First Khandhaka
Admission to the Order of Bhikkhus
The First Khandhaka is the first part of the Mahavagga.
The Mahavagga is the first part of the Khandhaka.
The Khandhaka is the second part of the Vinaya Pitaka ("Basket of Discipline").
The Vinaya Pitaka is the first part of the Tipitaka ("Three Baskets"), a.k.a. the Pali Canon.
The Tipitaka is the major religious text of Theravada Buddhism.
The First Khandhaka is the first part of the Mahavagga, which contains the stories behind the rules governing a Buddhist Sangha which are laid out in the Suttavibhanga. The First Khandhaka deals with the upasampadâ ordaination of bhikkhus/bhikkhunis (monks/nuns) to the Sangha, and who may and may not receive it and confer it.
The Mahavagga was first written in Pali, and was translated into English in 1881 by T. W. Rhys Davids and Hermann Oldenberg. It is available, with footnotes, at http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/sbe13/index.htm. I have not altered the text except to fix OCR typographical errors (the text has some instances of a capital I where a lowercase L should be, and other errors like that), but have included my notes to clarify or explain some words or passages, which appear in [brackets]. Text in (parentheses) appears in the text of the translation. The entire translation is in the public domain.
The First Khandhaka (Pali for "Expositions") is quite a long piece (the longest of the four Khandhakas in the Mahavagga), divided into seventy-nine parts, containing stories concerning the origin of the rules of the Suttavibhanga by giving an account of what the Buddha did following his enlightenment. I have broken the seventy-nine parts into manageable groups of five.
First Khandhaka List of Contents: