. Anchored in the Mahānāmasutta (AN 6.10), the Paṭhamamahānāma (AN 11.11), and Saṃyukta-āgama sūtra 931 (T0099, fascicle 33, Guṇabhadra trans.), the paper shows that sīlānussati is not the rote rehearsal of external rules but the practitioner's own already-cultivated ethical conduct, named in eight items, brought reflexively into the recollection-object position of the present moment. The same canonical formula — same eight items, same translator, same recension — bears two doctrinal uses: in P02, subject-side (attributes the noble disciple possesses); in this paper, object-side (content the noble disciple recollects). The two readings are complementary, not exclusive nor substitutive. The closing argument turns to the Visuddhimagga's Chapter VII §4 Sīlānussati-niddesa, where Buddhaghosa names two reasons for the recollection's psychological ceiling at access concentration (upacāra-samādhi) rather than absorption (appanā-samādhi): the depth (gambhīratā) of the virtues themselves, and the inclination to recollect virtues of many kinds (nānappakāra-guṇānussaraṇa-adhimuttatā). Both reasons point to the structure of the object, not to a deficiency in the practitioner. The ceiling is therefore constitutive of what sīlānussati is.04EkaggatāThe preceding paper (SILA-P03) closed by registering, after Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga Chapter VII §4, two reasons why the recollection of one's own ethical conduct (sīlānussati) reaches access concentration (upacāra-samādhi) but not full absorption (appanā-samādhi): the depth (gambhīratā) of the virtues recollected and the practitioner's inclination toward recollecting virtues of many kinds (nānappakāra-guṇānussaraṇa-adhimuttatā). Both reasons point to the structure of the object rather than to a deficiency in the practitioner. The present paper lifts that special-case observation to a categorical claim across all forty kammaṭṭhāna: meditation subjects whose objects are structurally multiple admit only access concentration; meditation subjects whose objects are single-and-homogeneous admit full absorption. The Pāli anchor is the second-jhāna pericope shared by Dīgha Nikāya 22 and Majjhima Nikāya 10 — cetaso ekodibhāvaṁ, "mind at one" — together with the AN 6.10 verbal cascade cittaṁ samādhiyati. The Chinese anchor is twofold: the Saṃyukta-āgama (T0099) phrase 內淨一心 ("inner-purified one-mind") attested at five fascicle-distinct sites and its cross-translator witness 內靜一心 ("inner-stilled one-mind") in the Madhyama Āgama (T0026); and the Yogācāra anchor Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra (T1579), fascicle 11, where Xuanzang gives the term its post-canonical technical definition — "concentration is, with regard to an object, scrutinised observation, mental one-pointedness" — making explicit that the object (於所緣) is grammatically necessary, not modifier. The two recollections that do reach absorption — mindfulness of breathing (ānāpāna-sati) and mindfulness immersed in the body (kāyagatā-sati) — confirm rather than refute the partition: their objects are direct sensory contact, not propositional multiplicity. The axis is object-shape, not practice-name. The paper closes Part I of the SĪLA volume and prefigures SAMĀDHI: the chain from ethical conduct to concentration emerges naturally — sīla → non-remorse → joy → tranquility → bliss → samādhi — rather than by force.Same part, two ways in — papers keep the scholarly apparatus; the book is continuous prose for reading. Same source.