The Bhikkhunī Vibhaṅga and Pātimokkha of the Mūlasarvāstivāda school, translated from the Chinese, can now be found here: 
This is the fifth (and last) vinaya of my translation project. Because it is quite a bit larger than the other vinayas, I’ve divided it into two parts. Part 1, which is published now, consists of the pātimokkha and the vibhaṅga. Part 2 consists of additional texts, similar to the Pāli bhikkhunī khandhaka, and will hopefully be ready for publication by the end of the year.
As always, many thanks go to two anonymous Mahayana bhikshunis, who help me out with difficult passages, and to Bhante @Khemarato.bhikkhu for tech support.
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The text of the Mūlasarvāstivāda school is quite unique with an unusual structure. The most obvious difference is that the bhikkhuni vibhaṅga is a complete text that fully includes all the shared rules. In all other schools, only the bhikkhu vibhaṅga is complete, and the bhikkhunī vibhaṅga just has the unshared rules. For the shared rules, one needs to refer to the bhikkhu text.
This left me with the question if I should translate the entire text, or just the unshared rules. I decided to just translate the unshared rules for now. The shared rules tend to be much longer and more elaborate, and it would have taken a lot of time to include them. It didn’t seem like a good use of my time, since the focus of my project is on the rules that are for bhikkhunis only. If I ever decide to translate bhikkhu vinaya in the future, it would make more sense to translate it then.
This vinaya was translated into Chinese about 300 years after the other four vinayas. So the style of the text and the technical terminology is all very different from what I’d been used to.
The number of rules is also quite large. This pātimokkha has 20 saṅghādisesas, instead of the usual 17, including a unique rule about not enforcing contracts of a deceased person. It has 33 nissaggiya pācittiyas, instead of the usual 30, again including unique rules not found anywhere else. And 11 pātidesanīyas, instead of the usual 8, including one rule shared with the bhikkhus. This is the only vinaya that has a shared pātidesanīya rule.
In most vinayas, all or almost all sekhiya rules are shared between bhikkhus and bhikkhunis. In the Pāli tradition, all sekhiyas are fully shared. In most other vinayas, all sekhiyas are shared, except for the rule about not defecating and urinating on living plants. This rule is upgraded to a pācittiya for bhikkhunis. Here in the Mūlasarvāstivāda, we have an additional unshared sekhiya, about not going to the village when menstruating. This sekhiya is not found in any other vinaya.
Another unique feature is a “mirrored rule”, np4. Technically, np4 is classified as a shared rule, but it’s not actually shared. The bhikkhu rule says: If a bhikkhu has an unrelated bhikkhuni wash, dye, or beat his old robe, it’s a np.
So if this rule was shared, it should say: If a bhikkhuni has an unrelated bhikkhu wash, dye, or beat her old robe, it’s a np.
However, it actually says: If a bhikkhunī washes, dyes, or beats the old robe of an unrelated bhikkhu, it’s a nissaggiya pācittiya.
So instead of covering opposite actions, here the same action, a bhikkhuni washing a bhikkhu’s robe, leads to a pacittiya for both.
This vinaya also has a habit of duplicating numbers. For example, whereas sikkhamānās observe 6 rules in other vinayas, they observe 12 rules here. Where other vinayas have misbehaving bhikkhunis belonging to a group-of-six, here they belong to a group-of-twelve. (However, numbers are only duplicated for bhikkhunis. The bhikkhu vinaya still retains the usual numbers. This leads to the odd situation that bhikkhus have a group-of-six, and bhikkhunis have a group-of-twelve, and they even appear in the same stories and interact with each other.)
The ordination procedure is also very unusual, but I’ll cover that more when I publish part 2 of this vinaya.
And my personal favorite nun, Thullanandā, appears again in this vinaya with many very colorful and entertaining stories. Her siblings are also featured again. Thullanandā has many family members in all the vinayas, and most of them are also monastics. In this vinaya, one of her sisters is very active, and we also meet a new brother not found anywhere else.
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Thank you also to the people who have submitted typos on github! I appreciate everyone making these translations better!
While proofreading this vinaya, I also made changes and corrections to all the other schools. If people have copied the files from github, I suggest you get the updated versions now.
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For more background on this project, and the other four vinayas already published, see here:
