The Chapter on Medicines
Introduction

The Bhaiṣajyavastu, “The Chapter on Medicines,” is the sixth chapter of the Vinayavastu, “The Chapters on Monastic Discipline,” of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya. The Mūlasarvāstivāda was one of the most influential Buddhist schools in India, and its Vinaya, the corpus of monastic law, is reported to have circulated not only in various parts of the Indian subcontinent but also in Southeast Asia, at least in the late seventh century. When this Vinaya was composed is an unresolved question, and we are presently unable to say more than that the corpus seems to have taken its present shape in the first few centuries of the common era.1

The Vinayavastu is one of the four divisions of this voluminous Vinaya and is a collection of seventeen thematic chapters, each of which deals with monastic rules about a specific topic such as ordination, clothing, and so on. Among these chapters, the Bhaiṣajyavastu is the lengthiest (in the Tibetan translation) or the second lengthiest (in the Sanskrit manuscript). As is indicated by its title, this chapter is concerned with rules about medicines to be used and foods to be eaten by monastics. Actually, however, most of the text is not related to any such rules, at least not directly; accounts of rules are concentrated mostly in the first and last parts of the chapter, which together make up less than 20 percent of the entire chapter, and the rest of the text is filled with various narrative stories about the Buddha and other characters, and stories of their former lives. Many parallels to sūtras, which present doctrines rather than monastic law, are also included in this chapter. Thus, it not only provides interesting information about medical knowledge shared by ancient Indian Buddhist monastics but is also a vast treasure trove of Buddhist narrative literature, and it even opens a number of doors to another canonical corpus, the Sūtrapiṭaka of the Mūla­sarvāstivādins, most of which is lost today. The abundance of narrative elements and sūtras is characteristic of the law code of the Mūla­sarvāstivādins as a whole, and the Bhaiṣajyavastu is outstanding in this regard.

The outline of the Bhaiṣajyavastu based on the Tibetan version is as follows. The chapter opens with an account of the Buddha’s permission for monks to use medicines, and explanations of various medicines follow. After the account of permission to boil almsfood that is not completely cooked, however, the text suddenly begins to narrate the biography of Pūrṇa, a disciple of the Buddha. After this story ends, another unrelated story begins, explaining how the city of Rājagṛha was endangered by a nāga king named Apalāla. In this story, at the request of the citizens of Vaiśālī and King Ajātaśatru of Magadha, the Buddha leaves Rājagṛha and journeys with his disciples to quell an epidemic in Vaiśālī and convert the nāga king, who lives in the northern region. The first part of this journey generally corresponds to the Buddha’s final journey as narrated in the Mahā­parinirvāṇa­sūtra in the Dīrghāgama. However, in this text the story develops differently from the sūtra after the Buddha quells the epidemic in Vaiśālī, the first destination. Although he hints at his approaching nirvāṇa, the Buddha travels to Kuśinagarī without entering the city of Pāpā, which is an important place in the Mahā­parinirvāṇa­sūtra. In the end, the Buddha does not enter nirvāṇa in the story in the Bhaiṣajyavastu. Various episodes are narrated regarding each place the Buddha visits, and sometimes they appear quite jumbled‍—the Buddha even “arrives” at Rājagṛha, the starting point of the journey, before he reaches the northern region, that is, his second destination. The Buddha flies through the air from a place named Rohitaka to the northern region, converts the nāga king Apalāla, returns, and continues traveling. In Śrāvastī, answering a question of King Prasenajit of Kosala, the Buddha narrates many stories of his former lives. Then the Buddha and his five hundred disciples visit Lake Anavatapta by means of their magical power, and there each of the disciples recites verses about his former lives, as does the Buddha, after which they return to Śrāvastī. The story of their journey continues until Vaiśālī. After an episode in Vaiśālī, accounts of various rules follow, which seem not to be related to the preceding story but to be simply a list of episodes relevant to rules. The chapter closes with an account of a monk who is bitten by a poisonous snake and then saved by the Buddha with a charm, accompanied by two stories about the former lives of the Buddha and the monk.

Today, the Bhaiṣajyavastu is extant in three languages: Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese. There had been available only a single Sanskrit manuscript of the Vinayavastu that included the Bhaiṣajyavastu, the so-called Gilgit manuscript, since its discovery in the 1930s and publication by Nalinaksha Dutt.2 At the end of the twentieth century, however, another Sanskrit manuscript of the Bhaiṣajyavastu was identified by Klaus Wille, and the present translator is now preparing to publish a transliteration.3 Unfortunately, about half of the Bhaiṣajyavastu is lost in the Gilgit manuscript, and the newly identified manuscript is only fragmentary. Although there are some other manuscript fragments from Central Asia identified with the Vinayavastu, there are no fragments identified with the Bhaiṣajyavastu other than some corresponding to the verses of the brahmin Nīlabhūti, which appear in the middle of the chapter.4 In some parts where both manuscripts are unavailable, the Divyāvadāna, a Sanskrit anthology of narrative stories, helps, for many of its chapters are extracts from the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya.5

The Chinese translation was made by Yijing 義淨 (635–713) around 700 ᴄᴇ, after his more than twenty-year sojourn in India and Southeast Asia.6 This text is one of seven extant chapters of the Vinayavastu translated by Yijing, which were translated as separate texts, not as chapters of a larger text. The extant Chinese version of the Bhaiṣajyavastu lacks the last part of the Tibetan version, which seems either not to have been translated or to have been lost soon after being translated.

Only the Tibetan translation preserves the complete text of the Bhaiṣajyavastu. According to the colophon to the Vinayavastu, the text was translated by Sarvajñādeva, Vidyākaraprabha, Dharmākara, and Palgyi Lhünpo and proofread by Vidyākaraprabha and Paltsek. The translation seems to have taken place in the ninth century, and it is the only Tibetan version of the text.

There are also several secondary translations such as the Mongolian version.

Various differences at various levels, from words to narrative structures, are found between the extant Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan versions. Many of these differences seem to have already existed in the Sanskrit manuscripts on which the Chinese and Tibetan translations were based.

In some Kangyurs, there is a colophon at the end of volume kha (Degé, Lithang, Choné) that mentions a revision of the translation at the time of the fourth Shamarpa (1453–1524), whereas other Kangyurs (Yongle, Peking, Narthang, Urga, Lhasa) do not have this colophon.7 In some other Kangyurs (Tokyo, London, Stok Palace, Shey Palace, Phukdrak), the corresponding part of the text is not located at the end of the volume, and no such colophon exists, either.

Most of the extant folios of the Gilgit manuscript corresponding to the Bhaiṣajyavastu were edited and published by Dutt in 1947, and since then several passages in the text have been edited or re-edited by other scholars such as Heinz Bechert, Raniero Gnoli, Klaus Wille, Jin-il Chung, and Hisashi Matsumura. Black-and-white photographs of the manuscript were published by Raghu Vira and Lokesh Chandra in 1974 and reprinted in 1995, and color photographs in high resolution were published by Shayne Clarke in 2014 together with detailed bibliographical surveys and concordances of the extant versions.

Since Alexander Csoma Kőrösi introduced the Tibetan Buddhist canon to the Western world in 1836,8 many of the stories in the Bhaiṣajyavastu have been translated into various modern languages from the Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan versions. Ryūzan Nishimoto translated the entire Chinese version of the Bhaiṣajyavastu into classical Japanese in kakikudashi style in 1933. In this publication, he supplemented the Chinese version by translating the missing portions of the Bhaiṣajyavastu from the Tibetan version. The first complete translation of the Bhaiṣajyavastu into a modern language was a Japanese translation of the Tibetan version made by the present translator, which was published in 2013.

The present translation is based on the text as it appears in the Degé Kangyur, and its readings have been corrected on the basis of the Stok Palace manuscript and, in a few cases, several other Kangyurs, too. Our reason for using the Degé and Stok Palace Kangyurs is that it is mainly these two editions that have been used in recent studies of the Vinaya. The translation has also been modified on the basis of the Sanskrit and Chinese versions, as is mentioned in a note in each case. References to the Gilgit manuscript in notes are based on the manuscript itself unless reliable partial transliterations are otherwise available, while the page numbers in Dutt’s edition have been provided for convenience.

The sections and subsections of the present translation follow the uddāna system in the text itself. The Bhaiṣajya­vastu includes eleven uddānas, or summaries of contents, each of which is placed at the beginning of a section, and the first items of the uddānas are collected into a piṇḍoddāna, or general summary of contents, which is given at the beginning of the entire text. There are some discrepancies between the uddānas and the main text, and these may represent vestiges of textual development.9 In some cases where it seemed necessary, the present translator has divided stories that are not mentioned in the uddānas into subdivisions and titled them according to their main topics.

As is usual in the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya, there are a large number of repetitions in the Bhaiṣajyavastu. The text abbreviates many of these repetitions, using certain phrases such as zhes bya ba nas and zhes bya ba’i bar gong ma bzhin no. The present translation simply uses ellipses (…) for these phrases to indicate an abbreviation.

Notes to the present translation are different from the notes to the translator’s Japanese translation. Many of the notes to the Japanese translation had to be omitted or abridged in view of 84000’s guidelines because they were too detailed and lengthy. On the other hand, the notes to the present translation include many new pieces of information that are not found in the notes to the Japanese version. Thus, for scholarly purposes, readers are advised to consult the notes to both versions if possible.