I am trying to find (if it exists) the Pali term which corresponds to
something I have come across in Tibetan & Chinese. The term I have could be
translated as "incremental regulation" where "incremental" may be "krama /
krame.na" in Skt, but I do not know what the whole phrase could have been.
What this connotes is the way the Buddha would stipulate regulations
incrementally or gradually as the need arose (arthotpatti) to cover all
eventualities. For example, he would regulate against behaviour X, but
ingenious monks would find a way around that and think it was OK to do
something similar but not quite the same. The Buddha would then regulate
against that, but then the naive monks would do something else circumventing
the new rule. And so on.
So, was this method of rule-making ever labelled in Pali exegetical
literature ?