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.)
| Reference | Guṇaprabha. vinayasūtra [विनयसूत्र]. 'dul ba'i mdo [འདུལ་བའི་མདོ།]. [Aphorisms on Monastic Discipline (84000)]. Tengyur, RKTST 3455 http://www.rkts.org/cat.php?id=3455&typ=2. |
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| People | Guṇaprabha, Jinamitra, Chokro Lui Gyaltsen |
