Dating the Vinaya

Just wondering if anyone has any recommendations for secular scholarship on the Vinaya? On the assumption that the pātimokkha is the earliest layer of the text I have been pasting words from it into Digital Pali Reader and a surprising number of terms are simply absent from, or very rare in, the suttas.

For those skeptical of the idea that we can date this text to the 13th year of the dispensation, where can one go for a grounding in the issue, especially from a lexical point of view?

Any recommendations appreciated.

Ok, I have read the Gregory Schopen article in the Encyclopedia of Buddhism, downloaded Frauwallner, and started on Shayne Clarke.

As some may be familiar I have a genuine aversion, perhpas even a learning deficit, when it comes to understanding grammer and learning languages, so I have developed a “blunt instrument” approach to studying Buddhist texts in Pali that simply involves cuting and pasting strings of letters from suttacentral into digital pali reader and observing the patterns of numerical patterns across the books.

It is a “well known truth” that the patimokkha is the oldest part of the Vinaya and so I wanted to start to identify the connections between this text and the suttas that remain my primary interest, mostly as a way to take a break from trying to learn Pali prosody, yet another topic that is intensely difficult for me.

So, as usual my abbreviations are VN for Vinaya, DN, MN etc, AB of Abhidhamma.

Tatrime cattāro pārājikā dhammā uddesaṁ āgacchanti.
These four rules on expulsion come up for recitation.

pārājikā
VN: 86
DN: 0
MN: 0
SN: 0
AN: 0

plus one occurrence in the Jataka.

Yo pana bhikkhu bhikkhūnaṁ sikkhāsājīvasamāpanno sikkhaṁ appaccakkhāya dubbalyaṁ anāvikatvā methunaṁ dhammaṁ paṭiseveyya, antamaso tiracchānagatāyapi, pārājiko hoti asaṁvāso.
If a monk, after taking on the monks’ training and way of life, without first renouncing the training and revealing his weakness, has sexual intercourse, even with a female animal, he is expelled and excluded from the community.

sikkhāsājīvasamāpanno
VN: 1
DN: 0
MN: 6 (MN27 MN38 MN51 MN94 MN101 MN112)
SN: 0
AN: 2 (AN4.198 AN10.99)
KN: 0

appaccakkhāya
VN:1
DN: 0
MN: 0
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 2 (Mil)

dubbalyaṁ
VN: 5
DN: 0
MN: 2 (MN3)
SN: 0
AN: 14 (all in AN5 starting at AN5:55)
KN: 3 (all in Mil)

anāvikatvā
VN: 5
DN: 0
MN: 0
SN: 0
AN: 4 (all in 5, starting at AN5.55)
KN: 0

methunaṁ
VN: 68
DN: 7 (starting at DN24)
MN: 1 (MN76)
SN: 0
AN: 11 (AN4.50 and then from AN5.55 as above)
KN: 19 (occuring in atthaka and cula, then mostly in Nidd)
AB: 11 (all in Pp and Kv)

paṭiseveyya
VN: 3
DN: 1 (DN24)
MN: 0
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 3 (all in Nidd)
AB: 7 (all in Kv)

tiracchānagatāyapi
VN: 3
DN: 0
MN: 0
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 0
AB: 0

asaṁvāso
KN: 17
DN: 0
MN: 0
SN: 0
AN: 5 (AN6.44 AN8.13)
KN: 3 (Dhp, Ja)
AB: 0

Yo pana bhikkhu gāmā vā araññā vā adinnaṁ theyyasaṅkhātaṁ ādiyeyya,
If a monk, intending to steal, takes from an inhabited area or from the wilderness what has not been given to him—
yathārūpe adinnādāne rājāno coraṁ gahetvā haneyyuṁ vā bandheyyuṁ vā pabbājeyyuṁ vā corosi bālosi mūḷhosi thenosīti, tathārūpaṁ bhikkhu adinnaṁ ādiyamāno
the sort of stealing for which kings, having caught a thief, would beat, imprison, or banish him, saying, ‘You’re a bandit, you’re a fool, you’ve gone astray, you’re a thief’—
ayampi pārājiko hoti asaṁvāso.
he too is expelled and excluded from the community.

