Dharmaguptaka

• 1. Preservers of the Law

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  The Dharmaguptaka school took a name that means, roughly, preserver of the law. In Sanskrit it is written धर्मगुप्तक, and in Chinese 法藏部, read Fǎzàng Bù. The word guptaka carries the sense of preserver, while dharma points to law, justice and morality. Most likely it meant the body of laws of Northern Buddhism.

  The Dharmaguptaka were one of the eighteen or twenty early Buddhist schools, and the count shifts depending on the source. The name has proved fitting. Monks and nuns in China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan, and in the Philippines, still live under the Dharmaguptaka monastic rules, known as the Prātimokṣa. Only two other lineages of monastic discipline survive anywhere, those of the Theravāda and the Mūlasarvāstivāda.

  How did one early school come to govern monastic life across so much of Asia? What do the oldest Buddhist manuscripts ever found have to do with it? And why do two ancient Chinese texts disagree about the color of its robes?

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• 2. What They Taught

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  Tradition holds that the Dharmaguptakas grew out of another sect, the Mahīśāsakas. From that starting point they developed ideas of their own. They treated the path of the śrāvaka and the path of the bodhisattva as two separate things. A commentary on the Samayabhedoparacanaćakra adds that the Buddha and those of the Two Vehicles reach the same liberation by different noble paths.

  The same commentary records a striking view about gifts. The Dharmaguptakas said the Buddha is part of the Saṃgha, yet giving to the Buddha bears especially great fruit, while giving to the Saṃgha does not. Offerings to stūpas could bring many extensive benefits. They also held that those of outer paths, meaning heretics, cannot obtain the five supernormal powers, and that the body of an arhat is without outflows. In many other ways, the commentary says, their views resemble those of the Mahāsāṃghikas.

  The Abhidharma Mahāvibhāṣā Śāstra reports that the Dharmaguptakas believed the Four Noble Truths are to be observed simultaneously. Vasubandhu says the same, noting that on this point they agreed with the Theravāda and disagreed with the Sarvāstivāda. The realisation, in his account, happens all at once. The term for this is ekābhisamaya.

  The Sarvāstivāda Prātimokṣa drew a pointed rejection. The Dharmaguptakas refused its authority because, in their view, the original teachings of the Buddha had been lost.

  They also organised the teachings into twelve divisions: Sūtra, Geya, Vyākaraṇa, Gāthā, Udāna, Nidāna, Jātaka, Itivṛttaka, Vaipulya, Adbhūtadharma, Avadāna and Upadeśa. This twelvefold scheme appears in their Dīrgha Āgama and their Vinaya. It also turns up in some Mahāyāna sūtras, a first hint of how far the school's influence reached.

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• 3. Colors of the Robe

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  Sometime between 148 and 170 CE, a Parthian monk named An Shigao arrived in China and translated a work called Da Biqiu Sanqian Weiyi. It describes the color of monastic robes, called kāṣāya in Sanskrit, worn in five major Indian Buddhist sects. In this earlier text the Sarvāstivāda wear deep red and the Dharmaguptaka wear black.

  A later translation, the Śāriputraparipṛcchā, contains a passage with nearly the same information. There the colors are reversed. The Sarvāstivāda wear black, and the Dharmaguptaka wear deep red. The sources give no way to settle which text is right.

  Chinese practice offers its own twist. During the Tang dynasty, Chinese Buddhist monastics typically wore grayish-black robes. They were even called Zīyī, which means those of the black robes. Yet the Song dynasty monk Zanning, who lived from 919 to 1001 CE, wrote that in the earlier Han-Wei period Chinese monks typically wore red.

  The Dharmaguptaka Vinaya itself says nothing about hue in this account. It speaks instead of construction. A robe should be sewn from no more than 18 pieces of cloth, and the cloth should be fairly heavy and coarse.

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• 4. Scrolls of Gandhāra

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  The Gandharan Buddhist texts are the earliest Buddhist texts ever discovered, and they appear to be dedicated to the teachers of the Dharmaguptaka school. Richard Salomon, the leading scholar in the field, attributes them to the sect. He sees the British Library scrolls as a random but reasonably representative fraction of a probably much larger set. That library was likely kept in a Dharmaguptaka monastery in Nagarāhāra, in Afghanistan.

  Another piece sits in the Schøyen Collection. It is a fragment in the Kharoṣṭhī script that mentions the Six Pāramitās, a central practice for bodhisattvas in Mahāyāna doctrine.

