about the self (atman) [Footnote ref 3].  With the Upani@sads the highest truth was the permanent self, the bliss, but with the Buddha there was nothing permanent; and all was change; and all change and impermanence was sorrow [Footnote ref 4].  This is, then, the cardinal truth of Buddhism, and ignorance concerning it in the above fourfold ways represented the fourfold ignorance which stood in the way of the right comprehension of the fourfold cardinal truths (ariya sacca)—­sorrow, cause of the origination of sorrow, extinction of sorrow, and the means thereto.

There is no Brahman or supreme permanent reality and no self, and this ignorance does not belong to any ego or self as we may ordinarily be led to suppose.

Thus it is said in the Visuddhimagga “inasmuch however as ignorance is empty of stability from being subject to a coming into existence and a disappearing from existence...and is empty of a self-determining Ego from being subject to dependence,—...or in other words inasmuch as ignorance is not an Ego, and similarly with reference to Karma and the rest—­therefore is it to be understood of the wheel of existence that it is empty with a twelvefold emptiness [Footnote ref 5].”

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[Footnote 1:  Samyutta Nikaya, II. 46.]

[Footnote 2:  Majjhima Nikaya, I.p. 54.]

[Footnote 3:  Cha.  I.i. 10.  B@rh.  IV. 3.20.  There are some passages where vidya and avidya have been used in a different and rather obscure sense, I’s’a 9-11.]

[Footnote 4:  A@ng.  Nikaya, III. 85.]

[Footnote 5 Warren’s Buddhism in Translations (Visuddhimagga, chap.  XVII.), p. 175.]

112

The Schools of Theravada Buddhism.

There is reason to believe that the oral instructions of the Buddha were not collected until a few centuries after his death.  Serious quarrels arose amongst his disciples or rather amongst the successive generations of the disciples of his disciples about his doctrines and other monastic rules which he had enjoined upon his followers.  Thus we find that when the council of Vesali decided against the V@rjin monks, called also the Vajjiputtakas, they in their turn held another great meeting (Mahasa@ngha) and came to their own decisions about certain monastic rules and thus came to be called as the Mahasa@nghikas [Footnote ref 1].  According to Vasumitra as translated by Vassilief, the Mahasa@nghikas seceded in 400 B.C. and during the next one hundred years they gave rise first to the three schools Ekavyavaharikas, Lokottaravadins, and Kukkulikas and after that the Bahus’rutiyas.  In the course of the next one hundred years, other schools rose out of it namely the Prajnaptivadins, Caittikas, Aparas’ailas and Uttaras’ailas.  The Theravada or the Sthaviravada school which had convened the council of Vesali developed during the