theyyasaṅkhātaṁ
VN: 8
DN: 8 (DN26 DN29 DN33)
MN: 9 (MN41 MN42 MN76 MN114)
SN: 2 (SN42.13 SN55.7)
AN: 11 (starting at AN5.178)
KN: 0
AB: 0

ādiyeyya
VN: 21
DN: 1 (DN4)
MN: 0
SN: 2 (SN22.80 SN55.7)
AN: 9 (starting at AN5.30)
KN: 10 (Nidd and Mil)
AB: 6 (all in Kv)

adinnādāne
VN: 6
DN: 4 (all in DN26)
MN: 0
SN: 0
AN: 7 (AN3.164 AN4.201 AN10.221 or higher)
KN: 7 (all in Nidd)
AB: 3 (all in Pp)

similar results will occur with haneyyuṁ, bandheyyuṁ, pabbājeyyuṁ, corosi, bālosi, mūḷhosi and thenosīti but lets move on.

Yo pana bhikkhu sañcicca manussaviggahaṁ jīvitā voropeyya, satthahārakaṁ vāssa pariyeseyya, maraṇavaṇṇaṁ vā saṁvaṇṇeyya, maraṇāya vā samādapeyya
If a monk intentionally kills a human being or seeks an instrument of death for them or praises death or incites someone to die, saying,
“ambho purisa kiṁ tuyhiminā pāpakena dujjīvitena, mataṁ te jīvitā seyyo”ti,
‘My friend, what’s the point of this miserable and difficult life? Death is better for you than life!’—
iti cittamano cittasaṅkappo anekapariyāyena maraṇavaṇṇaṁ vā saṁvaṇṇeyya, maraṇāya vā samādapeyya,
thinking and intending thus, if he praises death in many ways or incites someone to die—
ayampi pārājiko hoti asaṁvāso.
he too is expelled and excluded from the community.

sañcicca
VN: 131
DN: 2 (DN29, DN33)
MN: 4 (MN76 MN86)
SN: 0
AN: 6 (starting at AN7.53)
KN: 3 (in Cp Ja and Mil)
AB: 9 (all in Kv)

manussaviggahaṁ
VN7
DN: 0
MN: 0
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 0
AB: 0

Again, interesting results are obtained with several other terms but a desire for alacrity compels me to move on.

Yo pana bhikkhu anabhijānaṁ uttarimanussadhammaṁ attupanāyikaṁ alamariyañāṇadassanaṁ samudācareyya “iti jānāmi, iti passāmī”ti,
If a monk falsely claims for himself a superhuman quality, a knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones, saying, ‘This I know, this I see,’
tato aparena samayena samanuggāhīyamāno vā asamanuggāhīyamāno vā āpanno visuddhāpekkho evaṁ vadeyya “ajānamevaṁ āvuso avacaṁ jānāmi, apassaṁ passāmi, tucchaṁ musā vilapi”nti,
but after some time—whether he is questioned or not, but having committed the offense and seeking purification—should say: ‘Not knowing I said that I know, not seeing that I see; what I said was empty and false,’ then,
aññatra adhimānā,
except if it is due to overestimation,
ayampi pārājiko hoti asaṁvāso.
he too is expelled and excluded from the community.

uttarimanussadhammaṁ
VN: 33
DN: 0
MN: 0
SN: 1 (SN41.4)
AN: 2 (AN6.77)
KN: 3 (Mil and Pet)
AB: 0

samanuggāhīyamāno
VN: 10
DN: 0
MN: 1 (MN93)
SN: 0
AN: 0
KN: 0
AB: 0

Anyway, I know people will come at me with critiques of my woeful ignorance, and by all means do, but please, if possible, make it constructive, give me clues and information about how to improve my methadology etc etc.

