The editors begin not with the Buddha but with a rulebook, and explain why: "we propose to consider first the Rules of the work called the Pâtimokkha; for the later texts presuppose its existence. It is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of all Buddhist text-books." The monastic code is treated as the earliest stratum, and everything else in the Vinaya is dated against it.
Vinaya Texts, Part I: The Pâtimokkha and the Mahâvagga I–IV — SBE Vol. 13 (trans. Rhys Davids & Oldenberg, 1881)
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The translator’s English as printed (T. W. Rhys Davids & Hermann Oldenberg). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
For this purpose we propose to consider first the Rules of the work called the Patimokkha; for the later texts presuppose its existence. It is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of all Buddhist text-books; and it has been
\ called collectively the Sutta-vibhanga.
called collectively the Khandhakas.
x VINAYA TEXTS FROM THE PALI.
inserted in its entirety into the first part of the Vinaya, the Vibhanga!.
The Patimokkha—the meaning of the name will be discussed later on—seems to have owed its existence to the ancient Indian custom of holding sacred two periods in each month, the times of the Full Moon and of the New Moon.
The Vedic ceremonies of the DarsapfirzamAsa sacrifice, and of the feast or sacred day (U pavasatha) connected with it, are known to have been very old, and the custom of celebrating these days would naturally be handed on from the Brahmans to the different Samavzas, and be modified and simplified (though, as it seems, sometimes increased in number) by them, in accordance with their creeds and their views of religious duty. According to Buddhist tradition?—and we see no sufficient reason for doubting the correctness of the account—the monks of other, that is, of non-Buddhistic sects, used to meet together at the middle and at the close of every half-month, and were accustomed then to proclaim their new teaching in public. At such times the people would crowd together ; and the different sects found an opportunity of increasing their numbers and their influence.
The Buddhists also adopted the custom of these periodical meetings, but confined themselves to meeting twice in each month’. And the peculiarity which gave to these meetings among the Buddhists their distinguishing character seems to have been borrowed by them neither from the Brahmans nor from other dissenters, but to have been an original invention of the Buddhists themselves, The Brethren and Sisters made use of these half-monthly gatherings to confess to the assembled Order the sins and faults which each of them had committed ; and to take upon himself, or herself, the penance which the transgressor had thereby incurred. It would be unnecessary to dwell here upon the details of these penitential meetings, as we can
1 The opening sentence only is found in the Mahavagga. See below, p. xv.
3 Mahavagga II, 1, 1. 3 Ibid. II, 4, 2.
INTRODUCTION. xi
refer the reader to the second book of the Mahavagga, where he will find them fully set out.
It was for use at such penitential gatherings that the text, now known as the Patimokkha, was composed. A list was drawn up—which of course it would be necessary from time to time to complete, and rectify—of those offences which ought to be confessed and atoned for; this list was read out in the half-monthly meetings of the Order; and the Brethren and Sisters who were present were asked if they were innocent of each one of the offences therein mentioned.
Its origin is placed in practice rather than in doctrine: the Pâtimokkha "seems to have owed its existence to the ancient Indian custom of holding sacred two periods in each month" — the Uposatha days, on which the code was recited aloud. A list of rules exists because there was already a fixed occasion for reading one out. That is an argument about how texts come to be, not only about what this one says.
On the tradition that the Buddha laid down each clause himself, they neither accept nor dismiss: "This tradition is of course very far from being conclusive; but neither should we hold it impossible that the Pâtimokkha, either in its present shape, or at least in its most essential parts, can reach back to the Buddha's own time, or to that of his personal disciples." Two refusals in one sentence — of the tradition's claim and of the reflex to reject it.
Then the passage that makes this introduction worth reading on its own. Before arguing that the early community was organised, they name where the opposite assumption comes from: "It is no doubt natural, through the influence of the history of early Christianity, or perhaps of the school of Socrates, to imagine that early Buddhism was" a loose fellowship. Having identified the borrowed frame, they set it aside: "Gotama's disciples, from the very beginning, were much more than a free and unformal union of men held together merely through their common reverence for their Master ... They formed rather, and from the first, an organised Brotherhood."
That is the discipline Müller asked for in his preface to the series, actually performed — and it is the exact inverse of Palmer's introduction to the Qur'ân in the same series, where a Victorian frame is applied throughout and never named. One pair of editors examines the lens; the other looks through it. Both volumes are on this shelf, which is the only reason the comparison is available to a reader at all.
contrasts in method with The Qur'ân, Part I: Chapters I–XVI — SBE Vol. 6 (trans. E. H. Palmer, 1880)
The counterpart in the other direction. Eggeling's introduction to the Satapatha-Brâhmana in this same series argues, with real evidential care, that the elaboration of Vedic ritual served the interests of the priests who administered it — and never remarks that the question comes to him from European anticlerical historiography, whose comparandum he supplies himself in Mommsen's Rome. Rhys Davids and Oldenberg here do the thing he does not: they name the borrowed frame first, then decide against it on the evidence.
contrasts in method with The Satapatha-Brâhmana, Part I — SBE Vol. 12 (trans. Julius Eggeling, 1882)