Right section, wrong collection: an identification of a canonical vinaya text in the Tibetan bsTan 'gyur--Bya ba'i phung po zhes bya ba (Kriyaskandha-nama).

• Author: Clarke, Shayne

The Vinaya commentary or 'Dul ba'i 'grel pa section of the Tibetan bsTan 'gyur contains translations of a number of texts important for our knowledge of Indian Buddhism. Perhaps the best known of these is Gunaprabha's Vinaya-sutra and its corpus of auto- and sub-commentaries. This section, however, also contains a handful of texts that have been neglected by modern scholarship, despite their potential contributions to the study of Indian Vinaya literature in general, and the Mulasarvastivadin tradition in particular.

One such text, implicitly classified as a Vinaya commentary, is the Bya ba'i phung po zhes bya ba or Kriyaskandha-nama (Tohoku no. 4111; Peking no. 5612). A. C. Banerjee, whose scholarship (in this case six lines) still remains the most detailed work on the bsTan 'gyur Vinaya texts, states that this work is "incomplete" and that "[w]e know nothing of the author and the translator." (1) Unfortunately, Banerjee seems to be correct. An initial investigation of the text, however, would suggest that the situation may not be quite so dismaying. The author, to be sure, is unknown--but this merely classes it with all other texts purported to stem from the mouth of the Buddha. Since this is what the Kriyaskandha-nama appears to be, its assignment to the bsTan 'gyur collection, purportedly an assemblage of works of specific authorship, as opposed to the bKa' 'gyur, which collects all works attributed to the Buddha, is a puzzle and perhaps explains its neglect by scholars.

The last division of the Tibetan translation of the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya--and the least studied--is known as the Uttaragrantha. The Uttaragrantha itself, moreover, is made up of a number of individually named subdivisions. We do not yet know what to call these subdivisions or what exactly they are, whether "chapters," "sections," "texts," or the like, although from both Indian and Chinese evidence it appears that some, if not all, of them circulated or were cited individually. The Kriyaskandha-nama is, almost certainly, a translation of the last part of the last of these subdivisions. Although this last "section," or "text," identifies itself as a matrka (ma mo / ma lta bu), and a matrka is known to be the source of a number of canonical citations made by Gunaprabha, (2) the relationship between this matrka text and the other canonical Vinaya texts in this corpus is still not clear. As research into the Vinaya matrkas, of which we have at least three in Chinese and one in Tibetan, with fragments in Sanskrit, has only just begun, it is too early to say very much about them. (3) The Vinaya matrkas themselves, however, usually seem to contain three subsections. In the Kriyaskandha-nama we find what seems to be a translation of the third subsection of the matrka, the section on deportment or obligatory behavior. The identification of this text with the canonical matrka, in fact, is what allows us to establish a possible Sanskrit equivalent for the Tibetan title of this section of the canonical matrka. The Tibetan is given as bya ba'i phung po and also 'tsho ba'i phung po, and these would seem to be translations of the title of the text currently under consideration: Kriyaskandha. (4)

The text of the Kriyaskandha-nama begins (Peking [= Q], Kriyaskandha [= K.], Tshu 244a3) (5) with a list of approximately 115 terms, which are then subsequently elaborated upon or expanded in the body of the text. Directly after this initial enumeration we find the first clear evidence that we do indeed have a translation of part of the Vinaya matrka. The text reads: ma mo lta bu'i dum bu gsum pa'i gzhi rdzogs so (Q, K., Tshu 245a5). While the exact meaning of the Tibetan is not immediately clear, it would seem to be translatable as "The matter[s] of the third section of the matrka are complete." The function of this statement, however, is clear: it marks the end of the third list of terms to be expanded in the matrka. Indeed, with only minor variation, this is exactly what we find after the initial list of terms in the canonical matrka preserved, as we would expect, in the bKa' 'gyur: ma lta bu'i dum bu gsum pa'i dngos po rdzogs so "The matter[s] of the third section of the matrka are complete" (sTog [= S], Uttaragrantha [= U.], Na 405a7-b1; cf. Derge [= D], U., Pa 277b6; Q, U., Phe 265a3). The lexical variation here probably only reflects the Tibetan translator(s)' word choice...