My impression so far is that the patimokkha uses a version of Pali that is quite different to the version in the bulk of the suttas, and that using patimokkha terms might be a good way of identifying suttas that deserve furthur investigation as it may betray lateness in those texts.

The failure to find any Vinaya literature at Gandahara apart from a patimokkha might be suggestive that at least at the beginning of the common era the Vinaya material was still mostly an oral tradition and was not considered “canonical” in the way the suttas where, nor as “technical” or “promotinal” the way abbhidhamma and poetic texts seem to be regarded.

The twin copy of the patimokkha found may even have been a study aid for the scribe that produced it, perhaps used in debate between to differing lineages of the Vinaya.

All this to me indicates that we might perhaps have a good candidate in the Vinaya, inclusive of it’s patimokkha for a period of the literature that begins to be fixed only after the beginning of the common era.

So my revised impression is:

Approx 500bce - lone forest contemplatives begin to distinguish themselves by doctrine
Approx 400bce - atthakavagga? parayanavagga?
Approx 300bce - munisutta, a larger and growing body of poetry becoming canonical with a floating commentary in prose still not considered as canonical
Approx 250bce - Ashoka
Approx 200bce - growing textuality starts to fix the prose around the verse, the 4 principle collections are evident, commentarial and abbhidhamma lit is beginning to be fixed.
Approx 100bce - Mahayana textual tradition emerges, Vinaya traditions begin to be considered for textuality and regularisation
Approx 0ce - Multiple patimokkhas, abbhidhammas and mahayana texts are evident.

Approx 500ce - Chinese translations and Buddhaghosa commentarial project indicates that the canon as we have it now is more or less fixed in the various textual transmissions.

Anyone have any suggestions what to read in either the primary or secondary literature for a good overview of what is known or suspected of the 0ce to 500ce period?

Metta.

I don’t think your approach proves your point.

I know you said you don’t do grammar but your argument is like searching for ‘going’ and not for go and gone and then arguing that going isn’t frequent.

Grammar tables just don’t agree with some people’s brains, including mine. I get it.
This is why we have DPD. It’ll search for ‘going’, ‘goes’, ‘gone’ (gama, gacchati, gata).

I’d still recommend learning enough pali to recognise common suffixes, prefixes, conjugations and endings. Maybe you could grab Nyanatusita’s grammar tables and set yourself the homework of spotting all the optatives in a sutta. My brain, which like patterns, started to do this as soon as I learned what they were.

Entering the first word (words ending in -o will probably list with an -a ending)
sikkhāsājīvasamāpanno is just sikkhā + sājīva + samāpanna.
Just click into the grammar tab to see this.

sikkhā is a very common word in the suttas (like in the precepts)
sājiva is not so common but is AN and KN, it’s just sa+ajiva (which is a concept we know from the 8fp)
samāpanna is reasonably frequent through the suttas.
So if we take this a meaning unit, I would say that people at the time of the Buddha would understand this compound similarly to how it is understood within a vinaya context.

moving on…

appaccakkhāya is the antonym of paccakkhāya (DPD grammar tab again ftw)
paccakkhāya is all through MN, SN, AN. Additionally the grammar tab tells us that Grammar ger of paccakkhāti, trans (+acc), so then we can click and see the present tense is used as a legal term regularly in the parajikas alone.
(you can even click on ger and find out what that means. It’s kinda like our -ing words)

Your numbers also seem quite off.
Searching a common word in DPD, methunaṁ (which is the accusative of methuna) show so many more occurrences.
DPD tip: check the conjugations tab and you will see how -ṃ and -a are related.

pārājikā is just the plural of pārājika. 506 times in the vinaya according to DPR, and a slightly higher count in DPD because it counts both pārājika, pārājikā, pārājikaṃ etc
(check the conjugation tab to see this)

paṭiseveyya is just 'should/could/may/might paṭisevati. The -eyya suffix (opt 3rd person) is all the way through sutta pali. paṭisevati is, again, all through the suttas.

tiracchānagatāyapi - just take the pi off the end (of any word that contains it) and the word is very frequent. -pi is an emphatic (like the malaysian ‘la’).

I could go on with all the words you pasted. Really you don’t need much pali knowledge, just a familiarity with DPD to see that these are common words used in the suttas.

I hope this helps you up-skill your pali searching.

From my meagre understanding of Pali, I believe that there are ways you can learn about the dating of text from the pali but you would have to recognised endings (conjugations/declensions) which are not common in the suttas. I chant the bhikkhuni patimokkha and have not noticed many which stand out as uncommon within the context of MN/DN/AN sutta Pali.

I’m sorry I can’t point you to references for dating the vinaya, they definitely exist. @Brahmali might have some resources.

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yes! exactly!! that is the argument I am trying to make.

If you found a corpus that studiously avoided ever saying “going”, even once, even where you might expect it, in chapter after chapter and book after book, and then suddenly, in volume 114, after never ever saying “going” before, the 114th book of the series uses “going” 16 times, you would put that book down and think “I reckon Clive Cussler has used a ghostwriter here” and even if he denied it till eh was blue in the face, you would probably be right, because it’s weird if if a particular spelling, or a particular way of compounding, or a particular tense, or really any readily identifiable feature of a the way terms are represented by strings in text, occurs in a corpus after being absent for literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of words.

For example, I couldn’t help but notice that there is a strong affinity between terms in the patimokha and AN5.5. I haven’t looked at it yet but I will eat my pencils through my nose if there’s nothing of note there.

Good advice :slight_smile: and I am going to take my Warder on retreat with me this november and do my best to come back a bit less ignorant :slight_smile:

but this is again, exactly my point, as the language develops from it’s near-Vedic roots to its classical form, longer and longer compounds are more and more apparent, so this adds to ones suspision that sikkhāsājīvasamāpanno is late, not early, especially if there are occuances of sentences containing sikkhā sājīva samāpanna. (corected for grammer stuf) elsewhere in the corpus, becuase we would expect the compound version everywher if it was early, and the seperated version to be earlier if there are both.

This is exactly what I want to avoid with my methodology, meaning units could be spelt all sorts of different ways, could occur in all sorts of different cases, could even be expressed with different words. what I want is to identify the strings that occur in recognizable patterns, not the meanings, because my basic claim is that written representations resemble themselves as physical objects, and written passages that have categorizable self-resemblances can be distinguished form other such “regularizations” regardless of the meanings of the texts.

so if some group of texts always glues words together in long unbroken strings that are not glued together in the same way in other texts then we can say “these are the glued texts” and “these are the non-glued texts”, with a sufficient quantity of such characteristics we should be able to make claims about what texts cluster with what texts.

Again, this is my point If a bunch of texts say “true” over and over but never ever say “untrue” but only ever “false” we don’t say “well, “un” is a common thing, and “false” just means the same thing as “untrue” so therefore pointing out that these three quarters of a million words never says untrue, while there other half a million words says “untrue” a lot must be meaningless”.

Thank you I will :slight_smile:

They can be, DPR sometimes just runs out of memory, or I have too many tabs open, or it decides that it doesn’t like me, was, as i say, some fairly mindless cut and pasting because Pali Metre was doing my head in and I needed a distraction.

yes, again, if a word is used emphatically in one corpus but not in another it makes no difference to my argument about the representation of the text by it’s strings. (if anything it strengthens my argument as if pi is a common emphatic in the sutta texts and tiracchānagatāya is a common term, it’s all the more indicative of a difference if the vinaya uses the emphatic on that string while the sutta chooses not to.)

One last time, because I really think this is where the grammarians struggle to understand my point. What words are used in the various corpuses is irrelevant to my argument, what I care about is what strings are used to represent those words and how we can use those representations as statistical evidence about the likely periodization of the texts.

