Reassembling Discipline: Bu ston Rin chen grub’s 
Collection of Incidents Involving Nuns from the Vinaya
 (ʼDul ba dge slong maʼi gleng ʼbum)

This dissertation explores consistency problems in sources for nuns in the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya preserved in Tibetan, and one fourteenth-century exegete’s solutions to those problems. If one looks closely at the canonical recitation text of nuns’ rules, the Bhikṣuṇī-prātimokṣa-sūtra, alongside the ostensibly matching canonical explanatory text, the Bhikṣuṇī-vinaya-vibhaṅga, significant discrepancies of order and content appear in the minor rules, particularly in the pāyantikā section. In 1352, the Sa skya polymath Bu ston Rin chen grub (1290–1364) developed a digest of narratives about nuns, the ʼDul ba dge slong maʼi gleng ʼbum or Collection of Incidents Involving Nuns from the Vinaya, which remediated the discrepancies he saw in these sources. He took the recitation text to be authoritatively Mūlasarvāstivādin, rejected the explanatory text as belonging to another sect, and relied on the Indian exegete Guṇaprabha’s Vinayasūtra and its autocommentary (fifth–seventh century) as guides. He supplemented narratives from the Ārya-sarvāstivādi-mūla-bhikṣuṇī-prātimokṣa-sūtra-vṛtti, a source grouped as commentary, which he attributed to yet another sect. This dissertation argues that in the process of remediating the code’s inconsistencies, Bu ston created a new set of rules in certain sections, in some cases drawing on commentarial works to make sense of rules and narratives for which texts with the authority of buddhavacana—the status of buddha-speech, or canonicity—were readily available. In other words, the rules he compiled match no other extant list in full, including the list given in the canonical recitation text itself. In addition to this central claim about Bu ston’s use of sources, this dissertation demonstrates that Bu ston drew extensively on narrative supplements and past-life narratives (avadānas), to the extent of favoring narrative richness over brevity. A brief look at the writing of the thirteenth-/fourteenth-century monastic legal authority mTsho sna ba Shes rab bzang po also shows that Bu ston was not the first to give attention to discrepancies about the nuns’ rules. This dissertation underlines the lasting effects of Bu ston’s digesting practices on the circulation of vinaya narrative literature in Tibet, largely through its impact on the digest produced by Dalai Lama I dGe ’dun grub. Finally, this dissertation raises questions about what, if anything, Bu ston’s grappling with nuns’ rules tells us about the status of nuns in Tibet during his time, and what values his digest embodies in terms of norms for organizational consistency and information management.

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