Popperian Vinaya: Conjecture and refutation in practice

Richard Gombrich, Oxford

I vividly remember my first encounter with Ernst. Though well aware of his
scholarly reputation, I had not met him until, at the 7th World Sanskrit Conference, held at Leiden in August 1987, I was introduced to a small group of people standing chatting in a corridor. Among them there was this stocky, relaxed
man in a tweed jacket smoking a pipe and looking benignly amused. One could
instantly sense that here was a man who pulled more than his apparent weight.
As he shook my hand, his eyes twinkled. (Eyes do twinkle better through pipe
smoke.) His gaze became what I can only call quizzical, and yet not unnerving.
I sensed that he pretty well saw through me and would cherish no illusions, and
yet it was OK, I had passed.
I did not immediately sense that this was to be one of the most fortunate
encounters of my life. But it was. Three times in the nineties Ernst invited me
to spend periods of several weeks working in his wonderful Institute, where I
revelled in the friendly atmosphere created by his extraordinary tolerance,
intelligence and diplomacy, and the admirable library, in which I was not only
led to many discoveries but also cut the pages of some of the obscurer volumes
of the Pali Canon. All, of course, wreathed in a cloud of tobacco smoke; the
fragrance welcomed me, a non-smoker, as soon as I entered the premises on the
first floor of the cavernous building on Maria-Theresien-Strasse. It had taken
not only fine scholarship but exceptional savoir faire to create that Institute.
Not only did I do some of my best work there; I feel I would have achieved far
more had I found the place, and Ernst, twenty years earlier.
Unlike Ernst, I have had no philosophical training. This is a serious deficiency
in someone who wants to study the history of Buddhism. In my publications, I
have several times pointed to features of the Buddhas teaching which strike
me as very like ideas propounded by Karl Popper.1 To some this must appear
1

Theravda Buddhism: a social history from ancient Benares to modern Colombo. 1st
ed. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1988, 2nd ed. Routledge, Abingdon, 2006, pp.

B. Kellner, H. Krasser, H. Lasic, M.T. Much, H. Tauscher (eds.), Pramakrti. Papers dedicated to Ernst Steinkellner on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Part 1. (Wiener Studien zur
Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde 70.1) Wien 2007, pp. 203211.

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idiosyncratic. I realise that the ideas of the Buddha and his followers can with
interest and profit be compared to those of many philosophers both ancient and
modern. So why Karl Popper?
Again, I suppose the root of the answer is biographical. For the best part of
fifty years Karl Popper was one of my fathers closest friends, perhaps indeed
his closest friend in England. They talked at least once a week on the phone,
and throughout my teens I spent many Sundays with my parents in the Poppers house just outside London at Penn, listening to Karl and my father discussing intellectual matters. I probably did not begin to read Karls work until
my late teens, but when I did so I was excited by it, and convinced. While I was
an undergraduate Karl asked me to read through the manuscript of Conjectures
and Refutations, a large volume of collected papers, as a copy editor. I think
that in the end he quietly rejected many of my suggestions; but reading those
papers carefully had an enormous influence on me, which I still regard as entirely beneficial. When in 1983 The Times Higher Educational Supplement
asked me to write a column in a series called Milestones, in which people
wrote of a book which had deeply influenced them, I wrote on Conjectures and
Refutations.2
In this short article I want to make a point which philosophically is no doubt
trivial, but I think is important historically. The very title of Conjectures and
Refutations alludes to Poppers position concerning knowledge: that in empirical matters there is no final and certain knowledge, but that we come ever
closer to truth by a process of conjecture and refutation, that is, by forming
hypotheses on the basis of the best evidence available, and then putting our
hypotheses to the test by any means we can find. Of course the Buddha was not
a fully-fledged Popperian in this regard: he was a religious teacher who believed that he had discovered the truth, though its final expression lay beyond
words. However, he had a great deal to say about how to improve our experience of life short of attaining nirvana, and in this empirical domain he held
some quite Popperian positions.

9, 1517. How Buddhism began: the conditioned genesis of the early teachings, 1st ed.
Athlone Press, London, 1996, 2nd ed. Routledge, Abingdon, 2006, pp. 15, 7, 30; Religious experience in early Buddhism? Eighth Annual BASR Lecture, 1997. British Association for the Study of Religions Occasional Paper 17. Printed by the University of
Leeds Printing Service, Leeds [1998], p. 2.
2

Richard Gombrich chooses Conjectures and refutations by Karl Popper. The Times
Higher Educational Supplement, "Milestones" series, 27 May 1983, p. 13.

