Preface to the first Khandaka

To this book is prefixed, as introduction, an account of the first events after Gotama's attaining Buddhahood, down to the conversion of his two chief disciples, Sāriputta and Moggallāna (chaps. 1-24). Among the elements of historical or legendary character with which, in the Vinaya Piṭaka, the discussion of the monastic discipline is interwoven, this account occupies by far the first place, both in extent and in importance. For it contains the oldest version accessible to us now and, most probably, for ever, of what the Buddhist fraternity deemed to be the history of their Master's life in its most important period.

The connection in which this legendary narration stands with the main subject of the first Khandhaka is not difficult to account for. The regulations regarding the admission to the fraternity, which are discussed in this Khandhaka, could not but present themselves to the redactors of the Piṭaka as being the very basis of their religious discipline and monastic life. It was possible to fancy the existence of the Saṃgha without the Pātimokkha rules, or without the regulations about the Pavāraṇā festival, but it was impossible to realise the idea of a Saṃgha without rules showing who was to be regarded as a duly admitted member of the fraternity, and who was not. It is quite natural, therefore, that the stories or legends concerning the ordination of Bhikkhus were put in connection with the record of the very first events of the history of the Saṃgha. Nor is it difficult to account for the theory formulated by the historians of the Buddhist ecclesiastical law, of different successive forms in which the ordination of Bhikkhus had been performed. In the beginning, of course, there was nobody but the Buddha himself who could ordain Bhikkhus; to him those who desired to be received, expressed their wish, and he conferred on them the pabbajjā and upasampadā ordinations by the formula: 'Ehi bhikkhu,' &c. (see I, 6, 32, 34, &c.) It was a very natural conception that afterwards, as the Saṃgha grew larger, the Buddha should have transferred the power of admitting new members to the Bhikkhus themselves, and should have instituted that form of ordination which the redactors of the Piṭaka found valid at their own time.

The transition, however, from the supposed oldest form of ordination (the so-called ehi-bhikkhu-upasampadā) to that latter form is in the Vinaya legends not represented as immediate. There is described an intermediate stage between the two, the ordination by the three saraṇagamanas, or by the candidate's three times repeated declaration of his taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Saṃgha (see Mahāvagga I, 12). The reason which has led the redactors of the Vinaya Piṭaka to this construction, was most probably the important part which in the upasampadā service of the later time devolved upon the preceptor (upajjhāya) of the candidate. As only learned Bhikkhus, who had completed the tenth year after their own upasampadā, could perform the function of upajjhāya at the upasampadā ordination of other Bhikkhus (Mahāvagga I, 31, 8), it was natural that the redactors of the Vinaya found it impossible to ascribe this form of upasampadā service to the first times of Buddha's teaching. For these times, therefore, they recorded another form, the upasampadā by the three saraṇagamanas, the introduction of which they assigned, very naturally, to the time soon after the conversion of Yasa's friends, by which event the number of Bhikkhus had been augmented at once from seven to sixty-one.