The History of Buddhist Thought c11.s1.9

c11.s1.9

When we come to ask what we may conclude about the historical circumstances of the Council, we do not get much further than the conclusion of Kern: "It is by no means incredible that the Disciples after the death of the founder of their sect came together to come to an agreement concerning the principal points of the creed and of the discipline."³ All the accounts give us details which were written down centuries later, and from the point of view of those who assumed that the Buddhism and the Canon which they then knew existed as such from the beginning. We can infer that there was at Buddha's death a body of disciplinary rules in existence, and that many discourses of the Master had been remembered during his long years of teaching. To the extent to which we can infer what these were, we may be able to form some positive idea of the first Council, not from the recorded accounts.