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Introductions to Buddhism written for westerners tend to begin with a reference

to the Buddhas advice to a group of people called the Klmas.3 They had
complained to him that various teachers came and preached different doctrines
to them, and they were confused about which to follow. The Buddha replied
that everyone has to make up their own mind on such matters. One should not
take any teaching on trust or external authority, but test it on the touchstone of
ones own experience. Naturally, the implication is that people would then find
out for themselves that it was the Buddha whose teaching their experience
showed them to be correct. It is natural and appropriate for modern authors to
highlight this teaching: its implications for tolerance and egalitarianism, at least
on the intellectual level, resonate with post-Enlightenment thought. The attitude was not unique in the ancient world: one can imagine the same advice
coming from Socrates though not from Plato. But it is astonishing to find it in
the generally hierarchic society of India.
In every traditional society, including that into which the Buddha was born,
education consists largely in parroting what the teacher says. If later some
Buddhists parroted, The teacher says I must think for myself, we cannot
blame the Buddha for that. The Buddha even made a monastic ruling that one
of the duties of a pupil towards his teacher is to correct him when he is wrong
on doctrine or in danger of saying something unsuitable.4 That, I think, has few
parallels in world history.
The Pali Canon is very large and somewhat heterogeneous. The picture it
gives us of the Buddhas thought and personality is not consistent. Nevertheless, those comparatively few texts in which he is presented as claiming omniscience do strike a rather jarring note. In the Tevijja-vacchagotta Sutta the Buddha is asked whether at all times, both asleep and awake, he has complete
knowledge and vision. The Buddha says no: what he has is the threefold
knowledge. This threefold knowledge, as we know from many texts, is the
recollection of his former births, the power to see how all beings are reborn
according to their karma, and his destruction of the corruptions (sava), which
means that he is liberated. 5 I suggest that to us this reads like a denial of
omniscience, and that this is what we would perhaps expect of a great rational
intellect. Whether or not our interpretation is correct, it is not the one accepted
by any Buddhist tradition of which I am aware. According to the Theravda
exegetical tradition the Buddha is omniscient in the sense that all knowable

AN I 188193.

Vin I 49 para 20, 46 para 10.

MN I 482.

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things are potentially accessible to him. He cannot, however, know everything

simultaneously and must advert to whatever he wishes to know.6
The idea that the Buddha was omniscient is strikingly at odds with the picture of him presented in every Vinaya tradition. Though this is glaringly obvious once it is pointed out, I am not aware that anyone has pointed it out before.
The Vinaya is a great code of law with a vast array of glosses, elaborations
and commentaries. The actual rules are ascribed to the Buddha himself, and no
scholar believes that in fact every rule that we now have comes from the Buddhas own lips or even dates from his lifetime. On the other hand, the Vinaya is
historically inexplicable unless it started with the Buddha, who had the authority and intelligence to lay down the rules which constituted its basic framework
so successfully, indeed, that the Sagha, who live by those rules, represent
one of the worlds oldest and longest-lasting institutions.
So far as I know, every other legal code of the ancient world is ascribed to
some wise lawgiver who made up a set of rules a priori. The Buddha did not.
Every single rule in the Vinaya is presented in an empirical context. It does not
matter that the stories cannot possibly all be historically accurate, and indeed
are often stereotyped; the point is the pattern that they follow, a pattern which I
would argue must have been established at the outset. Thus every single rule is
presented to us as the Buddhas response to an untoward event or set of circumstances. He expresses disapproval, saying that it is not conducive to increasing
the number of believers. He then pronounces a rule, for which he gives a stock
list of ten reasons.7 They can be summarized as the protection and convenience
of the Sagha, the moral purity of its members, increase in the number of
believers and the good of non-believers. Nor is this empty rhetoric: the occasion for promulgating a rule is frequently lay dissatisfaction.
The scriptures thus represent the process of forming the Vinaya as a continuous process of meeting exigencies, of solving problems as they arise, sometimes as unintended consequences of previous rulings. This is conjecture and
refutation demonstrated in practice; it amounts to the same as trial and error.
Moreover, because every rule is framed to meet a particular situation that has
arisen, the first offender, the person who occasioned the creation of that rule, is
not guilty, because the rule did not yet exist to be broken.

Bhikkhu amoli & Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha,
Pali Text Society, Oxford, rev. ed. 2001, p. 1276, fn. 714.
7

Vin. III 21, etc.

