Vinaya Texts

Author(s): T W Rhys Davids, Hermann Oldenberg
Publisher: Oxford

Page 28

INTRODUCTION.
XXV
and extent of these penances are not defined in the first book of the Vinaya Pitaka, but in others, to which reference will be made when these books are brought under consideration. Suffice it to say, that they can possibly have no deterring effect on crime, but rather form loop-holes through which most enormous and disgusting misdeeds may be committed, and yet the perpetrator may remain not only as a Buddhist, but as a Bhikkhull'
Mr. Coles then applies this argument to show that many offences against morality, being only called Dukkata and not Pârâgika, must have been looked upon very leniently, not only by the Buddhists, but by Gotama himself; and that therefore his system of morality was not of the lofty kind it has usually been supposed to be, but was, in fact, a mere cloak and encouragement to wickedness and crime!
If Mr. Coles had looked at the Pitaka he was discussing from a historical, instead of from a controversial, point of view, he would scarcely have advanced this argument. The use of the term Dukkata does not arise from, nor is it evidence of, a weakness in moral feeling ; but merely of a difference in point of time. It occurs only in what we have ventured above to call the Notes : that is to say, in the latest portion of the Pitaka. When the author or authors of the final recension of the Vinaya had to speak of an offence not actually mentioned, though implied, in the text before them, they did not presume to call it by any of the names applied in the Pâtimokkha itself to the classification of offences. They no more dared to add to the number of Pârâgikâs, for instance, than a clergyman would now venture seriously to propose an addition to the Ten Commandments. They made use of two technical terms (both entirely new ones), namely, Thullakkaya and Dukkata (literally, Serious Transgression and Bad-deed), using the former more sparingly, and for graver misdemeanours. No argument based on passages where the word Dukkata occurs can therefore have any force as to the teaching of Gotama himself; and the Bhikkhus, who did use the
* Journal of the Ceylon Asiatic Society, 1867-1870, p. 155.
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