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The History of Buddhist Thought c11.s3: The Third Council

The History of Buddhist Thought c11.s3

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The Third Council

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The story of the third Council of Pāṭaliputta is given in the *Mahāvaṃsa* (ch. 5) at the end of the legendary account of the reign of Asoka. Much of the material of this comes from Indian sources, as we find most of the legend in Sarvāstivādin works,² but it is only in the Pāli that there is any mention of this Council. We are told in the *Mahāvaṃsa* that owing to the prosperity of the Order under Asoka, who was ruling in Pāṭaliputta, heretics had come to live with the monks. These heretics are expressly spoken of as non-Buddhists, not as members of any Buddhist party. No reference to Buddhist sects appears. Asoka sent for Tissa Moggali-putta, assembled all the monks on the earth, and turned out all those who wrongly answered his question, " What was the teaching of the Buddha ? " The king then asked the righteous monks, and they replied, " He was a Vibhajjavādin." Asoka was delighted, and ordered the Uposatha to be held, and they assembled.

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² The chief difference is that the Theravādins connect Asoka with their great elder Tissa Moggaliputta, while the Sarvāstivādins connect him with their own hero Upagupta. *CHI.*, i, 498, boldly identifies the two.

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The elder (Tissa) from the numerous assembly chose a thousand monks, learned, possessing the six higher knowledges, knowing the three Pitakas, versed in analysis, to form the Council of the true Doctrine.¹

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¹ Saddhammasamgaham. Geiger says " to make a compilation of the true doctrine ". But in Dpvs. saṃgaha is used all through in the sense of " council ". Buddhaghosa (Vin. com., 61), who paraphrases Mhvs., speaks only of saṃgīti.

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With these in the park of Asoka he formed the Council of the true Doctrine. Just as the elder Mahākassapa and the elder Yasa had held a Dhamma-council, so did the elder Tissa hold it.

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And in the meeting of the Council he spoke the work Kathāvatthu for the refutation of other sects.

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So under the protection of King Asoka this Dhamma-council was completed by the thousand monks in nine months.

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In the seventeenth year of the King the Sage, seventy-two years old, closed the Council with a great pavāraṇā ceremony.²

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² Mhvs., v, 275-280.

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Thus all we are told of the Council is that it was held and that the Kathāvatthu was spoken. Later accounts tell us no more. Buddhaghosa merely paraphrases the Mahāvaṃsa, and the Mahābodhivaṃsa (110) repeats him.

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The Sarvāstivādin accounts have much in common with the Pāli. They agree essentially in the reports of the first two Councils, although they put Asoka not two centuries but one after Buddha's death.³ Both accounts tell much of Asoka and repeat some of the same legends. They have similar lists of the early schools, and their Scriptures are arranged in the same four chief divisions. But the Sarvāstivādins have no word about the third Council. They speak of a Council under Asoka, but this is the second Council, and they may have confused this Asoka with Kālā-soka. Kern supposes that the third Council was but a party meeting, so much so that no other party ever heard of it, but the fact that it is ignored by all other sects makes it necessary to consider the other alternative, that there never was a third Council.

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³ The supposed 200 years mentioned in a Sarvāstivādin document (Burnouf, Intro., 432) rests on a misreading. See Speyer, Av. Śat., ii, 200. Other later sources give various dates. Bhavya gives 160 years, but still makes Dharmāśoka king at the second Council. Rockhill, Life, p. 182.

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Even the Pāli data lend support to this view. There is fairly early evidence for the first and second Councils in the *Cullavagga*, but that account has no mention of a third. This has usually been taken to imply that the *Cullavagga* account was composed before Asoka’s time. It may equally imply that the third Council had not then been invented. The earliest evidence for it is confined to the testimony of the much later Ceylon Chronicles. The Chronicles had already added the story of a Dhamma-council to the account in the *Cullavagga* of the second Council, and had garnished the story of the first Council with the patronage of Ajātasattu, and the second with more elaborate legends of Kālāsoka. There are cogent reasons why a third Council under Asoka should have been imagined, and Tissa is said to have held it “just as the elder Mahākassapa and the elder Yasa had held a Dhamma-council”. The Abhidhamma books were rejected by other schools, and in particular the *Kathāvatthu*, which Tissa had promulgated at it. This especially needed the support of a Council, or perhaps to the mind of disciples implied one.

