the treatment of such cases when he should no longer be with them. If anywhere, we should certainly have ex- pected to find here some allusion to the great authentic depositions of Dhamma and Vinaya after Buddha's death, which, according to the general belief of Buddhists, esta- blished a firm standard according to which differences could be judged and have been judged through many centuries. There is not the slightest trace of any such allusion to the Council. This silence is as valuable as the most direct testimony. It shows that the author of the Mah&- parinibb&na-Sutta did not know anything of the First Council.'
The only objection which it seems to me possible to raise against this argument is that the conclusion is worded somewhat too absolutely ; and that it is rather a begging of the question to state, in the very first words referring to the Mahd-parinibbdna-Sutta, that it is older than the story in the ATulla-vagga, and that its author could not have known that work. But no one will venture to dispute the accuracy of Dr. Oldenberg's representation of the facts on which he bases his conclusion ; and the conclusion that he draws is, at least, the easiest and readiest way of explaining the very real discrepancy that he has pointed out. We shall be quite safe if we only say that we have certain facts which lend strong probability to the hypothesis that the author of the Mahd-parinibbana-Sutta did not know that account of the First Council which we find in the ATulla- vagga.
We do not know for certain the time at which that part of the A\illa-vagga, in which that account occurs, was com- posed. I think it quite possible that it was as late as the Council of Patna (b. C. 250), though Dr. Oldenberg places it somewhat earlier 1 . But even if we put the conclusion of the ATulla-vagga as late as the year I have mentioned, it is still in the highest degree improbable that the Mah&- parinibbclna-Sutta, supposing it to be an older work, can have been composed very much later than the fourth century B.C. — a provisional date sufficient at present for practical purposes.
1 Maha- vagga, p. xxxviii.
This conclusion, however, is only almost, and not quite certain. It is just possible that the author of the Book of the Great Decease omitted all mention of the First Council at R&^agaha, not because he did not know of it, but because he considered it unnecessary to mention an event which had no bearing on the subject of his work. He was de- scribing the death of the Buddha, and not the history of the Canon or of the Order.
I must confess however that I only mention this as a possibility from a desire rather to understate than to over- state my case. For, firstly, it should be remembered that the writer does not merely omit to mention an occurrence subsequent to and unconnected with the Great Decease. He does more : he gives an account of the Subhadda in- cident which is inconsistent and irreconcilable with the legend or narrative of the R^agaha Council as related in the ATulla-vagga. Had that narrative, as we now have it, been received in his time among the Brethren, he would scarcely have done this.
And, secondly, he does not, after all, close his book, as he might well have done, with the Great Decease itself. It will be seen from the translation below 1 that there was a point in his narrative, the exclamations of sorrow at the death of the Buddha, which would have formed, had he desired to omit all unnecessary details, a very fitting con- clusion to his narrative. The Book of the Great King of Glory, the Mahd-sudassana-Sutta K closes with the very ex- clamation our author puts, at this point, into the mouth of Sakka. The Mahd-parinibbana was then over, and the Mahci-parinibbcina-Sutta might have then been closed. But he goes on and describes in detail the cremation, the distribution of the relics, and the feasts celebrated in their honour. It is not necessary for my point to show that it was in the least degree unnatural to do so. It is sufficient to be able to point out that the author having done so, — having gone on to the arrival of Kassapa, who was after- wards (in the A^ulla-vagga) said to have held the Council ; having mentioned the very incident which, according to the
1 See below, Chap. VI, § 21.
other narrative, gave rise to the holding of the Council ; and having referred to events which took place after the Council, — it is scarcely a tenable argument to say that he, knowing of it, did not refer, even incidentally and in half a sentence, to so important an event, simply because it did not come, necessarily, within the subject of his work. And when we find that in other works on the death of the Buddha, referred to below 1 , the account of the Council of Rd^agaha has, in fact, been included in the story, it is difficult to withhold our assent to the very great probability of the hypothesis, that it would have been included also in the P&li Book of the Great Decease had the belief in the tradi- tion of the Council been commonly held at the time when that book was put into its present shape. At the same time we must hold ourselves quite prepared to learn that some other explanation may turn out to be possible. The argument, if it applied to writers of the nineteenth century, would be conclusive. But we know too little about the mode in which the Pali Pi/akas were composed to presume at present to be quite certain.
The Mah£-parinibb£na-Sutta was then probably com-
posed before the account of the First Council of Rd^a-
gaha in the concluding part of the ATulla-vagga. It was
also almost certainly composed after Pd/aliputta, the
modern Patna, had become the capital city of the king-
dom of Magadha ; after the worship of relics had become
common in the Buddhist church ; and after the rise of a
general belief in the Afakkavatti theory, in the ideal of a
sacred king, a supreme overlord in India.
