The Master & the Apprentice: Monastic Mentorship through the lens of Guṇaprabha's Vinayasūtra

In this dissertation I attempt to recreate through thick description a picture of monastic mentorship,i.e. The niśraya apprenticeship, as it is depicted by the compilers of and commentators on the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya (MSV). I interpret the emerging picture of the niśraya apprenticeship using a philologically-based post-critical method for reading literary forms and a theoretical language derived from French and American sociology. On a theoretical level, my interest is to better understand how the person of a new Buddhist monk or nun is shaped by the ("obligatory") 5– to 10–year niśraya apprenticeship and how that shaping process can be understood as a form of self-care, a technology of the self that harnesses discipline as an instrument in a larger project of self-perfection. In my introduction, I briefly explain how I came to the topic of niśraya and wonder whether L.A. Waddell's Lāmaism prejudiced those in his wake to think the guru-disciple relationship was intrinsically Tantric. I then explain the theoretical language and critical lenses that I use in this study before giving a brief social history of ancient and medieval India, with special attention to the gurukula, where the Vedic student serves their ācārya or guru in exchange for which, the disciple receives the instruction they need to become an ācārya or guru themself. Interpreting the niśraya apprenticeship as a Buddhist gurukula, I then consider the Vinaya's intertwined development with the Dharmaśāstric literature, drawing upon recent scholarship to argue that the dharmas early Buddhist monastics were debating are better regarded as "rules" than "laws". In closing, I review previous scholarship on the niśraya apprenticeship and Guṇaprabha's Vinayasūtra. In chapter 1, I demonstrate, with a close reading of the extant canonical vinayas in Sanskrit, Pāli, Chinese, and Tibetan, that all Indian Buddhist monasticisms shared a model of and vocabulary for monastic training, generally introduced with the ordination rite under the rubric niśraya. 1 In chapter 2, I introduce Guṇaprabha's first sūtra, consider the claim about the Vinaya he makes with it, and examine Guṇaprabha's appropriation of the sūtra form from his Buddhist rivals in medieval India's other philosophico-religious disciplines. I then attempt a genealogy of śīla, as Guṇaprabha uses it in his own comments on the first sūtra, first, surveying the opinions of MSV commentators, followed by contemporary opinions on śīla and its relation to the Vinaya, and an examination of the Vaibhāṣika and Sautrāntika takes on śīla with Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośa and Abhidharmakośabhāṣya as my guide. I reflect briefly on the Vaibhāṣika interpretation of śīla, considering it a reflection of a more fundamental sense of śīla, śīla-as-habitus. To close the chapter, I discuss how Dharmamitra's Vinayasūtraṭīkā demonstrates the exegetical principles stipulated by Vasubandhu in his Vyākhyāyukti and consider Dharmamitra's style as an instance of the Buddhist śāstric or "scholastic" style. The formal and stylistic choices made by Guṇaprabha and Dharmamitra are best understood against the background of Mathurā's contested Sanskrit culture, which I discuss briefly before closing the chapter. In chapter 3, I focus on Guṇaprabha's digest of the Pravrajyāvastu's niśraya section (sūtras 70–77) and use thick description—drawing especially upon narratives and rulings from the Kṣudrakavastu and the Uttaragrantha—to construct a picture of the master-apprentice relationship as it is prescribed in the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya (MSV). I examine the niśraya master's and the niśrita apprentice's duties to one another, their daily routines and monthly calendars, their environment, and the official curriculum that are to follow, etc., Drawing upon the recent work of Gregory Schopen and in the Dharmaśāstric literature, I argue that the saṅgha functioned as a guild of ascetics whose skills-in-trade were learning and the possession of śīla. I thus consider how the niśraya apprenticeship affords for monastic apprentices to gain the knowledge and practical mastery of saṅgha culture they need to secure independence and become masters themselves. From a theoretical perspective, I consider the structures, forms, rhythms, and hierarchies I discuss in this chapter as instrumental to the monastic's acquisition of practical mastery. In chapter 4, I discuss those ways in which the monastic apprenticeship describes the process of becoming "learned". In chapter 4, I focus on sūtras 78–102 of Guṇaprabha's Vinayasūtra, which present 21 pentads of qualities that comprise the niśraya master's qualifications. I close read Guṇaprabha's auto-commentary alongside commentaries by his Indic heirs and the main Tibetan Vinaya authorities, Tshonawa, Buton Rinchen Drub, the First Dalai Lama, and the Eighth Karmapa. I examine in these sūtras, patterns of Buddhism's "culture of oral transmission"

Advisor: von Rospatt, Alex
Dalton, Jacob