Efforts have been made by many scholars to reveal the contents of the lost Sūtrapiṭaka of the Sarvāstivādins in a broad sense. These efforts include affiliating various extant āgama materials to this school, editing and translating such materials, and studying sūtras preserved in works other than āgamas. My study of sūtras embedded in the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya falls in the last category. Studying sūtras in the Vinaya, one is confronted by some difficulties: It is not always evident if the “sūtra” is precisely the same as its counterpart in the lost Sūtrapiṭaka; neither is it clear if the “sūtra” was extracted from the Sūtrapiṭaka and incorporated into the Vinaya or rather from the Vinaya into the Sūtrapiṭaka. In this paper, I emphasize the importance of being aware of the narrative context of the Vinaya, in which sūtras are embedded, for solving such problems. To clarify this, I discuss the identity of four discourses included in a series of instructive speeches called “Bharata's Responses,” which constitute the concluding part of the lengthy story of King Caṇḍapradyota in the Kṣudrakavastu, “Chapter of Miscellanea,” of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya. Together with other pieces of evidence, a brief mention to the Ekottarikāgama made in the middle of the story of Caṇḍapradyota strongly suggests that these four discourses were extracted from the Ekottarikāgama of the Sarvāstivādins, most of which is no longer extant. The main discussion is accompanied by an annotated Japanese translation of the part of “Bharata's Responses,” including three of the four discourses I regard as extracts from the Ekottarikāgama.
