Right Section, Wrong Collection: An Identification of a Canonical Vinaya Text in the Tibetan Bstan 'Gyur--Bya Ba'i Phung Po Zhes Bya Ba (Kriyaskandha-Nama)‪.‬

The Vinaya commentary or 'Dul ba'i 'grel pa section of the Tibetan bsTan 'gyur contains translations of a number of texts important for our knowledge of Indian Buddhism. Perhaps the best known of these is Gunaprabha's Vinaya-sutra and its corpus of auto- and sub-commentaries. This section, however, also contains a handful of texts that have been neglected by modern scholarship, despite their potential contributions to the study of Indian Vinaya literature in general, and the Mulasarvastivadin tradition in particular. One such text, implicitly classified as a Vinaya commentary, is the Bya ba'i phung po zhes bya ba or Kriyaskandha-nama (Tohoku no. 4111; Peking no. 5612). A. C. Banerjee, whose scholarship (in this case six lines) still remains the most detailed work on the bsTan 'gyur Vinaya texts, states that this work is "incomplete" and that "[w]e know nothing of the author and the translator." (1) Unfortunately, Banerjee seems to be correct. An initial investigation of the text, however, would suggest that the situation may not be quite so dismaying. The author, to be sure, is unknown--but this merely classes it with all other texts purported to stem from the mouth of the Buddha. Since this is what the Kriyaskandha-nama appears to be, its assignment to the bsTan 'gyur collection, purportedly an assemblage of works of specific authorship, as opposed to the bKa' 'gyur, which collects all works attributed to the Buddha, is a puzzle and perhaps explains its neglect by scholars.