  Around the 1st century CE, these texts point to a flourishing school in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent. Its canonical language was Gāndhārī. The Buddhist scholar A. K. Warder places the school's origin in Aparānta. One scholar reads the evidence as showing early success under Indo-Scythian supporters in Gandhāra. The decline came with the rise of the Kuṣāṇa Empire, from about the mid-1st to the 3rd century, which gave its patronage to the Sarvāstivāda.

  The link between sect and language is looser than it first appears. Scholars have tentatively tied the first wave of Buddhist missionary work to Gāndhārī and the Kharoṣṭhī script, and to the Dharmaguptakas. Yet most Gāndhārī manuscripts may belong to the Dharmaguptakas while virtually every school, Mahāyāna included, used some Gāndhārī. Von Hinüber found incompletely Sanskritised Gāndhārī words in works ascribed to the Sarvāstivādins. His conclusion was that either those attributions needed revising or the tacit rule that Gāndhārī means Dharmaguptaka is wrong. The Dharmaguptakas, for their part, sometimes used Sanskrit. From the 1st century CE onward, a heavily Sanskritised Gāndhārī became common.

  That language did not stay home. It travelled with missionaries, and one of its first destinations was Khotan.

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• 5. The Road East

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  The Khotan Dharmapada, certain spelling devices of Khotanese, and Gāndhārī loanwords in Khotanese all tell the same story. The first Buddhist missions to Khotan included Dharmaguptakas who used Gāndhārī written in Kharoṣṭhī. Every other manuscript from Khotan, especially those in Khotanese, is Mahāyāna, written in the Brāhmī script and translated from Sanskrit. Scholars identify three phases of Buddhist missionary activity in Central Asia, tied in order to the Dharmaguptaka, the Sarvāstivāda and the Mūlasarvāstivāda.

  Warder pictured the Dharmaguptakas moving in a vast circling movement along the trade routes. From Aparānta they went north-west into Iran, and into Oḍḍiyāna, the Suvastu Valley north of Gandhāra, which became one of their main centres. After reaching as far west as Parthia, they followed the silk route east across Central Asia and on into China. There, in Warder's account, they effectively established Buddhism in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The Mahīśāsakas and Kāśyapīyas seem to have followed them. For the earlier period of Chinese Buddhism he calls them "the main and most influential school."

  By the 7th century the school had left its homeland behind. Xuanzang and Yijing both recorded Dharmaguptakas in Oḍḍiyāna and Central Asia but not in the Indian subcontinent. Yijing grouped the Mahīśāsaka, Dharmaguptaka and Kāśyapīya as sub-sects of the Sarvāstivāda. He said these three were not common in the "five parts of India" but were found in parts of Oḍḍiyāna, Khotan and Kucha.

  In China, the school's ordination lineage took root between 250 and 255 CE, when Indian monks were invited to help with ordination. No full Vinaya had been translated yet. Only two texts were on hand. One was the Dharmaguptaka Karmavācanā, used for ordination. The other was the Mahāsāṃghika Prātimokṣa, used to regulate the life of monks. Once full Vinayas were translated, most monks followed the Dharmaguptaka ordination lineage. Even so, temples often governed daily life with other texts, such as those of the Mahāsāṃghika, the Mahīśāsaka or the Sarvāstivāda.

  Yijing described the resulting patchwork in the 7th century. Most people in eastern China followed the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya. In Guanzhong, the region around Chang'an, the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya had been used in earlier times. The Sarvāstivāda Vinaya was prominent in the Yangtze area and further south. Yijing and Dao An, who lived from 654 to 717, both criticised having several Vinaya lineages. In the early 8th century Dao An won the support of Emperor Zhongzong of Tang. An imperial edict followed, ordering that the Sangha in China use only the Dharmaguptaka vinaya for ordination.

  No other sect had worked harder to carry Buddhism beyond India, and most countries that received Buddhism from China received the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya along with it. Yet that Vinaya reached Chinese monks through the memory of a single translator.

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• 6. Texts in Chinese

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  Buddhayaśas, a Dharmaguptaka monk from Kashmir whose name is written 佛陀耶舍 in Chinese, translated the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya in the early 5th century CE. He did not work from a written manuscript. He recited the entire text from memory. After this translation the Vinaya became the predominant one in Chinese monasticism.

  In East Asia it is called the Vinaya in Four Parts, written 四分律 and read Sìfēn Lǜ. The equivalent Sanskrit title would be Caturvargika Vinaya. Its lineage for ordaining monks and nuns has survived uninterrupted. Ordination under it concerns only monastic vows and lineage. It does not conflict with whichever Buddhist teachings a person follows.

