The Nature of a Vow: Karma, Ritual, Lineage, and the Three Vows
Creators: name: Johnson, Anna
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Tibetan Buddhism
subject: vows
subject: three-vow theory
subject: Shakya Chokden
subject: Sakya tradition
subject: pratimoksa vows, bodhisattva vows, and tantra vows
subject: East Asian Languages and Cultures
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities

description: What is ritually produced when vows are conferred? Indian Buddhist scholars analyzed the three vows as discrete entities, as components of the person, to be defined and categorized in and of itself. In Tibetan Buddhist discourse, “three vows” (sdom gsum) refers to the prātimokṣa (monastic and lay vows), the cittotpāda (or bodhisattva, or bodhicitta, vows), and the vidyādhara (or secret mantra) vows. In its most technical sense, a vow (sdom pa) is not a mere promise; it is not commensurate with what is to be relinquished (spang bya) or what is to be trained in (bslab bya), where these three vows both overlap and conflict. The nature of the vow is not a code of conduct or an abstract notion of disciplined behavior. It is, according to the fifteenth-century exegete Shākya Chokden, a mental factor (sems byung), a ritually created, stable and continuous, merit-producing mental factor of intention. The first chapter of this dissertation, “The Ritual Production of a Prātimokṣa Vow: Perceptible and Imperceptible Karma and the Arising of a Vow in the Karmic Process,” addresses abhidharma discussions on the ontological status of a vow and how it is situated within categories of action and within categories of nature. In his Golden Lancet, Shākya Chokden clarifies the Vaibhāṣika view of the nature of the vows as only avijñaptirūpa (imperceptible form). The second chapter, “The Intention to Train: The Nature of the Vow in the Two Cittotpāda Vow Lineages,” addresses how Shākya Chokden uses the concept of the nature of the cittotpāda vow to differentiate the two vow lineages of Cittamātra and Madhyamaka. He distinguishes them based on the two types of bodhicitta, and their respective rituals and downfalls, addressing the problems that arise from assuming that the philosophical views of these two schools are relevant to the preceptee. The third chapter, “Vidyādhara Vows and Shākya Chokden’s Three-Vow Theory,” addresses Shākya Chokden’s analysis of how all three vows are held within a single practitioner, as discussed in his two three-vow treatises. Here, Shākya Chokden conceptualizes the three vows in terms of their upward progression (yar ldan), in that the higher include and transcend the former, defining the vow’s transformation of state (gnas ’gyur) based on progressive ritually generated motivations that each outshine or suppress the lesser motivations of the prior vows. Each chapter addresses a different set of concepts that Shākya Chokden mobilizes in order to clarify the ritual production of vows. In each of these contexts, larger networks of interrelated doctrinal categories are connected to definitions of the nature of each of the three vows as, at the relative level, “intention together with its seeds.” What differentiates the three vows is the content of that intention.