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In sum, not only does the entire Vinaya tradition show that the Buddha did
not anticipate what rules would be needed, he even occasionally made a false
start and found it necessary to reverse a decision. Since omniscience includes
knowledge of the future, this is not omniscience. A pious Buddhist who was
committed to believing that the Buddha was omniscient would have to say that
his ignorance of the future was a charade. This would raise a problem about his
truthfulness, but in any case this hypothesis need not bother us, since it is not
actually put forward in the Vinaya tradition itself. However, sometimes when
the Buddha asks a question about what is going on, the commentaries do say
that actually he knew, but asked just for forms sake. This same observation occurs in the Chinese Vinaya text which I cite below, when the Buddha asks
about the noise being made by Upli and the other boys; but I believe it is nowhere found in the Pali Vinaya.
To illustrate how the rules were created by a process of trial and error, I shall
now summarise the section from the first book of the Khandhaka which describes how the institution of having novices (smaera) in the Sagha became
established.
I shall use the Pali version, since that and Sanskrit are the only relevant
languages that I know. Of course, there are five versions of the Vinaya extant in
Chinese and one of those, the Mlasarvstivdin, is also extant in Sanskrit and
Tibetan (but is incomplete in Chinese). This is a major reason why there is so
little modern scholarship on the Vinaya: to do a thorough job, one needs to be
able to use and compare the texts in all three languages. I have however found
a practical way forward. My doctoral student Mr Jungnok Park has had the
great kindness to check for me the relevant passages in the Chinese text of the
Dharmaguptaka Vinaya.8 All that matters for my present purposes is the process of making and changing the rules, and since Mr Park assures me that
everything I say about that applies equally to the Dharmaguptaka version, I
think we can take my remarks as valid for the whole Vinaya tradition.
There was a boy called Upli, the leader of a group (a gang?) of seventeen
boys.9 His parents were worried what would happen to him after their deaths.
They had heard that Buddhist monks lived in comfort: they ate well and slept
under cover. Upli heard his parents discussing this and went and told his
friends, whereupon they all decided to go for ordination with the Buddhists.

T1428, translated by Buddhayaas in 410 A.D.

Vin. I, 77.

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The parents all gave their consent, so the boys went and took ordination.
Though the text has them asking only for the lower ordination (pabbajj), they
received both that and the full ordination (upasampad). But in the night towards dawn they got up and cried, demanding food and drink. The monks
asked them to be patient until dawn; then they would get whatever there was
available, and would get the rest on their alms round. They however then used
their cells as toilets.
The Buddha heard the clamour and asked nanda what was going on;
apparently he did not know that the boys were there. When he had ascertained
that monks had knowingly ordained people under the age of twenty, he rebuked
them, saying: A person under the age of twenty cannot put up with heat and
cold, hunger and thirst, with insects bites and stings, with wind and sun, with
contact with creepy-crawlies, with harsh and unwelcoming speech. He cannot
bear the whole range of physical discomfort and pain, up to the lethal. But a
person aged twenty can. This will not make people who do not trust in us have
such trust, nor strengthen the trust of those who do.10 He then laid down the
rule: One may not knowingly ordain a person aged under twenty. One who
does so is to be penalised according to the rule.
The Dharmaguptaka story is much the same, though it seems to be shorter
and a bit more coherent. (a) It does not mention the lower ordination (pabbajj), which is logical, since the rule concerns higher ordination (upasampad) and is indeed the first step in the process by which a separate pabbajj
came to exist originally the two terms referred to the same thing. (b) The rule
which the Buddha lays down also includes the essential point that the underage ordination is invalid. It further specifies that a monk who has conducted
such an ordination is guilty of a pcittiya offense. In the Pali Vinaya, the Suttavibhaga,11 in the section on pcittiya offenses, has the same introductory story
about Upli and his friends, word for word, but the concluding rule does include the fact that the ordination is invalid, so the omission of the phrase from
the Pali Khandhaka is certainly a textual corruption. (c) The Dharmaguptaka
does not say that the boys used their cells as toilets. That too seems to make
better sense: the boys misbehaviour suggests really small children; but why
would any monk have thought that little boys who were not yet toilet trained
10

I.B. Horner translates this stock expression: This is not for pleasing those who are
not (yet) pleased, nor for increasing the number of those who are pleased. But this
makes the two results mean the same. I think therefore that bhiyyo here means more in
quality rather than in number.
11

Vin. IV 128130. Likewise, this passage also occurs as pcittiya 65 in the Dharmaguptaka version of the Sutta-vibhaga.

