CHAPTER XII

ASOKA

1

The first period in the history of Buddhism extends from the death of the founder to the death of Asoka, that is to about 232 B.C.  It had then not only become a great Indian religion but had begun to send forth missionaries to foreign countries.  But this growth had not yet brought about the internal changes which are inevitable when a creed expands far beyond the boundaries within which it was a natural expression of local thought.  An intellectual movement and growth is visible within the limits of the Pali Canon and is confirmed by what we hear of the existence of sects or schools, but it does not appear that in the time of Asoka the workings of speculation had led to any point of view materially different from that of Gotama.

Our knowledge of general Indian history before the reign of Asoka is scanty and the data which can be regarded as facts for Buddhist ecclesiastical history are scantier still.  We hear of two (or including the Mahasangiti three) meetings sometimes called Councils; scriptures, obviously containing various strata, were compiled, and eighteen sects or schools had time to arise and some of them to decay.  Much doubt has been cast upon the councils[551] but to my mind this suspicion is unmerited, provided that too ecclesiastical a meaning is not given to the word.  We must not suppose that the meetings held at Rajagaha and Vesali were similar to the Council of Nicaea or that they produced the works edited by the Pali Text Society.  Such terms as canon, dogma and council, though indispensable, are misleading at this period.  We want less formal equivalents for the same ideas.  A number of men who were strangers to those conceptions of a hierarchy and a Bible[552] which are so familiar to us met together to fix and record the opinions and injunctions of the Master or to remove misapprehensions and abuses.  It would be better if we could avoid using even the word Buddhist at this period, for it implies a difference sharper than the divisions existing between the followers of Gotama and others.  They were in the position of the followers of Christ before they received at Antioch the name of Christians and the meeting at Rajagaha was analogous to the conferences recorded in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.

The record of this meeting and of the subsequent meeting at Vesali is contained in Chapters XI. and XII. of the Cullavagga, which must therefore be later than the second meeting and perhaps considerably later.  Other accounts are found in the Dipavamsa, Maha-Bodhi-Vamsa and Buddhaghosa’s commentaries.  The version given in the Cullavagga is abrupt and does not entirely agree with other narratives of what followed on the death of the Buddha[553].  It seems to be a combination of two documents, for it opens as a narrative by Kassapa, but it soon turns into a narrative about him.  But the clumsiness in compilation and the errors of