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The History of Buddhist Thought c11.s2: The Second Council

The History of Buddhist Thought c11.s2

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The Second Council

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The *Cullavagga* (ch. 12) also gives an account of the second Council. We are told that a hundred years after the death of the Lord the Vajjian monks of Vesālī explained ten things to be permissible practices :

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1. That salt might be kept in a horn.

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2. That it was permissible to eat when the sun’s shadow showed two fingers’ breadth after noon.

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3. And to go into the village for alms and eat again after having eaten.

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4. That monks in one parish might hold separate Uposatha meetings.

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5. That a party in the Order might perform an official act and decide to inform the rest.

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6. That it was permissible to practise what was practised by one’s tutor.

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7. That milk which had begun to turn but had not become curd might be drunk by one who had had his meal.

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8. That liquor which had not yet fermented might be drunk.

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9. That a rug not of the prescribed length might be used if it had no fringe.

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10. That gold and silver might be accepted.

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The elder Yasa (one of the earliest converts of Buddha and now over 165 years old) was going for alms in Vesālī and found that the monks of the place had set up a bronze bowl filled with water and was asking the lay people for contributions in money. He warned the people that the sons of Buddha were not allowed to accept gold and silver. Nevertheless the monks collected the money and offered Yasa a share, which he refused. They therefore carried an act of expiation against him, requiring him to go and apologize to the laity for his action. He went, but he defended himself before the people with such effect that they concluded he was in the right. Then the monks decided to carry an act of suspension against him, but he rose in the air and flew to Kosambī, where he summoned a meeting of the monks of Pāvā, Avanti, and the south. They met on Ahoganga hill and decided that as it was a difficult and delicate matter they had better get the elder Revata on their side. Revata was at Soreyya, but he heard them with his divine ear, and not wishing to be involved in a dispute decided to keep out of their way. He went from place to place, until they caught him up at Sahajāti, and there they succeeded in getting a satisfactory answer from him on the ten points.

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The monks of Vesālī also thought it would be well to have Revata on their side. They approached him with a present of bowl, robes, and other requisites. He refused them, but they succeeded in bribing his attendant, so Revata dismissed him. Revata then decided that the matter should be decided where it arose, and the assembly met at Vesālī. But the speeches were aimless and their meaning obscure, so Revata proposed a motion that a committee of eight elders should be elected, four from the east and four from the west, and this was approved. Revata had already made sure of a majority by interviewing the elder Sabbakāmin, one of the eastern monks, the night before. The committee adjourned to the Vālika park, where Revata questioned Sabbakāmin on the ten points, and all were rejected.¹ Sabbakāmin then declared the questions settled, and asked Revata to question him again before the full assembly for the information of the monks. The account concludes : “So the elder Revata questioned the elder Sabbakāmin on the ten points also in the midst of the assembly, and question by question the elder Sabbakāmin replied. Now in this Vinaya-council there were seven hundred monks, no more and no less ; therefore, this Vinaya-council is called that of the seven hundred.”

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¹ The sixth point, that the practice of one's tutor might be followed, may be permissible according to circumstances, but could not form a rule.

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In this account some links in the actual procedure appear to be missing, but the records in the Chronicles do not make it any clearer. The Mahāvaṃsa says that it was held in the tenth year of Kālāsoka, that 12,000 monks were present, and that “then the elder Revata selected seven hundred monks who were arahats, who knew the science of meaning and so forth and had the three Piṭakas by heart, from the whole number of monks to form a Dhamma-council”. They then met at the Vālika park and made a collection of the Dhamma. It goes on to say that the wicked monks, 10,000 in number, who had been defeated by the holders of the second Council, formed a school (ācariyavāda)² named the Mahāsanghika. This term means “belonging to the Great Order or Community of monks ”, but there is nothing in the *Mahāvaṃsa* to imply that they held a council. The *Dīpavaṃsa*, however, states that the 10,000 wicked monks assembled and made a collection of the Dhamma, and therefore this Dhamma-council is called the Great Council. It seems that the author of the *Mahāvaṃsa*, who must have known this statement, deliberately rejects it. He also omits the next statement of the *Dīpavaṃsa*, which goes on to say :

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² Lit. “teacher-school”; these teachers appear to have been the heads of sects, and the names of several—Dharmagupta, Kāśyapa, and Bhadrāyaṇa—probably appear in the names of heretical schools.

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The monks of the great Council made a reversed teaching. They broke up the original collection (of the Scriptures) and made another collection.
They put the Sutta collected in one place elsewhere. They broke up the sense and the doctrine in the five Nikāyas . . .
The Parivāra, the summary of the sense (of the Vinaya), the six sections of the Abhidhamma, the Paṭisambhidā, the Niddesa, and part of the Jātaka—so much they set aside and made others.

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Oldenberg declared that the account of the dispute at the second Council bears the stamp of being in the highest degree trustworthy. Yet it is part of the same document which tells us of the first Council, an event which he considered pure invention. We at least have to reject the details. The Council, we are told, was held 100 years (or 110 in Rockhill’s account) after Buddha’s death. Yet the eight elders had all seen Buddha,¹ so that they were all at least 120 years old if they had been ordained at the lowest possible age of twenty. The various accounts all speak of the ten practices, but they do not agree what these were. In Rockhill’s account only the last four agree with the Pāli. Four in the Dharmagupta account also agree, but not the same four. The list was preserved by means of ten mnemonic words, *singiloṇakappa* “horn-salt-practice”, *dvangulakappa* “two-finger-practice”, etc., and it is clear that some of them have been misunderstood. For the Dharmaguptas the two-finger-practice refers not to the shadow of the sun being two fingers’ breadth after noon, but to eating after meals by taking food with two fingers. Evidently the writers had to guess at the meaning. Nor can we infer that the Pāli is the only trustworthy version, for, in the case of the eighth practice, *jalogikappa* should mean the practice of sucking like a leech (*jaloga*), as the Dharmagupta account takes it.

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¹ Geiger thinks this an embellishment intended to exalt the authority of the elders. In that case it must have been another Yasa, for Yasa is identified with the Yasa who was one of Buddha’s first converts.

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We thus cannot be certain what all the points of dispute were about, but the list does not appear to be an arbitrary invention. The probability is that it records a real set of practices which were once in dispute, but it is also probable that their condemnation at the Council is mere inference. This is all the more likely when we find that Vasumitra, in his account of the first schism,¹ gives an entirely different reason for the origin of the Mahāsanghikas. It was due, he says, to five points of doctrine about the nature and attainments of the arahat, which were brought forward by a certain Mahādeva. These five points need not be inventions any more than the ten points, as they appear again later, but they show that one party or other (or both) knew nothing of what took place at the second Council.

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¹ "Origin and Doctrines of Early Buddhist Schools," from the Chinese by J. Masuda, *Asia Major*, ii, p. 14; from the Tibetan by Vasiliev, *Der Buddhismus*, p. 247.

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The same conclusion may be drawn about the story of the Great Council in the *Dīpavaṃsa*. What is there told about the different recension of the Scriptures is true in substance. There was such a recension, and the author inferred that it was part of the disputes at the second Council. But the story that it was deliberately drawn up at this time by the Mahāsanghikas is ignored by the author of the *Mahāvaṃsa*. As the *Mahāvaṃsa* is a deliberate rewriting and improving of the *Dīpavaṃsa*, "a conscious and intentional re-arrangement," as Geiger says, it must have definitely rejected that story.

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