bedding, on the treatment of quarrelsome priests, the use of fragrant substances, and many other trivial points of ecclesiastical discipline. The volumes containing all these instructions are followed by one in which the same stories are told, and the same morals deduced from them, concerning the nuns. Then there are some injunctions apparently peculiar to this sex, as, for instance, the restraint imposed on their possession of a multiplicity of garments. Another prohibition was called forth by the following conduct of a nun. A king had sent a piece of fine linen cloth as a present to a brother king. "It comes afterwards into the hands of Gtsug-Dgah-Mo (a lewd or wicked priestess); she puts it on, appears in public, but from its thin texture, seems to be naked. The priestesses are prohibited from accepting or wearing such thin clothes" (As. Re., vol. xx. p. 85).
It will be observed from these few quotations that according to the Canon the Buddha's usual mode of proceeding was to lay down rules as occasion required. Some instructive anecdote is related, and the new order follows as a natural consequence of the event. More probably the rules were in fact made first, and the anecdotes subsequently composed to account for them. However this may be, there exist in the Canon some undoubtedly ancient ordinances not called forth by any special circumstances, conformity to which was required of the monks, if not by their founder himself, at least by the rulers of his Church in its most primitive condition. Such, for example, are "the thirteen rules by which sin is shaken," reported by Burnouf, which are also found, with the exception of a single one, in a Chinese work entitled "the sacred book of the twelve observances" (H. B. I., p. 304). These rules belong, according to Burnouf, to an epoch when the organization of the monks under a powerful hierarchy. and their residence in settled monasteries, had scarcely begun. Some of them are even inconsistent with the institution of such monasteries, or Viharis, which are nevertheless very ancient. The fact that the above-named Chinese treatise, the pentaglot Buddhist Vocabulary,[1] and a
- ↑ This Vocabulary is a Chinese compilation, forming one of a class of catalogues drawn up in ancient times by Buddhist preachers. Such catalogues are found in the midst of canonical books, and are of high authority among Buddhists.