The first of these last three arguments depends on the prophecy placed in Gotama's mouth as to the future great- ness of Pa/aliputta — a prophecy found in the Mahd-vagga as well as in the Mahci-parinibb&na-Sutta. It is true that the guess may actually have been made, and that it re- quired no great boldness to hazard a conjecture so vaguely expressed. The words simply are —
'And among famous places of residence and haunts of
See p. xxxviii.
busy men, this will become the chief, the city of Pd/aliputta, a centre for interchange of all kinds of wares. But there will happen three disasters to Pd/aliputta, one of fire, and one of water, and one of dissension V
But it is, to say the least, improbable that the conjecture would have been recorded until after the event had proved it to be accurate : and it would scarcely be too hazardous to maintain that the tradition of the guess having been made would not have arisen at all until after the event had occurred.
What was the event referred to may also be questioned, as the words quoted do not, in terms, declare that the city would become the actual capital. But we know, not only from Buddhist, but from Greek historians, that it did, and this is most probably the origin of the prophecy.
Now the Mctlcilank&ravatthu, a Pdli work of modern,
date, but following very closely the more ancient books,
has been translated, through the Burmese, by Bishop
Bigandet; and it says,
'That monarch [Susuniga], not unmindful of his mother's origin, re-established the city of Vesdll, and fixed in it the royal residence. From that time R^gagaha lost her rank of royal city, which she never afterwards recovered. He died in 8i' [that is, of the Buddhist era reckoned from the Great Decease] 2 . . . .
Relying on similar authority Bishop Bigandet afterwards himself says :
* King Kd/dsoka left Ra^agaha, and removed the seat of his empire to Palibothra [the Greek name for Pi/aliputta], near the place where the modern city of Patna stands 2 .'
1 See below, Chap. I, § 28. I have translated Pu/abhedana/w, 'a centre for the interchange of all kinds of wares,' in accordance with the commentary, which is clearly based on a derivation from pu/a, ' a bag or bundle.* But I see that Trenckner in his P&li Miscellany renders n&n&pu/abhedana/w by 'siuy rounded by a number of dependent towns.'
At the end the text has ' from fire or from water or from dissension;' on which Buddhaghosa says that or stands here for and; and the comment is correct enough, not of course philologically, but exegetically. But in either case the last clause is of very little importance for the present argument.
■ Bigandet's * Legend of the Burmese Budha,' third edition, vol. ii. pp. 115, 183. I have altered the spelling only of the proper names.
It would seem therefore that, according to the tradition followed by this writer, Susunaga first removed the capital to Vesdli, and his successor Kd/dsoka, who died, in the opinion of the writer in question, in 118 after the Great Decease, finally fixed it at Pd/ialiputta.
If we therefore apply this date to the prophecy we must come to the conclusion that the Book of the Great Decease was put into its present form at least 100 years after the Buddha's death, and probably a little more. But the authority followed by Bishop Bigandet is very late ; and no mention of these occurrences is found either in the Dipava^sa or in the Mahdva^sa. I think indeed that the whole account of these two kings, as at present accepted in Ceylon and Birma, is open to grave doubt 1 (in which connection it should be noticed that the oldest account of the Council of Ves&li, in the Abulia- vagga, Book XII, makes no mention of K4/ctsoka).
We have next to consider the reference to the relics in the concluding sections of Chapter VI as a possible basis for chronological argument These sections are almost certainly older than the time when especial sanctity was claimed for Buddhist d&gabas on the ground that they contained par- ticular relics of the Blessed One (such as a tooth, or the bowl, or the neck bone) ; for if such special relics were accepted as objects of worship when the Book of the Great Decease was put together, they would naturally have been mentioned in the course of Chapter VI.
It is even almost certain that when the sections were put into their present form no Buddhist d&gaba was in exist- ence except at the eight places mentioned in them ; and the words are quite consistent with the belief that those eight had themselves then ceased to have any very wide- spread and acknowledged sanctity. So in Chapter V, § 13, where four places are spoken of * which the believing man should visit with feelings of reverence and of awe,' there is no mention of d&gabas at all ; and in Chapter V, § 16, it is
1 See my * Ancient Coins and Measures of Ceylon/ p. 50.
clearly implied that only one d&gaba, or memorial burial
mound, should be erected in honour of a Tath&gata, just as
one memorial mound should be erected in honour of a king
of kings.
When we recollect that in the first and second, and perhaps in the third century before Christ, d&gabas had already been erected in honour of the Buddha in distant parts of the continent of India, and had rapidly become famous as places of pilgrimage, the reasonable conclusion to be drawn from these passages is that the Book of the Great Decease is older than them all; or, at the least, that it was written before any of them had become famous.
On the other hand, there is evidently an exaggerated belief as to the respect in which the Buddha was held by his contemporaries underlying the concluding and other sections of the book. It is probable enough that Gotama was held in deep respect by the simple people among whom he lived and moved about as a religious teacher and reformer. It may well be that the inhabitants of the village where he died gave him a sort of public funeral. But that the neighbouring clans should have vied one with the other for the possession of his remains is quite inconsistent with the position that he can reasonably be supposed to have held among them. It must have taken some time for this belief to spring up, and be received without question.