  The year 413 CE saw a complete Dharmaguptaka Dīrgha Āgama, called Cháng Āhán Jīng or Long Discourses in Chinese, translated by Buddhayaśas and Zhu Fonian under the Later Qin dynasty. It corresponds to the Dīgha Nikāya of the Theravāda. The Chinese version holds 30 sūtras, where the Theravādin collection has 34 suttas.

  The Ekottara Āgama, or Incremental Discourses, has a more contested identity. Dharmanandi translated it into Chinese in 384 CE, and Gautama Saṃghadeva edited it in 398 CE. It corresponds to the Aṅguttara Nikāya of the Theravāda. Some have proposed that its source text came from the Sarvāstivādins or the Mahāsāṃghikas. Warder disagrees. The text refers to 250 Prātimokṣa rules for monks, a number that agrees only with the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya. He also finds parts of its doctrine that contradict Mahāsāṃghika tenets and match known Dharmaguptaka views, so he concludes it belongs to the Dharmaguptakas.

  The school's life of the Buddha is called the Abhiniṣkramaṇa Sūtra. It is the most exhaustive of all classical biographies of the Buddha. Chinese translations of it date from between the 3rd and 6th century CE.

  The Śāriputra Abhidharma Śāstra, written 舍利弗阿毘曇論 and read Shèlìfú Āpítán Lùn, is a complete Abhidharma text thought to come from the sect. Its only complete edition is in Chinese. Sanskrit fragments found at Bamiyan, Afghanistan, now sit in the Schøyen Collection as MS 2375/08. Those manuscripts are thought to have belonged to a monastery library of the Mahāsāṃghika Lokottaravāda sect, not the Dharmaguptakas.

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• 7. Close to Mahāyāna

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  Kaniṣka, who ruled the Kuṣāṇa Empire from 127 to 151 CE, appears in the Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa as presiding over the establishment of Prajñāpāramitā doctrines in northwest India. Tāranātha wrote that 500 bodhisattvas attended the council at Jālandhra monastery in his time, which suggests real institutional strength for Mahāyāna in the region. Edward Conze goes further. He says the Prajñāpāramitā may have been the "fortress and hearth" of early Mahāyāna in the northwest, though not its origin, which he associates with the Mahāsāṃghika branch. When Dharmaguptaka members began accepting Mahāyāna sūtras is unknown.

  Jan Nattier finds textual evidence that the Mahāyāna Ugraparipṛcchā Sūtra circulated in Dharmaguptaka communities early in its history. A later translation shows it moving among the Sarvāstivādins too. The sūtra mentions a fourfold division of the canon that includes a Bodhisattva Piṭaka, and the Dharmaguptakas are known to have kept such a collection. Nattier reads the sūtra as describing a monastic community that accepted bodhisattva scriptures as legitimate and treated memorising them as a valid specialty. Only a certain subset of its monks, however, took part in the practices of the Bodhisattva Vehicle.

  The Ratnarāśivyākaraṇa Sūtra, part of the Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtra, is believed by some scholars to have a Dharmaguptaka origin. The reason is its specific regulations on giving to the Buddha and giving to the Saṃgha. Joseph Walser sees links between the Dharmaguptakas and two long Prajñāpāramitā works, the one in 25,000 lines and the one in 100,000 lines. He does not see the link for the one in 8000 lines. Guang Xing reads that shorter text's view of the Buddha as Mahāsāṃghika.

  The Dharmaguptaka Tripiṭaka was said to hold two sections that some other schools lacked. One was a Bodhisattva Piṭaka. The other was a Mantra Piṭaka, written 咒藏 and read Zhòu Zàng, sometimes called a Dhāraṇī Piṭaka. In the 4th century, Asaṅga's Abhidharmasamuccaya named the collection holding the Āgamas the Śrāvakapiṭaka, tied to śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas. He placed the Mahāyāna sūtras in the Bodhisattvapiṭaka, the collection for bodhisattvas.

  Buddhayaśas himself was known as a Mahāyānist. He learned both Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna treatises, and his translations included the Ākāśagarbha Bodhisattva Sūtra, written 虛空藏菩薩經 and read Xūkōngzàng Púsà Jīng. His preface to the Vinaya states that the Dharmaguptakas had assimilated the "Mahāyāna Tripiṭaka," written 大乘三藏 and read Dàchéng Sānzàng.

  Paramārtha, a 6th-century monk from Ujjain, went the furthest. He unequivocally associates the Dharmaguptaka school with Mahāyāna and portrays it as perhaps the closest thing to a straightforward Mahāyāna sect.

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