Mulasarvastivada

• 1. Introduction

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  The Mulasarvastivada was one of the early Buddhist schools of India, and its story stretches from ancient Mathura to the monasteries of modern Bhutan. On the 23rd of June 2022, 144 women were ordained as bhiksuni nuns in Bhutan, marking the official start of a Tibetan Buddhist nun's tradition that traces its monastic lineage back to this ancient school. That ceremony was not a beginning so much as a resumption, a living thread connecting the present to a school whose origins remain genuinely mysterious to scholars. Where did the Mulasarvastivada come from? Was it truly distinct from the older Sarvastivada, or were the two really the same community under different names? And how did a school rooted in India come to shape Buddhist practice from Sumatra to Japan to the Mongolian steppe?

• 2. A Disputed Origin

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  Gregory Schopen, one of the most prominent scholars of early Buddhist monasticism, places the Mulasarvastivada's development in the 2nd century CE. What that origin actually looked like, however, is the subject of sharp disagreement among researchers. The monk Yijing claimed the school derived its name from being an offshoot of the Sarvastivada. Buton Rinchen Drub offered a different reading: that the prefix mula, meaning "root," was a tribute to the Sarvastivada as the foundation of all Buddhist schools, not a claim of descent from it.

  Frauwallner proposed that the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya, the school's monastic code, belonged to an early Buddhist community centred in Mathura. That community, in his view, was established independently of the Sarvastivadins of Kashmir, even if the two shared doctrine. Lamotte pushed back hard, arguing that the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya was actually a late compilation made in Kashmir to supplement the existing Sarvastivadin code. Warder took a third position, treating the Mulasarvastivadins as a later literary development of the Sarvastivada whose main contribution was the compilation of a large Vinaya and the Saddharmasmrityupasthana Sutra.

  Willemen, Dessein, and Cox built yet another framework. They traced the school's lineage to the Sautrantikas, a branch within the Sarvastivadin group that emerged in Gandhara and Bactria around 200 CE. Those Sautrantikas, in this theory, lost ground to the Kashmir Vaibhasika school partly because of the political influence of Kaniska, then later regained prominence under the name Mulasarvastivada. Enomoto went furthest of all, arguing that Sarvastivadin and Mulasarvastivadin were simply the same community. Scholar Bhikkhu Sujato, who summarised these competing positions, recorded his own disagreement with Enomoto and with Willemen and colleagues, and concluded that Frauwallner's theory has stood up best over time. Schopen's dating also places the school's decline in India by the 7th century, after roughly five centuries of activity on the subcontinent.

• 3. Across Asia

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  Yijing, the 7th-century Chinese monk whose travels left detailed records of Buddhist communities across Southeast Asia, reported that the Mulasarvastivada had a pronounced presence in the kingdom of Srivijaya, which occupied what is now Sumatra in Indonesia. He spent six to seven years there, studying Sanskrit and translating Sanskrit texts into Chinese. His assessment was that the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya was almost universally followed in that region, and that the curriculum and ritual practices closely matched what was observed in India.

  Yijing described the islands broadly as Hinayana in orientation, though he noted that the Melayu Kingdom within Srivijaya also incorporated Mahayana teachings, including Asanga's Yogacarabhumi Sastra. In Champa, also at the end of the 7th century, Yijing recorded that Buddhist monks generally followed either the Sammitiya Nikaya or the Mulasarvastivada Nikaya. He observed that Mulasarvastivada monks there had a distinctive way of wearing their robes, pulling the ends through the belt and hanging them over it on both sides.

  Further north, Kukai, the founder of the Shingon lineage in Japan, required his students to study the Mulasarvastivada Vinaya, a requirement that brought the school's monastic code into one of Japan's most influential Buddhist traditions. The school also spread through Central Asia in three successive phases of missionary activity, with the Mulasarvastivada representing the third and latest of those phases, following the Dharmaguptaka and the Sarvastivada.

• 4. The Living Vinaya

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  Only three Vinaya lineages from the ancient Buddhist world survive intact today: the Dharmaguptaka, the Theravada, and the Mulasarvastivada. The Tibetan Emperor Ralpachen made the Mulasarvastivadin Vinaya the sole authorised basis for Buddhist ordination in Tibet. When Buddhism spread from Tibet into Mongolia, the Mongolian tradition inherited that rule and follows the Mulasarvastivadin ordination lineage to this day.

  The Mulasarvastivada Vinaya survives in two full translations: a Tibetan version produced in the 9th century and a Chinese version from the 8th century. Parts of it also survive in the original Sanskrit. The bhiksuni ordination tradition within this lineage had a more interrupted history. Until recently, Mulasarvastivadin nuns did not exist; ordained women within the tradition had only found pathways through ceremonies held in Taiwan and later in Bodh Gaya, India. The 2022 ordination in Bhutan of 144 women as bhiksuni formally opened that door within Tibetan Buddhism, connecting a 2nd-century Indian school to a living community of monastics in the 21st century.