Guṇaprabha's Vinayasūtra Corpus: Texts and Contexts
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Articles/Guṇaprabha's Vinayasūtra Corpus: Texts and Contexts
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Guṇaprabha's Vinayasūtra Corpus: Texts and Contexts
Journal Article
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Description
This essay is a study of the corpus of texts associated with the Vinayasūtra, written by ninth-century Indian scholar Guṇaprabha, and included in the Tibetan Tengyur. The essay begins with consideration of the sūtra format of the texts, the myths associated with the author, and continues to examine the Indian and Chinese Vinayas available to the Tibetans and their choice of the Mūlasarvāstivāda and Guṇaprabha’s Vinayasūtra corpus. These are followed with a brief discussion of the problems of manuscript availability and translation into Tibetan. The essay concludes with a brief review of the texts and their translators. The Tibetans' choice of these texts as core documents for Tibetan Buddhism is relevant to the study of canon formation, to the institutionalization of monasticism, the place of monastic life in Tibetan Buddhism in relation to philosophical inquiry and tantric ritual, and to the Tibetans' preference for Indian sources.
Citation
Nietupski, Paul K. "Guṇaprabha's Vinayasūtra Corpus: Texts and Contexts." Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies 5 (2009): 1-19.
Table of contents
Interconnections
3 Scholarship on
Vinayasūtra. (T. 'Dul ba'i mdo). In Sanskrit, "Discourse on Discipline"; a work on the monastic code by the Indian master Guṇaprabha, who is dated between the fifth and seventh century CE. Despite its title, the work is not a sūtra (in the sense of a discourse ascribed to the Buddha), but instead is an authored work composed of individual aphoristic statements (sūtras). The text offers a summary or condensation of the massive Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya. At approximately one quarter the length of this massive vinaya collection, Guṇaprabha's abridgment seems to have functioned as a kind of primer on the monastic code, omitting lengthy passages of scripture and providing the code of conduct to which monks were expected to subscribe. In this sense, the text is an important work for determining what monastic practice may actually have been like in medieval India. The Vinayasūtra became the most important vinaya text for Tibetan Buddhism, being studied in all of the major sects. In the Dge lugs, it is one of the five books (gzhung lnga) that served as the basis of the monastic curriculum. The detailed commentaries on the Vinayasūtra by the Pāla dynasty writer Dharmamitra (early ninth century) and the Bka' gdam pa master Tsho sna ba Shes rab bzang po's (b. thirteenth century) were widely studied. (Source: "Vinayasūtra." In The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 976. Princeton University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n41q.27.)
The Vinayasūtravṛttyabhidhānasvavyākhyāna (Tib. 'Dul ba'i mdo'i 'grel pa mngon par brjod pa rang gi rnam par bshad pa; RKTST 3457) is Guṇaprabha's own autocommentary (svavyākhyāna) on his Vinayasūtra, presented as a running gloss (vṛtti) explaining the technical terms and expressions (abhidhāna) used in the root text; classified in the Tengyur as a Sanskrit original work, it survives in Tibetan translation by Tsultrim Jungne (Tshul khrims 'byung gnas).
The Vinayasūtravṛtti ('Dul ba'i mdo'i 'grel pa) is attributed to Guṇaprabha, the author of the root Vinayasūtra itself, though its colophon indicates it was actually a compilation produced by several scholars rather than a single-author work. It is the third major text in the Vinayasūtra corpus, following the root Vinayasūtra and Guṇaprabha's own autocommentary. Stylistically, the Vṛtti stands apart from those two texts: where the Vinayasūtra and autocommentary are terse and technical, the Vṛtti is wordy and explicit, and its general vocabulary differs both from Guṇaprabha's other works and from Dharmamitra's Ṭīkā. Along with three other major commentaries, the Vṛtti came to occupy a central place in the Tibetan scholastic curriculum alongside the root Vinayasūtra. (Source: Nietupski, Paul K. "Guṇaprabha's Vinayasūtra Corpus: Texts and Contexts." Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies 5 (2009): 1-19)