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The commentary on another Abhidhamma book, the *Dhammasaṅgaṇi*, represents an objector as saying, “why is the *Kathāvatthu* accepted? Was it not fixed by the elder Moggaliputta Tissa more than 218 years after the enlightened Buddha had attained Nirvāṇa? Therefore reject it as being the utterance of a disciple.” Even the authority of a Council was not enough for this objector. The commentator meets this by admitting that the discussion of the doctrines was composed by Tissa following the method given by the Master, but that the list of doctrines discussed was first given by Buddha when he visited the Heaven of the thirty-three gods and taught the doctrine to his mother.

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V. A. Smith remarks that Asoka after he had been reigning for some thirty years issued a fresh series of documents, the seven Pillar Edicts, which reiterate his earlier teaching, and conclude with a formal retrospect of the measures adopted by him in furtherance of the ethical reforms which he had at heart. Yet he seems surprised that there is no mention of the Council of Buddhist elders.¹ Mrs. Rhys Davids accepts the Council, but subjects the evidence for it to the severest criticism, pointing out first that the evidence is six or seven centuries later than the Council. She also holds that it was a Congress rather than a Council, that the " collection of the Dhamma " was a " gigantic task of revision ", that the actual revisers and judges were not a thousand but only eight,¹ that as the revision of the English Prayer-book took twenty years, the Council must have taken much longer than nine months, and that as the first thesis in the *Kathāvatthu* concerns the *puggala*, the question of paramount importance to be discussed must have been that of *attan* versus *an-attan*. The " drastic expulsion of ordained monks " can only have been carried through after the Council, not before, as the Chronicles say. In fact, the Council was a Congress, and every fact about it was different from what is recorded.²

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¹ *The Early History of India*, 3rd ed., p. 161.

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¹ The number eight is said to have a precedent because there were eight at the second Council. But these eight had nothing to do with the Dhamma; they were the eight referees for the ten disputed Vinaya rules, and the Vinaya account knows nothing of Dhamma revision at the second Council.

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² The view of the *Cambridge Hist. of India* (i, 498) is that " in the Kathāvatthu, composed at the time by Upagupta, we have a full record of the divergencies of opinion which led to its convention ". The story of the Council is thus inserted in the Upagupta story, which knows nothing of the Council.

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To attain a certain conclusion where the data are like this is obviously impossible, but even if we could be sure that a Dhamma-council was held under Asoka, we get no help in determining anything definite about the history of Buddhism. All we are told is that a work called the *Kathāvatthu*, " subjects of discussion," was spoken there, and we have good reasons for holding that it was not the work which now exists in the Pāli Canon. The work which now exists is of great importance for the growth of doctrine, but we do not reach more credible results by assuming that it was either composed or recited at a third Council.

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There is an excellent translation of the *Kathāvatthu* with extracts from the commentary by Mr. Shwe Zan Aung and Mrs. Rhys Davids. But the unfortunate result of this useful piece of work has been an astonishing amount of mistaken assumptions and slipshod inferences by scholars who have never taken the trouble to look at the text or to distinguish between the text and commentary. It was asserted that Tissa " composed " the work, though the Pāli authorities do not say so, and, as Mrs. Rhys Davids has pointed out, it could not have been composed by one man. It was also assumed that it mentions the sects that held the heretical doctrines which it refutes. If this were so, we should have fairly early evidence for the teachings of these schools. But, in fact, no names of schools are given in it.

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Where we find the names is in a commentary certainly several centuries later than the Council. This commentary is occupied not in specifying the doctrines of the seventeen schools, but in expounding the refutations of doctrines mentioned in the text and in stating what schools hold or have held them. Nine out of the seventeen are not mentioned at all, while some doctrines, indeed, whole sections of the work, are attributed to later schools not among the seventeen. Only three of the original seventeen are mentioned as " now " holding certain doctrines. As Mrs. Rhys Davids points out, the work probably grew gradually. Its " patchwork-quilt appearance " shows its slow growth, for any new heresy could be added and refuted as required.¹

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¹ Points of Controversy, p. xxxi.

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