It absolutely does! and thankyou for your feedback I really appreciate it! Language learning appears to be a real struggle for my brain, along with remembering names and various other things that these days seems to inspire people on tiktok to diagnose themselves with whatever is fashionable, but I am persevering and with the help of this community getting slowly more familiar.

Metta

Warder wouldn’t be my first choice. It’s dense.
If you are just interested in learning ‘enough’ and are not interested in learning vocab, Pali Primer or the Learning Pali Youtube would give you the overview you need to start spotting patterns.

This, would indeed be useful. There are certainly cases/tenses which are late or uncommon in the EBTs. For this you would need to search for those cases/tenses not the individual words. However, the nature of the patimokkha is that it will heavily emphasise certain tenses/cases. Patimokkha rules are mostly in the format of ‘should a monastic do x then y’. When looking through the rules there are some individual rules which deviate from this format. This always perks up my interest, in that the individual rule might be late.

As I understand it, the breaks in the words are a very modern invention. The palm leaf manuscripts don’t have breaks. The breaks are the late addition.

The use of the emphatic in this rule is to remove dodgey loopholes to do with having sex with monkey etc. tiracchānagatāya is ‘with an animal’. The emphatic is to say ‘even with an animal’. I can’t think of a non-vinaya application for talking about animals in this way. In the suttas tiracchānagatā is a common word for beasts. ie the lion is the king of beasts.

Furthermore, -pi is all through the pali canon. Think about taking precepts. Dutiyampi… tatiyampi. I did a search for *pi and some individual MN suttas alone have it ~50 times.

If you wanted to experiment with the frequency of certain indeclinable, I’d say that would be an interesting and valid argument. This would be useful across all of your research.

I just discovered you can find a list of all indeclinables under atha in DPD - then going to the set tab.

I have heard that the way ca and va are placed in lists has be theorised as a method of dating. I think this was Mark Allon’s work.

Yes. They both talk about a monastic disrobing. This is the kind of content which the vinaya is interested in. I don’t understand your point.

Possibly more interesting and useful for this exploration is to compare the legal terms used in the bhikkhuni and bhikkhu vinaya. Bhikkhuni have their own words for ‘full ordination’, ‘preceptor’ etc. which are not in common with the bhikkhus. From memory, I believe that the terms in the bhikkhuni vinaya are in also found in Jain vinaya.

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My point here is that AN5.55 probably eminates from the Vinaya corpus or arises contemporaneusly with it.

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This forum is about early Buddhist texts. This is the correct place for Joseph to be posting about this stuff.

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look @Sphairos I apologize for being snappy and rude, but you must understand my frustration, this forum was built to provide a platform for people to discuss these texts.
I am clear and explicit in the words I use to make sure that people understand I am not seeking religious advice but academic advice.

This is obviously untrue. many many people practice Buddhism as a religion and have done for thousands of years. Whether you take the ultimate meaning of Buddhism to be a religious one is something people can come to differing opinions about.

Oce again, just for the record, this is obviously rude. You don’t know me, you don’t know anything about my life, it is not appropriate behavior to talk like this.

Again this is obviously untrue, there are plenty of Buddhist texts about the next life, about practical matters, and loads and loads and loads about rectangles of cloth and what is and is not permitted with regards to their manufacture, exchange, donation and dying.

Once again, you don’t know me. Keep your opinions about me personally to yourself.

lol. this is a guaranteed way to determine what will be widely acknowledged as unfounded foolishness a generation hence.

How is this anything but manifest hypocrisy? So you are allowed to “work with Buddhist texts literally every day” but I should stop that and go practice? I suppose that’s because you haven’t forgotten about enlightenment in this very life like I have, according to you.

Honestly.

I’m sorry to see that posts addressing dating have been deemed off-topic.

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Please keep this thread on topic. The original post is specifically asking for academic and textual references and arguments about vinaya dating. Please refrain from posting off topic stuff about what they should spend their time on instead and what is a worthwhile pursuit or any other non-related issues.
:pray:t5:
trusolo (on behalf of the moderators)

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