ཕས་ཕམ་པ། | Glossary of Terms

The most severe of the five types of offenses a monk can incur. It cannot be expunged and results in the monk’s defrocking, unless the saṅgha sees fit to allow him to engage in rehabilitory training.

The four downfalls for monastics resulting in the forfeit of the monastic vows: sexual intercourse, theft, murder, and claiming greater realization than one has.

The pārājika are the first four defeats listed in the moral code of monks and nuns. Incurring a pārājika defeat entails exclusion from the order. Buddhaśrī 182b4–6 says a pārājika defeat is not as bad as a giving-up-bodhicitta defeat because a pārājika defeat is not absolutely wrong. Habituated behavior, lust and so on, causes the pārājika defeat, but it is not absolutely necessary that lust is the motivating factor when the activity is engaged in. So, the activity leading to a pārājika is not absolutely wrong and does not preclude bodhicitta.

Disciplinary transgressions that must result in the offender’s disrobing and expulsion from the community of renunciants.