The Vinaya Pitaka

The Vinaya Pitaka is the monastic discipline collection of the Pali Canon, the earliest complete Buddhist scriptural collection to survive, setting out the rules governing the conduct of Buddhist monks and nuns along with the narrative accounts explaining how each rule came to be established. As a primary canonical source it is the strongest possible evidence for what the earliest recorded Buddhist monastic tradition actually held its communities to, cited here as content rather than through one specific modern edition, so it carries no publisher or fixed year the way a printed translation would. Its limit is that, like other texts transmitted orally before being written down, questions about the precise historical layering of its material, which rules and stories are earliest, are a matter of ongoing textual scholarship rather than settled by the text alone.