There follows a story telling how, despite this prohibition, a native of Ayodhya succeeded in learning the law in Kashmir and subsequently teaching it in his native land.  Paramartha’s account seems exaggerated, whereas the prohibition described by Hsuean Chuang is intelligible.  It was forbidden to take the official copies of the law out of Kashmir, lest heretics should tamper with them.

Taranatha[197] gives a singularly confused account of the meeting, which he expressly calls the third council, but makes some important statements about it.  He says that it put an end to the dissensions which had been distracting the Buddhist Church for nearly a century and that it recognized all the eighteen sects as holding the true doctrine:  that it put the Vinaya in writing as well as such parts of the Sutra-pitaka and Abhidharma as were still unwritten and corrected those which already existed as written texts:  that all kinds of Mahayanist writings appeared at this time but that the Sravakas raised no opposition.

It is hard to say how much history can be extracted from these vague and discrepant stories.  They seem to refer to one assembly regarded (at least in Tibet) as the third council of the Church and held under Kanishka four or five hundred years[198] after the Buddha’s death.  As to what happened at the council tradition seems to justify the following deductions, though as the tradition is certainly jumbled it may also be incorrect in details.

(a) The council is recognized only by the northern Church and is unknown to the Churches of Ceylon, Burma and Siam.  It seems to have regarded Kashmir as sacred land outside which the true doctrine was exposed to danger. (b) But it was not a specially Mahayanist meeting but rather a conference of peace and compromise.  Taranatha says this clearly:  in Hsuean Chuang’s account an assembly of Arhats (which at this time must have meant Hinayanists) elect a president who was not an Arhat and according to Paramartha the assembly consisted of 500 Arhats and 500 Bodhisattvas who were convened by a leader of the Sarvastivadin school and ended by requesting Asvaghosha to revise their work. (c) The literary result of the council was the composition of commentaries on the three Pitakas.  One of these, the Abhidharma-mahavibhasha-sastra, translated into Chinese in 437-9 and still extant, is said to be a work of encyclopaedic character, hardly a commentary in the strict sense.  Paramartha perhaps made a confusion in saying that the Jnana-prasthana itself was composed at the council.  The traditions indicate that the council to some extent sifted and revised the Tripitaka and perhaps it accepted the seven Abhidharma books of the Sarvastivadins.[199] But it is not stated or implied that it composed or sanctioned Mahayanist books.  Taranatha merely says that such books appeared at this time and that the Hinayanists raised no active objection.