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could live in the Sagha? On the other hand, Jungnok Park informs me that in
the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya, after Rhula had become a novice (see below),
anonymous novices spoilt their beds and seats, which were covered with linen,
so the Buddha prohibited the use of linen-covered beds and seats to novices.
The next episode in the Pali (section I.50) is that a whole family were wiped
out by a disease, leaving only a father and his small son. The two of them
joined the Sagha (pabbajitv). When they went begging and the father was
given something the little boy would ask to share it. People grumbled because
they suspected that the little boy was the child of a nun. Thereupon the Buddha
ruled that no one under fifteen was to be admitted to the Order. Note that the
previous rule is about full ordination, this one about admission. Even so, the
story and the rule do not seem to me to match very well.
The Dharmaguptaka version again shows that we are dealing with a textual
corruption. In that version, this rule follows Pali 1.54. There is no mention of
the familys death by disease or of the suspicion that the boy was the child of a
nun, and the age given is 12, not 15.
Now (section I.51) comes a modification to the previous rule. A family who
used to look after nanda died of the same kind of epidemic (perhaps the same
one?), in this case leaving two boys. These, when they saw monks on their
alms rounds, approached them for food, as they had previously been allowed to
do; but now the monks rejected them and they cried. They were under fifteen,
so nanda wondered how to save them, and put the case to the Buddha. The
Buddha asked whether they were capable of making crows fly away. On
hearing that they were, he decreed that a boy aged under fifteen who could
shoo crows away could be admitted to the Order. This is the rule still in use
today; in Sri Lanka it is interpreted to mean about seven or eight years old.
This story too comes later in the Dharmaguptaka version. A few inessential
details are different, but this case still follows the previous one (Pali I.50) and
is a modification of it. (The age modified is 12, not 15.)
The next section (I.52) is very brief. Two named Sakyan boys who were
novices under the same monk had sex with each other. (Though Miss Horner
calls this sodomy, masturbation is surely more likely.) This caused the Buddha to forbid a single monk to take on two novices. We must understand that
novices were the responsibility of the monk who admitted them to the Order
and presumably also lodged with him.12
12

Though the Vinaya is not squeamish about mentioning sexual offences, it is worth
noting that no case is mentioned of a monk abusing a novice or being suspected of doing so.

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In the Dharmaguptaka version, the rule which appears at this point, i.e., after
the parallel to I.51, is virtually identical.
There is then a long section in the Pali (I.53) which concerns a different
topic. The next section (I.54) tells the famous story of how the Buddhas son
Rhula entered the Order. The Buddha goes to Kapilavatthu presumably,
though the text does not say so, returning for the first time since his Enlightenment. Rhulas mother the text gives her no other name tells him to go and
ask his father for his inheritance. When he does so, the Buddha tells Sriputta
to admit him to the Order.
Sriputta thereupon asks how he is to do that. The Buddha then explains that
novices are to be admitted by giving them the three refuges. They are to be
shaved and clothed in yellow robes. Putting his robe over one shoulder, the
postulant is to worship the feet of the monks present, squat with his hands together in the gesture of reverence, and be told to say three times, I go to the
Buddha for refuge, I go to the Dhamma for refuge, I go to the Sagha for refuge.
What follows is fascinating. The Buddhas father, Suddhodana, comes to
see him and asks him for a favour. He vividly describes the pain he suffered
when the Buddha left home as a renunciate, and then when Nanda, the Buddhas cousin, did; now Rhulas leaving is the worst of all. He asks that in
future no boy be admitted to the Order without the permission of his parents.
The Buddha grants his request. In doing so he in fact corrects himself, for he
decides that what he did to his own father, and what he has just repeated with
his own son, should never again be inflicted on any parent.
This famous story is the same in all essentials in the Dharmaguptaka text.
Sriputta now has Rhula as his novice. However, a family who support him
ask him to accept one of their boys as a novice (I.55). Aware that this has been
forbidden, he asks the Buddhas advice. The Buddha then in effect rescinds his
previous ruling, saying that a competent monk may take as many novices as he
is capable of educating.
In the Dharmaguptaka version, the monk who asks to have more than one
pupil is not Sriputta but anonymous. This variation, like others, is probably
due to the different sequence of the episodes. In the Pali narrative it is natural
that this request should come from Sriputta. But in the Dharmaguptaka version, this immediately follows the parallel to Pali I.52, the ruling which it rescinds. This is not very convincing, since it gives no particular reason for the
Buddha to rescind his earlier ruling.

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Unless and until we can compare all the extant Vinaya texts, there is little
point in trying to establish the core which they have in common and how deviations arose. Though it is clear that some variant versions are attempts to patch
up incoherences where the rules have been transmitted out of order, it is no less
clear that the Buddha on occasion modified rules, even to the extent of rescinding them completely. That, at least, is my conjecture, awaiting refutation.