The history of the Buddhist monastic institution, the development of the Vinaya rules that govern it, the attitudes of persons who take monastic vows, and its relations to the larger society are still poorly understood by western scholars. In this essay I will attempt a comprehensive picture of the Buddhist monastic institution in India and Tibet.
Much of Buddhist scholarship either misses the full impact of the ethical teachings by over-emphasizing the wisdom aspects of Buddhism, or misses the impact of the wisdom teachings by over-emphasizing the ethical. I will demonstrate the traditional formula that asserts that the two are inseparable.
I focus on the master of Vinaya, Gunaprabha, as a good example of Buddhist integration of renunciative and activist tendencies in Buddhist monasticism. He lived in the Post Gupta Dynasty in a flourishing Buddhist environment, where he synthesized early monastic practices, later Mahayana universalism, and possibly even Buddhist Tantra. My main problem here is a dearth of data on this crucial, but elusive, figure.
In the first Chapter I introduce the major issues, and in the second, I address some of the methodological problems. In the third, I summarize the life story of the Buddha, and show how it is a behavioral paradigm for later Buddhists. In the fourth and fifth Chapters, I describe the Vinaya literature and the system for personal and social transformation. In the sixth, I trace the history of the institution. In the seventh and eighth Chapters I discuss the Post Gupta period and the life and work of Gunaprabha. In the ninth Chapter I discuss the early transmission of Buddhism to Tibet. In the appendix, I translate a sample from Gunaprabha's Vinayasutra and Autocommentary.
