Vinaya

thumb|An ordination ceremony at Wat Yannawa in [[Bangkok. The Vinaya codes regulate the various official acts of the Buddhist monastic community (sangha-kamma), including the ordination of new monks.]]

thumb|right|250px|Central Asian bhikkhu|Buddhist monk teaching a Chinese monk. [[Bezeklik Caves, 9th–10th century; although Albert von Le Coq (1913) assumed the blue-eyed, red-haired monk was a Tocharian, modern scholarship has identified similar Caucasoid figures of the same cave temple (No. 9) as ethnic Sogdians, an Eastern Iranian people who inhabited Turfan as an ethnic minority community during the phases of Tang Chinese (7th–8th century) and Uyghur rule (9th–13th century).]]

thumb|Tibetan Buddhism|Tibetan Buddhist bhikṣus of the Mūlasarvāstivāda ordination lineage

The Pratimokṣa () is a list of rules (contained within the vinaya) governing the behaviour of Buddhist monastics (monks or bhikṣus and nuns or bhikṣuṇīs). Prati means "towards" and mokṣa means "liberation" from cyclic existence (saṃsāra).

thumb|Upasampadā of a Buddhist monk in Burma Upasampadā (Pali) literally denotes "approaching or nearing the ascetic tradition." In more common parlance it specifically refers to the rite and ritual of ascetic vetting (ordination) by which a candidate, if deemed acceptable, enters the community as upasampadān (ordained) and is authorised to undertake ascetic life.