Vinaya · Pāli/Skt: vinaya

Vinaya means discipline, and the Vinaya Piṭaka is where it is kept. Access to Insight describes it as “the first division of the Tipitaka” and “the textual framework upon which the monastic community (Sangha) is built”, holding “not only the rules governing the life of every Theravada bhikkhu (monk) and bhikkhuni (nun), but also a host of procedures and conventions of etiquette”. It falls into three parts: the Suttavibhaṅga, which sets out “the basic rules of conduct (Patimokkha) for bhikkhus and bhikkhunis, along with the ‘origin story’ for each one”; the Khandhaka, in its Mahavagga and Cullavagga; and the Parivara, “a recapitulation of the previous sections”.

At the centre sits the Pāṭimokkha, the rule list that is “being recited every half-month” before the assembled Sangha. Its gravest rules are the four pārājika, which in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation cover a monk who would “engage in sexual intercourse, even with a female animal”; “take what is not given from an inhabited area or from the wilderness”; “intentionally deprive a human being of life”; or, without direct knowledge, “claim a superior human state, a truly noble knowledge and vision, as present in himself”. Break one and he is “defeated and no longer in affiliation”.

Those are the rules of the Theravada monastic code. Beyond the Pali tradition the same institution appears under its Sanskrit name: “The two most important systems of moral discipline in Buddhism are the Five Precepts, which apply to lay people, and the Vows of Individual Liberation (Skt. prātimokṣa) which apply to monks and nuns”, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it. The five precepts shape a lay life; the Vinaya shapes a renunciant one.