detail are hardly sufficient to discredit an event which is probable in itself and left an impression on tradition.  The Buddha combined great personal authority with equally great liberality.  While he was alive he decided all questions of dogma and discipline himself, but he left to the Order authority to abolish all the minor precepts.  It seems inevitable that some sort of meeting should have been held to consider the position created by this wide permission.  Brief and confused as the story in the Cullavagga is, there is nothing improbable in its outline—­namely that a resolution was taken at Kusinara where he died to hold a synod during the next rains at Rajagaha, a more central place where alms and lodgings were plentiful, and there come to an agreement as to what should be accepted as the true doctrine and discipline.  Accordingly five hundred monks met near this town and enquired into the authenticity of the various rules and suttas.  They then went on to ask what the Buddha had meant by the lesser and minor precepts which might be abolished.  Ananda (who came in for a good deal of blame in the course of the proceedings) confessed that he had forgotten to ask the Master for an explanation and divergent opinions were expressed as to the extent of the discretion allowed.  Kassapa finally proposed that the Sangha should adopt without alteration or addition the rules made by the Buddha.  This was approved and the Dhamma and Vinaya as chanted by the assembled Bhikkhus were accepted.  The Abhidhamma is not mentioned.  The name usually given to these councils is Sangiti, which means singing or chanting together.  An elder is said to have recited the text sentence by sentence and each phrase was intoned after him by the assembly as a sign of acceptance.  Upali was the principal authority for the Vinaya and Ananda for the Dhamma but the limits of the authority claimed by the meeting are illustrated by an anecdote[554] which relates that after the chanting of the law had been completed Purana and his disciples arrived from the Southern Hills.  The elders asked him to accept the version rehearsed by them.  He replied, “The Dhamma and Vinaya have been well sung by the Theras, nevertheless as they have been received and heard by me from the mouth of the Lord, so will I hold them.”  In other words the council has put together a very good account of the Buddha’s teaching but has no claim to impose it on those who have personal reminiscences of their own.

This want of a central authority, though less complete than in Brahmanism, marks the early life of the Buddhist community.  We read in later works[555] of a succession of Elders who are sometimes called Patriarchs[556] but it would be erroneous to think of them as possessing episcopal authority.  They were at most the chief teachers of the order.  From the death of the Buddha to Asoka only five names are mentioned.  But five names can fill the interval only if their bearers were unusually long-lived.  It is therefore