The History of Buddhist Thought c11.s2.18

c11.s2.18

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.